Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 17, 2022 [3/3]
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

Probably the coolest paper I’ve read all year: “War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration” by Acemoglu et al. (2022), recently published on @QJEHarvard. It is an excellent take on the growth of fascism in post-war Italy. (1/6)


"Economic production substantially reduces the total abundance of wildlife, reduces the diversity of species, and changes the composition of species in a local ecosystem."
osf.io/preprints/soca…





I enjoyed this - on the marginal benefit of the NSF on funding economics: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…


I wrote a short summary of the what we know so far about the effects of the pandemic on the academic research enterprise
Here’s a summary of the summary in 3 graphs…

CEPR @cepr_org

New paper with @AGottfries combining growth via imitation and labor market frictions, a short thread.
#EconTwitter


Which patents get accepted?
How do the standards for innovation evolve over time?
What kinds of technologies turn over more quickly?
In joint work with Mirac Suzgun @lukemelas @skominers and @pmphlt, we introduce a dataset that may help address questions like these [1/n]


"Female candidates are consistently described more in terms of being diligent and hardworking rather than outstanding or brilliant.
Such differences are driven by letters written by male sponsors"
New paper about the econ job market: cepr.org/active/publica… by @Audingus1 et al.




🚨New paper alert! 🚨 Together with @MassPozzi, we conduct a meta-analysis of estimates of inequity aversion. Do people dislike being ahead/behind in social comparisons? What do 20 years of social science research teach us about this? Abstract in pic 👇 and highlights in🧵. 1/4


A 🧵 on our new paper in #JEBO @ELSFinance
"The pursuit of simplicity: Can simplifying eligibility criteria improve social pension targeting?"
Joint with Katharina Michaelowa (@UZH_en @IPZ_ch), @stkntp (@IIT_Bhilai) & Sourabh B. Paul (@iitdelhi).
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
[1/8]
More: satellite data with ML; Australian YCC; admin data attrition; German home care subsidy; money in politics and labor; entrepreneur forecasts; NREGA; Selgin vs. Gorton-Zhang; Indian economic history; detecting fake reviews; meta-nudge
Interesting discussions

We're going to have to change our courses/assignments immediately to deal with the effects of AI on higher Ed. This coming school year faculty in writing intensive courses will notice a dramatic improvement in the quality of student written work.

When I give the same paper (an RCT on health insurance in India) I get different questions (all good) depending on location & audience (US v India, econ v policy v law). I wonder…
How would economics evolve if we sometimes asked for ref reports from outside the field?

It's been a few months so I'll say it again: If you're an academic without a website, you don't exist.
Doesn't matter if you haven't published yet, put up a website with your name, affiliation, EMAIL, advisor, research interests, and photo. Otherwise you can't be found.

I agree with @albrgr that the most interesting thing about NSF economics funding is how negligible it is.
A senior NSF official once remarked that the budget fluctuations year to year in, say, engineering exceed the whole economics budget.

Michael (hermit mode) @michael_nielsen