Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 6, 2022
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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
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…
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🧵
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…
🚨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
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
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…
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…
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.
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…
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
“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.”
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?
