Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 7, 2021
www.bestofecontwitter.com
Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 7, 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
Forthcoming in JPE:
The cross-country relationship between heat and lower GDP is corroborated by daily fluctuations in wet-bulb temp in India, reducing labor supply + productivity of manufacturing firms.
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.108…
People in high-paying workplaces find their work less meaningful. Women self-report more meaningful work than men, especially in low-paying workplaces. This pattern is from Swedish nationally representative survey data.
Cash is better than in-kind, right? Our new WP (with @sandipz @sambnorris, M Singhal) begs to differ. In developing countries prices of essential commodities fluctuate a lot, so giving households commodities instead of cash can increase welfare – by providing insurance. (1/6)
THREAD: My coauthors and I have a new NBER working paper out studying economics seminars.
Our findings: Women receive around 12% more questions when presenting, including more hostile and patronizing questions.
Useful NYT summary from @bencasselman
nytimes.com/2021/02/23/bus…
NBER @nberpubs
Today in Development Impact, I cover the new WP on Gender Dynamics of Econ Seminars and try to point out a few important things you might have missed just from reading the NYT article a week or two back.
blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluati…
Very short thread below, as the blog post is not:
**Female role models matter**
New WP w/ @EconCath @KipkechElijah and Munshi Sulaiman.
Make & female college students visited primary schools in Somalia. Female RMs impacted students’ attitudes toward gender equality. No impact on education aspirations.
pvsessions.tamu.edu/RePEc/SerraSom…
Revised draft of my markups paper with Steve Bond, @GregWKaplan, and @pzoch5.
Summary thread 👇 (1/9)
static1.squarespace.com/static/5e96d45…
Interesting thread on the impacts of Berlin rent control. Some similar adverse supply consequences as in SF, as in paper by Diamond, McQuade, Qian. h/t @Noahpinion
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Andreas Kluth @andreaskluth
We find significant increases in the wages of other employers in response to large retailer MWs. Our estimates suggest a 10% increase in Amazon's hourly wages led to a 2.6% average increase in hourly wages at non-Amazon employers in the same CZ. 4/8
^also: Seattle minimum wage (lack of a s.s.) effect on crime
Forthcoming in @restatjournal! My paper with #MounuPrem and @DanielMejiaL "The Rise and persistence of illegal crops: evidence from a naive policy announcement"
🎉🥂
Thread 👇 (1/n)
I study the effects of prison quality on recidivism using data from Colombia.
To estimate causal effects, I leverage the quasi-random assignment of inmates to newer, less crowded, and higher service prisons.
I find that inmates assigned to newer facilities recidivate less
This thread about my own paper, but written way better than I could have! Thanks @ben_golub. Man I love Twitter, in spite of some possibly unpleasant side effects.
Ben Golub @ben_golub
One element new to this revision is a discussion of how our approach (IV validation of OLS value-added estimates) relates to approaches common in labor economics (such as AKM). This connects to some recent Twitter discussions about research design with @paulgp.
Peter Hull @instrumenthull
More: US RTW laws for teachers; geography and culture; immigration and redistribution preferences; drivers of sexual violence; yet another rideshare entry DiD; variation in Indian living standards
Public goods
@p_mukherj and @Prof_Nishith_P are delighted to introduce #AMIE (Association for Mentoring and Inclusion in Economics) @econmentoring! Visit us at econmentoring.org. #AMIE is supported by @YaleRISE @UConnGlobal & @UWMadison. Please follow us and R/T 1/14
Interesting discussions
Here's some data on 2 PhD programs @DukeU.
Roughly equal in size.
@usnews rankings and yield rates (% of admitted students who accept the offer) suggest the bio program is more prestigious.
The econ program receives nearly 10x more applications.
The Econ Bottleneck: a 🧵
^thread, lots of replies (eg), see also (though this is a twitter topic that, somehow, has too little discussion of identification and equilibrium)
For all the angst about the rise of the predoc and increasing time to complete the econ Ph.D., data from @NSF show the average time from BA to PhD for 2019 recipients in econ (8.5 years) is tied for lowest in the social sciences AND lower than the comparable stat (9.7) for 1994!
Imho, the recent trend in “enforcing” reproducibility at econ top journals has become mostly a waste of time on both ends. A thread:
After an afternoon of trying to find a paper I was interested in and could replicate, I decided to do a bit of data collection.
1/n #EconTwitter
An important implication of the way that public economists think about insurance: health insurance shouldn't make people much healthier unless people are making big mistakes (and health insurance *does* make people healthier)
limited space at the top journals, it's truly a zero-sum game. I got this personal experience, where I submitted a paper to journal X, and then almost simultaneously I got a referee request from the same journal X for a "competing" paper. Short, story both papers got rejected.
^this week in journal innovation: at JEEM, at the Journal of Urban Economics
Some of you have learned theres going to be prelims. If you hate that, on some justice grounds, I am sorry that you’re angry and having a hard time. And if you’re scared, I’m sorry too for that. But you can do this. 1/n
^personal story