Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 18, 2021
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Paper summary threads
🦶🦶🚨New DiD Paper🚨🦶🦶
What if treatment is continuous not binary? What parameters can you estimate under what assumptions? What about two-way fixed effects regressions? What about staggered timing?
Brant Callaway, @agoodmanbacon and I dive in here:
arxiv.org/pdf/2107.02637…
This is an IMO super impressive job market paper, working with tons of Social Security and Medicare data to find that ~randomly getting $100 more of SS reduces medicare spending by $38: jberman72.github.io/Jacob_Berman_J…
Also see mortality decrease(!) tho I can't figure cost per life saved
Econ perspective: People make choices to satisfy their preferences.
Psych perspective: People adapt their preferences to justify their choices.
Here's a theory that combines them. (A new working paper joint with Erik Eyster and Sarah Ridout.) arxiv.org/abs/2107.07491🧵
In 1750 Portugal had an output per head higher than France or Spain. One century later it was Western Europe's poorest country. Why? Find all about it in this new working paper, joint work with the extraordinary @dkedrosky (watch this kid, he's going far):
^another thread from coauthor Kedrosky
Dishonest behavior is contagious:
Supermarket theft increases by 16% after a local corruption scandal is made public.
Evidence from 🇮🇹: barcelonagse.eu/research/worki… by Giorgio Gulino @giorgio_gln and Federico Masera @masera_federico
Fascinating new paper in AER: Insights shows that adoptive moms experience a similar earnings penalty as biological moms. Suggests biological factors such as child birth and breastfeeding are less important for earnings penalty than factors related to culture/preferences/norms.
^this figure has gone mildly viral ~once a month since WP posted (understandably)
Can we measure platform bias in the music industry? We test for bias in playlist rankings at Spotify and provide an empirical approach that is applicable in other platform contexts.
The paper is now forthcoming at IJIO: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Check out this🧵for more!⤵️
Joel Waldfogel @JWaldfogel
George Constantinides: people face costly idiosyncratic shocks.
Huge value to covering these, which can be done more feasibly through insurance than for aggregate shocks (ie, income pooling )
ht @anup_malani and @MargRev
nber.org/papers/w29009
Arpit Gupta @arpitrage
***New Paper Alert ***
We estimate the impact of #MarketPower on firms’ response to a #MonetaryPolicy decisions.
Beautiful and cleanly identified paper on the effect of regulation/competition on bank behavior by Carlson, @Ogoun @StephanLuck forthcoming in @JPolEcon : credit booms due to lower entry barriers foster both econ growth + financial instability. Congrats!!
Stephan Luck @StephanLuck
Oxford Economic Papers have just published "An Economical Business-Cycle Model" (w/ E. Saez).
doi.org/10.1093/oep/gp…
(ungated: pascalmichaillat.org/7.html)
The paper builds a new business-cycle model centered on unemployment & tailored to the analysis of monetary & fiscal policy.
Really important new WP on the effects of health insurer billing difficulty on access to care 👇
Joshua Gottlieb @GottliebEcon
More: estimating intergenerational mobility is messy; lead is still bad; Indian government data; food stamp takeup is low; India’s national school feeding program; “success breeds success”;
Public goods
Do you wish there were a Wikipedia-type website for social science research? Join me, @SylvainCF, and others in making it happen!
TLDR: if you’re interested, email or DM me, and retweet. By joining, you are under no obligation to do anything.
Today, @bsprungkeyser and I launched Policy Impacts. Policy Impacts promotes and supports the use of the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF), a methodology for comparing the cost effectiveness of a wide range of public policies. [1/8]
Policy Impacts @PolicyImpacts
Whoever at the @nberpubs made the decision to keep the recordings of the Summer Institute livestreamed sessions open for everyone at youtube.com/c/NBERvideos, thank you! This is the right step towards transparency and accomodation of (junior) researchers from different time zones.
^NBER SI recordings are seemingly being left up this year.
