Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 6, 2025: paper summaries
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
On firewood and GDP accounting
To be clear about what those numbers in the paper mean:
^gives new meaning to the term “sex recession”… 🥁🥁
^IMO this whole discussion is in fact extremely deep and complicated and involves 🚨index number theory🚨, so basically I recommend running away screaming
Phil Trammell has a recent related paper, though of course the general point is older — intertemporal comparison of welfare is hard:
^Nordhaus on price of light/JEP
Idiosyncratic favorites
^Lyman Stone also has a good post (paywalled, alas) on the paper. IMO there’s a big opening to be the “Emily Oster of genetics” (i.e., doing causal inference carefully + taking economics seriously, as she has been doing in health). If you are already doing this please let me know, I would *love* to read your work
More paper summaries
"^IMO this whole discussion is in fact extremely deep and complicated and involves 🚨index number theory🚨, so basically I recommend running away screaming"
i find the Hicks solution (estimate the demand curve, the price of a not yet existent good equals the price at which demand is zero) pretty satisfying. is it much deeper than that? am i missing something?