Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 31, 2022 [2/2]
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 two of two.
Paper summaries
Our working paper with @Erdal_Tekin_ and @MevludeAkbulut is out. We study the long-term mental health consequences of war exposure during childhood, using the exogenous variation in the intensity of bombardment suffered by the German cities during World War II. 1/6 #econtwitter
Exploiting mass layoffs, they show that unemployment increases the probability of committing a crime by 23%. Effects are driven by economically-motivated crimes (+43%), but also violent crimes (+18%).
And effects persist for (at least) 4 years!!
2/6
Interesting new RCT on strategies for seeding a behavior in social networks without full knowledge of the network
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…
Nicholas A. Christakis @NAChristakis
Such a neat paper by @pontus_rendahl:
"Continuous vs. Discrete Time: Some Computational Insights"
🔗bit.ly/3Bn5kae
Powerful critique of the Census Bureau's new disclosure control strategies by a group of prominent economists, just appeared in PNAS. /1
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
Story of Abreu’s second-year paper
Are firm-level markup estimates unreliable?
They are much better than you may think!
Estimated markups correlate highly with true markups
🚨 "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Markup Estimation" w/ @DeRidderMaarten (@LSEEcon) & @MorzentiG (@Unibocconi)
tinyurl.com/2p8zzx9n
🧵
Imagine investors who repeatedly bet all their wealth. Despite the same opportunities, their wealth becomes concentrated exponentially over time. Those who'll end up owning nearly all the wealth will behave as if they solved a rational inattention problem. tinyurl.com/2p9p43xv
My theory paper on bundling got accepted today at AER Insights. In this thread, I summarize the main result and discuss the implications for empirical research on bundling/2nd-degree price discrimination. 1/7
Really fascinating JMP here by Hui Ding shows place based effects on mental illness, part of which can be attributed to provider capacity constraints.
stanford.edu/~khding/HuiDin…
Zong Huang @zongyhuang
Interesting proposal:
- post novel result as WP
- solicit replication
- give replicators coauthor credit
- publish bundle of original paper +replication https://t.co/TpQ3y90eqp
John List @Econ_4_Everyone
More: Subjective Risk-Return Trade-off; bilateral labor agreements; equal credit opportunity act; couples & retirement planning; FEs; education field experiments; de-prosecution; violence against women at work
Interesting discussions
Heck, someone with $$ could just offer bug bounties for people who discover substantive errors in the code of any article with above X number of citations or published in some list of good journals or whatever and then let other people do the sleuthing.
There’s a lot to like about twitter, but my fav is the democratization of discourse. You have grad students interacting w/ faculty from institutions all over the world. And everyone’s learning from each other.
That’s cool.
Wish it was around when I was a youngster.
Hot take: the "students don't read the syllabus" thing is really a "we are for some reason still putting all the most important information in paper analogue PDFs in 2022 instead of a wiki or similar" thing.
