Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 6, 2022
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
Ethan Mollick@emollick
Whoa. This paper shows that doctors vastly overestimate the odds of disease before testing, and continue to do so after both positive & negative test results. It held for all diseases studied, from cancer to UTIs to pneumonia. More stats, training, stat! jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai…
4:57 AM · Mar 5, 2022
61 Reposts · 185 Likes
Ivan Werning 🇺🇦 🌻@IvanWerning
How to design trade sanctions efficiently?
That is, at minimal cost to us for any given pain aimed at our "rival" country.
Interesting question, with a surprisingly simple powerful answer in this paper from up and coming MIT PhD! drive.google.com/file/d/1DGY7BR…
Brief thread🧵
10:11 PM · Mar 4, 2022
67 Reposts · 302 Likes
Aaron Chalfin@AaronChalfin
The main narrative about 2020 is that while murder rose, other crime fell. But people stayed inside more, making it hard to infer anything about public safety. In a new paper, Maxim Massenkoff & I study changes in the risk of violence while out in public.👇maximmassenkoff.com/papers/victimi…
4:18 PM · Mar 1, 2022
44 Reposts · 149 Likes
Zack Cooper@zackcooperYale
🚨New Paper Alert🚨
“Do Higher-Priced Hospitals Deliver Higher-Quality Care?” Joint w/Joe Doyle, @johngraves9, and Jon Gruber.
A thread with
- some surprising results re prices & quality
- evidence competition --> efficiency
- Policy recs
nber.org/papers/w29809
nber.org
Do Higher-Priced Hospitals Deliver Higher-Quality Care?
1:15 PM · Feb 28, 2022
75 Reposts · 191 Likes
Edward Kennedy@edwardhkennedy
New paper!
arxiv.org/pdf/2203.00837…
How do trt effects vary across people? Such heterogeneity is crucial for optimal allocation, generalizability, etc
Many methods out there... but optimality's been unsolved. What is "best"?
We derive minimax rates & give new optimal estimator
2:39 AM · Mar 3, 2022
34 Reposts · 161 Likes
Nicholas Tilipman@NTilipman
I’m extremely excited to see my JMP get published in the AER! I'm really proud of it and so here's a 🧵about it! 1/14
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
aeaweb.org
Employer Incentives and Distortions in Health Insurance Design: Implications for Welfare and Costs
6:17 PM · Feb 28, 2022
36 Reposts · 297 Likes
Lee Crawfurd@leecrawfurd
Fascinating paper on contracting out public services in Sweden:
Private ambulances cut costs at the expense of lives
"our calculations suggest that the cost of reduced quality vastly outweighs the cost savings that private firms generate"
academic.oup.com/qje/advance-ar…
6:00 PM · Mar 2, 2022
2 Reposts · 10 Likes
John B. Holbein@JohnHolbein1
Can you guess what happens when you kick young people off Supplemental Security Income at 18?
...
It increases the likelihood that youth are incarcerated in the two decades following by 60%!
The costs to taxpayers are so high that they nearly eliminate the savings.
7:38 PM · Feb 28, 2022
18 Reposts · 59 Likes
Christopher Ingraham@_cingraham
By 1999, nearly half of all federal judges had attended an all-expense-paid resort junket to learn about conservative economics. The seminars were bankrolled by major corporations. New research shows exactly what the funders got in return for their money. thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/how-an-ideol…
5:04 PM · Feb 28, 2022
125 Reposts · 286 Likes
More: sibling gender correlations; public funding of political campaigns; bikes for girls; air pollution and suicide; predicting teacher effectiveness; police information program eval; skewed wisdom of crowds; East Germany protests; Uttar Pradesh data; Wall Street landlords; fake news is fake news; stimmies → stonks
Interesting discussions
Adam S. Goldberg@TheRealAdamG
“We are launching a call for expressions of interest from researchers interested in evaluating the economic impact of OpenAI’s Codex—our AI system that translates natural language to code.”
lnkd.in
Economic Impacts Research at OpenAI
10:36 PM · Mar 4, 2022
1 Repost · 8 Likes
Jamin Speer 🇺🇦@JaminSpeer
So hypothetically, if you’re eligible for a sabbatical and you’d like to spend it at school X or in area Y…do you just ask someone? Especially if you don’t need any funding from them?
12:51 AM · Mar 4, 2022
4 Reposts · 81 Likes
Timothy B. Lee@binarybits
The more I learn about the Census Bureau's database reconstruction experiment, the more baffled I get.
3:04 AM · Mar 4, 2022
3 Reposts · 26 Likes
Rafal Konopka@rafalkonopka
Recently #econtwitter has been abuzz with the news that Putin's Chechen henchman Ramzan Kadyrov is a Ph.D in economics. In reality, the degree was purchased (as explained below) and there's no evidence Kadyrov progressed past high school 🧵
world.time.com/2013/02/28/put…
world.time.com
Putin’s Ph.D.: Can a Plagiarism Probe Upend Russian Politics? | TIME.com
4:07 AM · Mar 4, 2022
20 Reposts · 80 Likes