Best of #econtwitter - Week of June 14, 2020
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of June 14, 2020
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter. Recommendations always welcome over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
New papers
I am excited to share some new research on historical immigrant enclaves and upward mobility
Joint work with @stats4geo and Ran Abramitzky
nber.org/papers/w27372
1/n Thread to describe this paper
NBER @nberpubs
How to estimate a production function, esp in a developing country? Check out my forthcoming paper in REStat. Bottom line: many popular methods don't work when input markets have frictions or firms are constrained (1/N)
The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat) @restatjournal
Do films become “better” over time? Or, to put it differently: is there cumulative cultural evolution in film history? Our new paper with Peeter Tinits @yrgsupp approaches this question [a thread] /1
🚨⏰🚨A NEW PAPER (not about COVID)🚨⏰🚨
When does competitive equilibrium exist when goods are indivisible (hard!)+income effects (harder!)?
Everything turns out to be obvious once we knew the answer: income effects don't actually matter for existence! sites.google.com/site/ravijagad…
New paper by economist @MNDjourel showing with rigorous evidence how language can matter:
When the Associated Press stopped using the term "illegal immigrant", there was a causal effect on readers' views on immigration policy.
econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1720.pdf
ht @ellliottt
^good methods discussion in the replies
How do peers in school affect the long-run mental health of students?
Jonathan Norris (@StrathBusiness) and I show how students’ relative ranks in school affect their mental health both immediately as well as in the long-run.
coll.mpg.de/163067/2020_12…
#Econtwitter #MentalHealth
Public goods
Big week for public goods in finance:
Very important paper, Open-source Cross-Sectional Asset-Pricing by Andrew Chen and Tom Zimmermann.
They included STATA and R code for 105 characteristics and 945 portfolios with alternative rebalancing frequencies.
On the same topic, @Andrew___Baker has some interesting R code to clean data from CRSP and Compustat: github.com/andrewchbaker/… Check it out!
Reform proposals
In philosophy, there is a resource called the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is: a) written by leading scholars, b) up to date, c) free, d) comprehensive. The closest things I know of in econ are the JEP and JEL, but these are lacking on b)-d). (ht: @ben_golub)
^lots of discussion in the replies; the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (dictionaryofeconomics.com) and Annual Reviews (annualreviews.org) are underrated
Proposal for colloquia/Brown bag talks during a pandemic:
Everyone records a 45min talk & puts it on Youtube. Departments can check them out & select those they like.
Then they show it during their colloquium hour & invite speakers to do Q&A.
No travel, no cost, no risk.
👏👏👏👏 Q: how do we ensure jr ECRs get their share of attention?
Idea: have pairs of talks, where senior researcher is paired with jr researcher. Like how musical groups with market power choose an opening act they want their audience to see. *many* bands broke out this way
Jay Van Bavel @jayvanbavel
Navel-gazing
Did economists start tweeting more when the the nation went into lock down? Yes - nearly twice as much initially.
This graph shows the total number of original tweets each week produced by the 1,363 economists registered with rePEc. The red line is the approximate shutdown week.
Average Number of Discussants per Year at the NBER (@nberpubs) Summer Institute (2011-2020):
1) Harvard University, 23.4
2) University of Chicago, 16.0
3) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14.7
4) Stanford University, 13.2
5) New York University, 11.9
