Best of #econtwitter - Week of June 5, 2022 [1/3]
Jun 06, 2022
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.
This is part one of three.
Paper summaries

Johnathan Conzelmann@JohnConz
Where do college grads go after school? In our new WP on college-specific labor markets, we find out for 2,600 US colleges. Available @nberpubs! nber.org/papers/w30088
A🧵on the paper and where to access the data @SteveHemelt @BHershbein Shawn Martin @andrewrsimon @kevin_stange

1:48 PM · May 31, 2022
50 Reposts · 247 Likes

Johnathan Conzelmann@JohnConz
Using data from college LinkedIn pages, we find only 50% of grads (2010-2018) ended up in the same metro area as the college they attended. If you go a level higher, still just 67% of grads end up in the same state. This varies by school type, region, & selectivity (see⬇️)

1:48 PM · May 31, 2022
2 Reposts · 10 Likes
^data available here

Johannes Stroebel@stroebel_econ
Top Destinations for @Stanford grads [its hard to leave the sunshine]:
CA: 75.3%
NY: 5.7%
Top Destinations for @Harvard grads:
MA: 28.6%
NY: 15.0%
CA: 22.7%
Top Destinations for @Princeton grads:
NY: 29.5%
CA: 23%
NJ: 16.5%
6:29 PM · May 31, 2022
1 Repost · 6 Likes

Melissa S. Kearney@kearney_melissa
This paper presents a bunch of facts about the decline in the share of US kids living with two parents.
These trends matter because they are consequential to kids’ outcomes & to class gaps in outcomes.
I highlight five key facts in this thread -

NBER @nberpubs
The children of college-educated parents in the US are much more likely to live with two parents than other children; this college gap in family structure has contributed to widening household inequality, from @kearney_melissa https://t.co/RvBYq6UbE0 https://t.co/491iTHW7xy
5:06 PM · Jun 1, 2022
25 Reposts · 77 Likes

Jon de Quidt@jondequidt
Many decisions invoke conflicting motives:
- Discrimination that tries to look even-handed
- Temptations that clash with personal rules
- Unconscious biases that distort conscious choice
@testingham and I wrote a theory capturing all these, and more. 🧵
jondequidt.com/pdfs/paper_imp…

1:19 PM · Jun 2, 2022
54 Reposts · 207 Likes

Johan Ugander@jugander
🚨New!🚨 You're estimating a population mean from samples observed with varied probabilities. Do you use a Horvitz–Thompson/IPW or a Hájek/self-normalizing estimator? @stats_samir and I examine an old question due to Trotter & Tukey (1954): why not both?arxiv.org/abs/2106.07695 🧵

5:39 PM · Jul 15, 2021
24 Reposts · 100 Likes

Elliot Lipnowski@ElliotLip
Today's edition of "striking examples in game theory": an asymmetric information game in which *every* sequential equilibrium has a player convinced of a state and subsequently relinquishing that belief. (I've changed the players' names to protect their anonymity.)

12:37 PM · Jun 1, 2022
5 Reposts · 57 Likes

Constantinos Daskalakis@KonstDaskalakis
While coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) are very tractable in one-shot games, @GolowichNoah, @KaiqingZhang and I show that, surprisingly, stationary (Markov) CCE are intractable in stochastic games, and thus Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL):
arxiv.org/abs/2204.03991
10:10 PM · May 31, 2022
11 Reposts · 44 Likes

Will Diamond@wdiamond_econ
arxiv.org/abs/2004.01598 Cool paper using tools from cryptography to modify some impossibility results in auction theory.
Generally, a second price auction requires you to trust the auctioneer- if you bid 20 and the second highest bid is 18, can lie and say there was a bid of 19.
8:51 PM · Jun 3, 2022
4 Reposts · 51 Likes

Gustavo de Souza@GusMicrotoMacro
My paper with @hhaishili has a new version! We use a new identification strategy to find out the effect of tariffs on employment. This is a thread on how and why tariffs can increase employment and "bring jobs back".
#EconTwitter #BringJobsBack #AcademicTwitter #Tariff

12:01 PM · Jun 1, 2022
1 Repost · 43 Likes

Ethan Mollick@emollick
E-commerce fulfillment centers have a huge impact. Getting one in a county:
💸Drops retail workers income in the county by 2.4%
📉Reduces sales at retail stores by 4%
👨💼Costs the county 938 retail jobs a quarter
🚚Adds 256 warehouse & 143 food jobs/quarter nber.org/papers/w30077


2:07 AM · Jun 3, 2022
20 Reposts · 44 Likes
Interesting discussions

Marc F. Bellemare 🇺🇦@marcfbellemare
Do you *need* to publish during your PhD? I’m sure you’ll all be shocked that the answer is “It depends.”
A short thread on what I used to tell the students in the second-year paper seminar. 1/
1:27 PM · May 31, 2022
131 Reposts · 617 Likes

Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi
If you publish once in a good field journal during your econ PhD, you are more productive than the median graduate from top programs.
And that’s if we measure their productivity in the 6 years -after- their PhD!

Marc F. Bellemare 🇺🇦 @marcfbellemare
Do you *need* to publish during your PhD? I’m sure you’ll all be shocked that the answer is “It depends.”
A short thread on what I used to tell the students in the second-year paper seminar. 1/
2:24 PM · May 31, 2022
17 Reposts · 172 Likes

Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi
The median Harvard graduate publishes 0.04 AER-equivalent papers in the 6 years after PhD. (Roughly, 0.3 papers in a “high quality field journal.) Peer programs have similar statistics. Source:
pubs.aeaweb.org
2:24 PM · May 31, 2022
2 Reposts · 22 Likes
^these statements are based on a 2014 JEP which uses data on grads from 1986-2000, but (1) since 2000 coauthorship has become much much more common, including between grad students and their advisors; and (2) in the last ten years, predocs have become much much more common especially at these top schools, which in particular often lead to coauthorship. So it seems quite likely these patterns have changed/are in the process of changing substantially. Someone please update!

Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
On whether to try to publish in grad school, my case for it, for theorists, is that it is a good idea to try.
It's easy to have a vague and/or wrong idea of what it means to write a paper, let alone a paper that anyone wants.
1/
1:04 AM · Jun 1, 2022
16 Reposts · 99 Likes

Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
Working towrard publishing a small paper forces you to get very concrete. It makes the impossibly daunting task of "doing good research" more real. It's still daunting, but more productively so.
2/
1:09 AM · Jun 1, 2022
1 Repost · 29 Likes

