Best of #econtwitter - Week of June 18, 2023: paper summaries

Welcome readers old and new to this week’s (belated, again) edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.

Paper summaries

^someone might naively think ‘if economists can explain one thing it should be how prices are set’, but no, pricing is just really really weird and heterogeneous

^and here’s the Hendren thread. They do consider the welfare costs (“burden”) of audits, i.e. getting audited sucks:

^it’s probably in the paper somewhere, but: “What do these $ figure charts look like when expressed as a fraction of tax liability?”

^also there was a golden meme opportunity here

^thread from N Angrist. Also: “Can I just say though that dropping a new working paper the same week as @nhendren82 and co drop their new paper feels like dropping an album the same week as Taylor Swift, lmao.”

^I think the newsletter may have missed this thread when it came out; the paper is out in NBER series this week

^thread from the authors, also, “Overall it's not a bad paper. They mention in the abstract that they chose an LLM-friendly task. But the nuances were unfortunately but unsurprisingly lost in the commentary around the paper”

^inflammatory but the lit review is good

^at best, “NO return to *micro*targeting - targeting using 2 or 4 characteristics was no better than just 1 char”

^Yglesias column on this, “since 2016, wildfire smoke has significantly slowed or reversed previous improvements in average annual PM2.5 concentrations in two-thirds of US states, eroding 23% of previous gains on average in those states (equivalent to 3.6 years of air quality progress) and over 50% in multiple western states”

^🧐

More paper summaries