Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 10, 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 three of three.

Late edition here — this is for the prior week!

Paper summaries

Jon M Jachimowicz @jonj

🚨 New WP 🚨 In late 2020 we gave 5,000 low-income US participants $2000, $500, or nothing ($2.5m in transfers), measured survey outcomes, & (for 43%) have access to bank info. What did we find? 1/ (w/ @AniaJaroszewicz, @julianjamison, & Oliver Hauser) 🔓papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Jon M Jachimowicz @jonj

Turning to SURVEY outcomes (financial and psychological well-being, cognitive capacity, health), here comes the big (& based on prediction study, surprising) takeaway: We find NO positive effect of cash—if anything, in some prespecified analyses, we even see negative effects. 6/

^permanent income hypothesis: underrated

davidad 🎇 @davidad

DeepMind is getting into mechanism design for public goods provision and I have Thoughts. 🧵 nature.com/articles/s4156…

^🤖s are, slowly, coming for econ…

Alexander Berger @albrgr

Interesting paper from @ProfNeilT finding that we've needed exponential computing power improvements to get linear performance improvements in chess, go, weather prediction, and oil exploration: arxiv.org/pdf/2206.14007… Consistent w/ "ideas getting harder to find" thesis I think?

Martin Beraja @MartinBeraja

🚨New paper🚨 with @Nathan_Zorzi Automation raises productivity but displaces workers and lowers their earnings. When these workers are financially vulnerable, the degree of automation can be excessive. How should the government respond? A thread 🧵…1/n @MITEcon #EconTwitter

NBER @nberpubs

Automation can be excessive when it displaces workers who are financially vulnerable. This may justify slowing down automation, even when accounting for generous social insurance, from @MartinBeraja and @Nathan_Zorzi https://t.co/zuIIyNpgbG https://t.co/pdhGO8FXPn

Kyle Myers @KRoyMyers

Scientific grant applications, are they good or bad? Who knows!? I wrote a short paper hoping to help this debate just a tiny bit and suggest it's not so obvious tl;dr -- the effort incentive effect of contests can be a good thing sometimes arxiv.org/abs/2207.02379

^related: public use and public funding of science; economic societies

Ivan Werning @IvanWerning

What is the causal effect of a change in expected inflation on actual inflation? Which expectations matter most: short- or long-run? In a new paper I try to address these questions. A link to a very early draft (updates coming soon): dropbox.com/s/s7jipbmfgew3… A thread!

More: police responsiveness to women in India; Remittances and Domestic Violence; preferences of US physicians; Migration and Religious Schooling; Intra-bloc tariffs; Brazil Human Capital Review; female leaders; instruments in empirical macro; teacher quality; HHI is endogenous; climate change and mobility; optimal trade sanctions; immunization effects?; children’s human capital development; Italian mobility

Public goods

Baptiste Souillard @baptiste_sld

As part of my PhD, I've spent a lot of time searching for data on corporate income taxes, multinational enterprises, international trade, etc. I just listed 100+ databases I came across/worked with. I hope it can help! 👇 baptistesouillard.com/resources

Yoto V. Yotov @YotovG

📢NEW DATA! Very happy to share the new release of the International Trade and Production Database for Estimation - ITPD-E-R02. Thanks to my co-authors @SergeShikher, Larch, and Borchert and to the USITC!! Free to download at usitc.gov/data/gravity/i… Enjoy!

Serge Shikher @SergeShikher

Big update of the International Trade and Production Database, ITPD-E, is now available on https://t.co/PjCvZPscTB! Nearly double the observations, coverage for 1986-2019, 170 industries in all broad sectors, and 265 countries. Big thanks to the team @YotovG, Larch, Borchert!

Romain Espinosa @EspinosaRomain

For the past months, we've been working on the development of Registered Reports(RR) in econ journals with @TArpinon @SylvainCF and Marianne. We contacted hundreds of journals & dozens are discussing it. Here is the list of econ journals that accept RRs:

romainespinosa.comRegistered Reports in Economic JournalsDatabase of economic journals accepting Registered Reports as a valid submission format.

^related: JOP now accepting registered reports

Interesting discussions

Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck

There is a selection bias generated from the fact that researchers choose to study a topic that causes us to overstate the strength of the evidence in nearly all historical studies and many others.

Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck

I vaguely recall David Card saying that Jacob Mincer had the rule of thumb that any time he sees an effect size of beta, he assumes the best estimate of the true effect is 0.2*beta. This concern provides a rationale for that.

Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn