Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 17, 2022 [1/3]
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 17, 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.
Paper summaries
Every economist, down to undergraduate students, learns of Baumol’s cost disease. But what if it is a simple measurement problem? This week I found myself re-reading a provocative paper by Alwyn Young from a few years ago. A brief 🧵. 1/
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Young’s argument is that the strong evidence on sectoral employment shares and productivity growth rates is not only consistent with Baumol’s mechanism (inherently lower productivity growth in services) but also with an entirely different explanation (worker self-selection). 10/
Question about prehistory: did the Agricultural Revolution make our health better or worse?
This interesting paper argues it was great for the first 11,650 years or so, as our immune systems adapted to density & disease. But things changed dramatically starting around 1950… 1/2
^note big differences in y-axes though!
With the advent of public health & medicine, our ability to fight diseases became a liability, as autoimmune disorders became more of a risk than disease itself. The areas that had been first to have agriculture now have worse health than other areas. 2/2 nber.org/papers/w30221
For a good while now, I have been greatly annoyed by my tweed at the very beginning of the great inflation debate. The high inflation read yesterday reminded me of my mistake. The tweed minimized the role of the Biden stimulus in contributing to inflation. /1
In this extreme case, the world faces only a single “natural rate of interest” or what Fed people like to call “r-star.” Thus the EU and US common r-star is affected by fiscal policy in both regions. 11/
Do short-term tax cuts have long-term effects on GDP?
In a new paper (w Cloyne, Mumtaz and Surico) we find that short-term corporate tax cuts lead to higher productivity (and GDP) up to 10y after cut. Personal tax cuts have only short-term effects.
Link: tinyurl.com/2p843cmw
New paper showing large variations in wages for similar remote workers based on country of location
This explain what I hear some firms saying - that they are considering offshoring fully remote jobs to save on wage costs
bit.ly/3Iqa2Fo
From 2007-2017, 5 states began requiring at least one semester of personal finance prior to HS graduation. This has risen to 15 in the last few weeks!!!
In new research, I ask: does the new requirement come at a cost by reducing high school graduation?
Interesting paper finding that air pollution reduces performance in chess, particularly under time pressure: dropbox.com/s/kagethk90m8a…
Public goods
@Afinetheorem @bfjo @open_phil @nberpubs @mattsclancy Second is a set of lecture notes that you can build on yourself, or use as is
One for economic historians here: automatic, unsupervised extraction of road networks from historical maps. H/T @puntofisso
#econtwitter #datascience
In this year's edition of diff-in-diff in our Econometrics PhD class, I added a new lecture on matched DID and synthetic controls. All updated panel/DID lectures are on my website at the end of this new thread.
Here are some updated examples on the power of matrix visualization.
David Schönholzer @davidfromterra
