Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 3, 2022 [1/3]
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
This is part one of three.
Paper summaries
We combine matched employer-employee data, data on identity of business owners, and partisan affiliation data. We document strong political assortative matching (PAM) - even stronger than matching along gender and racial lines.
^see also: “Executive teams in U.S. firms are becoming increasingly partisan”
Interesting new paper in AEJ-App #EconTwitter by @FitzsimonsEmla @papiteide analyzing effect of breastfeeding on child outcomes; exploits the fact that in the UK, births taking place close to the weekend result in lower rates of bf'ing, b/c support services more limited
Core result captured in the graph - highest breastfeeding rates, and highest cognitive scores up to age 7, for those born in the middle of the wk; no effects on health
^Emily Oster wonders about weak IV
Iron and cavalry adoption in 1000 BCE in Eurasia is correlated with an abrupt shift in social scale.
War (really does) make states!
^Turchin…
Does increased concentration also distort public policy? Time for another 🧵, this time on the new @bocowgill, @andreapratnyc and @TomValletti paper on market power and lobbying. 1/
arxiv.org/pdf/2106.13612…
For any given macro event, there are typically many interpretations circulating in the media. Do these different narratives have any effect on beliefs? Can a story going viral affect aggregate sentiment?
In a new WP, Wenting Song @bankofcanada & I take a look. Short answer: yes!
Interesting discussions
📢 **REStud Page Limit**
With effect from 1st July 2022, a page limit policy applies to all submissions. Papers should be under 45 pages. Online appendices should not exceed 30 pages. A “grace period” is in place until 15th August 2022. For more details:
restud.com/submissions/#m…
^some criticism below for the sake of completeness, but, :
the problem with this is that authors just move stuff to the "online" appendix. questions:
1. is the online appendix part of the paper?
2. is it refereed?
if the answer to either of those questions is yes then this is simply a policy that papers should 75 pages or less.
The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStudies
True story, one time I forgot to attach an online appendix to a submission and nobody noticed (this was an R&R too)
The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStudies
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We talk a lot about the value of research, randomization, and experimentation in metascience, and I wanted to share an example of how these can be embedded in practice, even at a small scale.
Brief thread 🧵:
