Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 10, 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.
Late edition here — this is for the prior week!
Paper summaries

How many U.S. children grow in up in households with criminal activity and justice involvement? And, how does it shape their lives? Learn more in this new joint work with Keith Finlay and @brittanyrstreet. A thread 🧵. 1/12
Link to full paper here: cjars.isr.umich.edu/child-justice-….


Leveraging @UM_CJARS & srvy/admin data linked in FSRDCs, we build population-wide residential and relationship crosswalks, merged with population-wide CJ histories. We find that over 1/3 kids in the US grow up with 1+ exposure events to the CJ system from adults in their HH. 4/12


Race and income both fundamentally shape the likelihood that children grow up with exposure events. Close to 2/3rds of Black and American Indian children have been exposed by age 18. Same goes for kids from the lowest-income families. 5/12


^second thread from coauthor (“Welcome to Econ research... where papers execute an entire research agenda that in other disciplines would split across multiple publications”)

New column!
How the quiet toil of countless amateur genealogists helped ace economists @leah_boustan and Ran Abramitzky knock Ellis Island's huddled masses off their pedestal and totally rototill everything we thought we knew about immigrant success.
washingtonpost.com/business/2022/…


"Stated differently, the fiscal system is keeping almost 14 percent of low-income young females with children from getting married in a given year."
Holy moly

Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 @hamandcheese

1SD higher air pollution increases primary school student absence in India by 5% points
by @tejendrapsingh
deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?I…




Previous studies suggested that teaching kids chess improved a range of outcomes, from math skills to logic to academics.
But it just isn’t true. Now, two large randomized trials, one in the UK & one in Bangladesh found no other benefits to learning chess. (except ♟ is fun!) 1/



Excited to be @PrincetonEcon today for a conference on children's mental health.
Authors are presenting papers that will be published in a special issue of @J_HumanResource devoted to this topic.
I'll live tweet brief descriptions, so keep an eye out for the full JHR issue!

Thrilled to see our work on pandemic’s effect on demand for public schools, homeschooling and private schools in @JPubEcon
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
@kevin_stange @abacherhicks @JoshuaSGoodman (& the many funny stories he shared with us along the way)
🧵 on our findings 1/7
Interesting discussions

How long should academic papers be?
The hard sciences have short papers. The social sciences, especially economics, have long papers.
I think there is a good argument that longer papers are less productive, for both authors' careers & the development of fields.

Readers have limited attention & informative titles cannot convey too many ideas.
So when there are (1) lots of different ideas or extensions in a paper, titles cannot help readers find them all & readers run out of energy before absorbing those ideas. Good ideas get lost!

"The Council of EEA and the EJME Committee have also discussed the increase in the use of “exploding offers”, and we would like to alert you of the cost of this practice in terms of the mental health of the weakest side of the market, and to consider this when setting deadlines."

EEA @EEANews

Thanks @EEANews for acknowledging this terrible phenomenon. Transparency and reputation are powerful tools in these cases. It would be great if we could create official platforms where candidates can anonymously share info about deadlines imposed by institutions (not EJMR).

Konrad Burchardi @kbburchardi

Senior-ish academics: What's your advice for running a search? Tips, best practices, checklists, pitfalls?