Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 12, 2023: paper summaries
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Idiosyncratic favorites

Excited to share a new paper!
“The Debt-Inflation Channel of the German Hyperinflation.”
This is joint work with an awesome set of co-authors: @MarkusEconomist , @Ogoun, @StephanLuck, and @TomZ_Econ
Link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
A short thread… 1/

The inflation and reduction in real debt burdens was associated with booming employment through the end of 1922. Employment growth was strongest for firms with high leverage at the onset (1918-19) of the postwar inflation, consistent with the debt-inflation channel.



🚨Published!🚨Does partisanship in the U.S. affect the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policy? In our recent @AEAjournals, @JerryCarlino, T. Drautzburg, R. Inman, and I causally show that it does w.r.t federal transfers to states -- an important policy tool in big crises. 1/7


Hypergamy - women systematically marrying 'up' in status, men marrying 'down' does not exist in England, 1837-2021


CEPR @cepr_org
Remote work pop-up section

📢Our #WorkFromHome paper came out in the first issue of the Journal of Political Economy Micro!
Main finding: #WFH decreased productivity among IT workers, added 1.6-2h to working day, bc collaboration is harder remotely.
Summary thread 1/n
#EconTwitter doi.org/10.1086/721803


Firm measures output as % against target of main task. Eg quality assurance: lines of code reviewed.
Productivity is output / input.
March 2020 lockdown sent everyone home, so before-after comparison.
Here's monthly productivity over time (0 is switch to #WFH): 3/n


MS workplace analytics tracks who employees interact with and how they spend their time.
Another reason why productivity drops during WFH is less focus time - fewer 2h-blocks of uninterrupted time, where employees get actual work done.
Interruptions by more meetings. 8/n


New paper "Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space" is OUT, along with accompanying data and visuals at wfhmap.com. Here is a short 🧵 about what we found. First, as expected, share of job ads explicitly offering #WFH exploded! #EconTwitter (1/9)

^and:

We have a new project on the evolution of work from home (#wfh) with @StephenEKHansen, @pj_lambert, @I_Am_NickBloom , Steven Davis, and @raffasadun . paper nber.org/papers/w31007 and data

Nice writeup from @DKThomp on the new paper by @ModeledBehavior and me at @InnovateEconomy . Upshot is: we find that women with remote work are likelier to marry and have babies.

Paper summaries

"Monetary actions affect economic conditions ONLY after a lag that is both long and variable" Milton Friedman, JPE, 1961
🚨New paper: we find that this statement is qualified: ❌ONLY
We find important short lags before monetary policy effects fully unravel at long lags 🧵


My paper "Getting Dynamic Implementation to Work" w/ Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun & Tom Wilkening is free in the current issue of @JPolEcon. journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jpe/current. A thread on what we do. Buckle up. 1/19

At our first Replication Games in Oslo, Montero (2022, @JPolEcon, journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…) was assigned to @AndersKjelsrud, @kotsadam and @olerogeberg (2023). econstor.eu/handle/10419/2…

The core problem - 75% of data are duplicates - came from a merge using non-unique identifiers.
Gonna use this to shill for one of my very favourite R packages - {tidylog}.
If you're doing data processing within tidyverse, use this package! It's both effortless and brilliant.

I4R @I4Replication

How to tackle regional economic inequality in the UK?
With @edballs and @DanTurnerSY, some ideas in a new working paper.
TLDR: (1) STEM skills, (2) better transport for non-London cities, (3) boosts to public-funded R&D outside the South.
🧵below...
hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/…

New NBER Working Paper on "The Unexpected Compression" with @davidautor and @AnnieMcGrew1.
nber.org/papers/w31010
Short 🧵


What are the drivers of the recent rise in inflation?
In a new working paper joint with Mark Gertler, we explore the question with a simple quantitative NK model featuring oil as a complementary good for households and as a complementary input for firms.
#EconTwitter
1/11

so, the latest working paper from my Ph.D. is now available via the link below.
The bad news: Many spatial, urban, and transport economic models may be severely biased. Why?
A. Measurement errors in travel times, or transport costs, more generally.
tinbergen.nl/discussion-pap…


🚨🚨🚨Major revision of our Local Government Debt Valuation paper now available🚨🚨🚨
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
More paper summaries

Thread: New paper available at Social Science Quarterly (cc. @SSQ_Online) with @casey_joe on the myth of wartime prosperity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ss… #econhist #econtwitter


🚨 NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨
How does access to universal early child care affect mothers’ labor supply? We study this question experimentally in a new WP (w/ Marina Krauss, @lergetporer, Frauke Peter & @SimonWiederhold).
A 🧵👇🏻 [1/7]
Link to WP: tinyurl.com/29k5pmmk
#EconTwitter


🚨New Paper Alert!!🚨
Which occupations and industries are most exposed to advances in AI language modeling, as exemplified by #ChatGPT?
In a new paper with @EdFelten and Manav Raj, we use a framework to systematically address this question.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
1/10

ICYMI #EconTwitter, #AI is slated to become our new overlords. Until that happens, humans and AI have to interact. @AndreasLeibbra1, Joe Vecci, and I have a new paper showing what that interaction means for diversity in recruitment.

Blood-sucking web platforms may be good for consumers.
“Wait, what!?,” you’re thinking 🧐
I’m serious. It’s time to talk about vampire attacks 🧛♂️, and @J_W_Hatfield and I have a theory: ssrn.com/abstract=43775…
🧵👇

How do AMMs compare to limit order books (LOBs) with respect to metrics such as complexity and expressiveness? We offer answers to these questions in joint work with @ciamac @Tim_Roughgarden: arxiv.org/abs/2302.11652 Details👇 1/n


In this paper we study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a collective goal requires costly participation by some fraction of its members.

NBER @nberpubs

"The growing influence of industry in AI research"
Empirical analysis of an important topic by @NurAhmedB, @ImMuntasir and @ProfNeilT. It shows that industry is becoming dominant in AI publications, models and benchmarks - what do we do about this?
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
