Best of #econtwitter - Week of June 19, 2022 [2/3]
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 two of three.
Paper summaries

Today, @ClaraSievert, @vbolotnyy, Paul Barreira, and I shared results of our study of mental health in European Economics Departments with the 14 participating departments.
A thread about what we did and learned.
The executive summary is here: elisamacchi.github.io/files/emhs_exe…
1/N

34.7% of European Econ PhD students are experiencing moderate to severe symptoms of depression or anxiety. This prevalence is higher than among Econ PhDs in the 2017 U.S. study (24.8%). This is likely due, in part, to the COVID-19 pandemic. 7/N


Untenured, tenure-track faculty show rates of significant depression or anxiety symptoms (31%) that are similar to graduate student levels. Prevalence among tenured professors is much lower, around 9%. 9/N

Supermarkets use 99-ending prices a lot. Why? Presumably because of left-digit bias.
Question: is there left-digit bias to justify 99-ending prices?
Answer: Oh yes there is! here's an example 👇
See how demand drops when the dollar digit changes, but is flat if it doesn't?


And we do!
These are the residuals for 3,500 different products at 25 US chains, ain't it pretty? Gosh I love this figure.
Anyway...


Anyway, we can also quantify the magnitude of left-digit bias and find it to be about 0.2.
0.2?! What does that mean?
It means that the perceived price difference between, e.g., $4.99 and $5.00, is 21 cents.
That's a big difference and it has implications on pricing.

Strong kin-based norms are detrimental for well-functioning institutions. Excited to see my work on Kin Networks and Institutional Develop forthcoming in the Economic Journal!


The Economic Journal @EJ_RES

How does the migration of high-skilled knowledge workers shape innovation, knowledge diffusion, and economic growth?
@MartaPrato (@UChi_Economics) on the global race for talent:
youtu.be/9Hw94ZusazU

^always check out @econimate

Today's edition of 'pretty theory papers worth knowing' is Dezsö Szalay's paper, "The Economics of Clear Advice and Extreme Options". The paper concerns itself with information acquisition choices under delegated decision making. Let's go through an example...


New version of our paper (with Adam McCloskey) on critical values robust to p-hacking:
pascalmichaillat.org/12.html
The paper develops a model of p-hacking. It then gives critical values that correct the inflated type 1 error rate caused by p-hacking.


New working paper w/ @royer_heather & @corey_d_white. 🧵:
In the past 30 years over 400 counties have lost their sole hospital-based OB unit, with most closures occurring in rural areas.
What is the impact of this “Rural Maternity Care Crisis”?
nber.org/papers/w30141

Interesting discussions

In the "nerding out" part: the end of the elephant. Between 2008 and 2018, incomes of the globally poor have increased in percentage terms much more than the incomes of the globally rich. The global Gini has gone down.


I was the corporate pricing manager for Wendy's from 2010-2012, so as a professional pricer seeing this thread go viral, I can't help providing some corrections.
The most basic thing to understand about fast food pricing is that a successful store needs to run at ~30% food cost

C. Katsfoter, Burger Stalinist🔻 @primarycatdad
^thread on multiproduct pricing

Comprehensive new resource from our group at @AarhusUni_int: the ‘Danish Atlas of Disease Mortality’ with epidemiological and mortality data for 1800+ health conditions 🧵
👉nbepi.com/atlas
Just published in @PLOSMedicine
#epitwitter #rstats #poptwitter @John_J_McGrath
