Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 18, 2021

Jul 19, 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

Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna@pedrohcgs

🦶🦶🚨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…

Difference-in-Differences with a Continuous Treatment, by Brantly Callaway, Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

6:06 AM · Jul 16, 2021

309 Reposts · 1.25K Likes

Alexander Berger@albrgr

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

8:49 PM · Jul 11, 2021

52 Reposts · 180 Likes

Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi

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🧵

1:42 AM · Jul 16, 2021

82 Reposts · 467 Likes

Nuno Palma@nunopgpalma

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):

warwick.ac.uk

The Cross of Gold: Brazilian treasure and the decline of Portugal

10:40 AM · Jul 16, 2021

81 Reposts · 337 Likes

^another thread from coauthor Kedrosky

Robert Dur@DurRobert

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

4:00 PM · Jul 14, 2021

52 Reposts · 240 Likes

Devin Pope@Devin_G_Pope

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.

6:08 PM · Jul 14, 2021

129 Reposts · 510 Likes

^this figure has gone mildly viral ~once a month since WP posted (understandably)

Luis Aguiar@luisaguiarw

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

Powerful platforms – and the possibility of bias - are on everyone’s mind these days. For example, Google got in hot water for favoring its own properties in search. How about bias at Spotify? 1/n https://t.co/UjDJoZpBNp

11:31 AM · Jul 14, 2021

5 Reposts · 25 Likes

Arpit Gupta@arpitrage

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

It would be nice if startup employees could pool their earnings with 10-20 comparable startup peers. Odds of joining a Unicorn is low, so idiosyncratic labor risk is massive. But some diversification would bring nice smoothing just like VCs get.

5:54 PM · Jul 13, 2021

5 Reposts · 72 Likes

Marina M. Tavares@tavares_mm

***New Paper Alert *** We estimate the impact of #MarketPower on firms’ response to a #MonetaryPolicy decisions.