Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 12, 2020

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter. Recommendations always welcome over email or on Twitter @just_economics.

New papers

Tommaso Porzio @PorzioTommaso

📢 Thread on new working paper: "Achieving Scale Collectively" with @bassi_vittorio @RitwikaSen @EsauTugume Streamed tomorrow at NBER SI Growth: nber.org/si2020livestre… And for the few that still read papers available at: dropbox.com/s/ffn46prbhcwz… 1/N

dropbox.comASC_Draft.pdfShared with Dropbox

Ivan Werning @IvanWerning

Modern IO ---> Macro! Monopolistic competition reigns supreme in macro, trade, growth etc., but what about more realistic dynamic oligopolistic scenarios? Olivier Wang (NYU Stern) will present our paper at NBER SI session. Link in next tweet. Short thread below. 1/n

Jeff Denning @JeffDenning

We just released an updated version of our working paper, "Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes" @FelixWeinhardt @RichMurphy_Econ nber.org/papers/w27468 Much of the paper is similar but this new version represents a substantial revision of the previous version

Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck

👉 New paper w/ Leila Agha (@LeilaEcon), David Chan, Daniel Singer, and Diana Zhu: doctors who depart from guideline recommendations cause many preventable strokes. …d1a-wp-offload-media.s3.amazonaws.com/faculty/wp-con…

Pierre Azoulay @pierre_azoulay

@bfjo, @jdanielkim, @jmirandal and I are presenting a paper entitled "Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the US" Monday morning (7/13) at 10:45am in the Entrepreneurship meetings of the NBER Summer Institute. [1/8]

Asaf Manela @AsafManela

New paper I am excited to share today. 1/ tl;dr: - simple new value of information measure - can be estimated at high frequency - shows dramatic spikes in value of information at start of COVID-19 and the (old) financial crisis Paper here: ssrn.com/abstract=36451…

Hassan Afrouzi @hafrouzi

Excited to present our paper with Choongryul Yang on "Dynamic Rational Inattention and the Phillips Curve" this afternoon at NBER SI Behavioral/Macro group at 4pm EST. Youtube link: youtube.com/channel/UC79EL… Any comments would be much appreciated! Brief summary of what we do: 1/N

youtube.comNBERThe National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that facilitates cutting-edge investigation and analysis of...

Newly-published papers

Isabel Z. Martínez @home @IZMartinez86

🥳 our paper "Intertemporal Labor Supply Substitution? Evidence from the Swiss Income Tax Holidays" with Michael Siegenthaler @KOFETH & Emmanuel Saez @berkeleyecon is forthcoming in the American Economic Review @AEAjournals Revised version here 👇 nber.org/papers/w24634

Doug Campbell @TradeandMoney

In our paper, we find several coding errors which overturn a seminal paper in the "Chinese competition caused a huge increase in innovation" lit by Bloom et al (BDvR). From the beginning, I knew the BDvR paper had problems. Why?

^launched a large debate about replication in the profession, see the replies. Response from the authors here; interesting proposal here

Elira Kuka @EliraKuka

I'm so excited to finally see my JMP in print! As all JMPs, this paper has a special place in my heart, and I am so happy it found a home at @restatjournal. 🎉🍾🎊 mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.11… Also, its topic is of special interest these days. So here is a super quick thread. 1/N

mitpressjournals.orgMIT Press JournalsMIT Press Journals is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher devoted to the widest dissemination of its content.

Mohammad Akbarpour @akbarpour_

Accepted in Econometrica, Redistribution through Markets (with awesome coauthors, @skominers and Piotr Dworczak). Link: stanford.io/3gJQxbT We have multiple takes on how to present this, with no optimal one. Here's one take, based on Econ 101: (1/10)

Jessica Leight @leightjessica

Happy to share a new paper of mine on vote-buying and political accountability, recently published in @JPubEcon joint with Foarta, Pande and Ralston! (1/7)

sciencedirect.comValue for money? Vote-buying and politician accountabilityThe prevalence of vote-buying is widely identified as a cause of poor governance in the developing world; potential mechanisms for this relationship i…

Public goods

Eric Monnet @MonnetEric

1/6 With Damien Puy, we make public our quarterly dataset of macro & financial data since 1950. It covers Real GDP (37 countries), Credit (45), Consumer Prices (48), Stock Prices (26), and Bond yields (18). We use it for our paper on global cycles.

imf.orgOne Ring to Rule Them All? New Evidence on World CyclesWe estimate world cycles using a new quarterly dataset of output, credit and asset prices assembled using IMF archives and covering a large set of advanced and emerging economies since 1950. World cycles, both real and financial, exist and are generally driven by US shocks. But their impact is modes…

Michael Droste @mcdroste

Hi #econtwitter - I wrote some programs for supervised ML in Stata, and I'd like to plug them! Pylearn allows Stata users to estimate random forests, gradient boosting/adaptive boosting, decision trees, and feed-forward neural nets. Read more: github.com/mdroste/stata-… (1/N)

Sascha Steffen @sascha_steffen

Free Research Data!!! We just updated our paper "Kicking the can down the road: Government interventions in the European Banking Sector" - We show that forbearance during the 2007/2008 crisis had a causal effect on banks risk and the economy during the sovereign debt crisis 1/n

Abhishek Nagaraj 🗺️ @abhishekn

Very excited to team up with Stephen Turban and Megan Gorges (incoming @HarvardHBS PhD students) on a new wiki to provide guidance for those applying to PhD programs in business schools. businessphdwiki.com Check it out! CC: @MITSloanPhD @PHDPROJECT 1/

businessphdwiki.comstart [Business PhD Wiki]This is a wiki to provide support for prospective applications to PhD programs in business schools. This website is meant to host a living document providing up-to-date information on applying to Business PhD programs based on the following two documents:

Eva Vivalt @evavivalt

Happy to announce the new and improved Social Science Prediction Platform is now open with three initial studies to forecast! Follow @socscipredict for updates as more studies are added in the coming weeks. I've blogged about the launch here: buff.ly/2W2rwAK

Nick HK @nickchk

I have been working on a new #rstats package that is finally in beta and ready to go. It's a package designed to make it easy to work with @SafeGraph data - downloading, reading it in, normalizing, processing! Check it out at

safegraphinc.github.ioPackage for Processing and Analyzing SafeGraph DataThis package is designed to make it easy to read SafeGraph files into R, and to perform basic preprocessing on SafeGraph data to ready it for analysis.

Good discussion in the replies

Florian Ederer @florianederer

Since my last take on pre-docs hit a nerve let me re-up with two more: 1) Because pre-docs are exclusively empirical this will turn economics even more away from theory (and I don't think that's good). 2) Large pre-doc programs will reinforce rather than reduce hierarchies.

^Launched a large discussion. For a contrasting take, see here.

Ivan Werning @IvanWerning

Many economists repeat (without thinking?) that the burden of the proof is on showing a market failure. Perhaps makes sense in some politico-economy perspective, to avoid lobbies. But scientifically, I cannot make sense of it from a Bayesian perspective.

Sean J. Taylor @seanjtaylor

A friend who is a senior grad student recently asked: "Does the possibility of ever returning to academia seem impossible now that you’re in industry?" I left academia in 2013 -- it's 7 years out. I have a few data points to draw on to answer this.