Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 12, 2023: interesting tweets
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.
A lot of juicy content this week!
Interesting discussions
Saloni@salonium
My favourite type of paper is one that covers 'knowledge gaps' in a field:
• What isn't well understood / the unanswered questions
• How they might be answered: what kind of data is needed or the breakdown of the problem
…written by experts. Have you read an example of this?
12:01 PM · Mar 9, 2023
14 Reposts · 92 Likes
^existing incentive structure under rewards synthesis
Jess Riedel@Jess_Riedel
Imagine if we settled smallish (~$20k) civil cases by emailing the case briefs to a couple of random neighbors and asking them to judge the facts in their spare time over the next month, as a matter of civic duty.
Journal refereeing is like this!
10:42 PM · Mar 11, 2023
8 Likes
Oliver Kim@oliverwkim
Some thoughts on creativity and the research process, featuring Hirschman, the Beatles, and Van Gogh:
oliverwkim.com/Creativity/
8:41 PM · Mar 10, 2023
3 Reposts · 17 Likes
Alvin Christian@_AlvinChristian
For students recently admitted to econ phd programs: can you comment/dm what stipend your program offered? Asking for union reasons.
1:00 PM · Mar 7, 2023
26 Reposts · 128 Likes
Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
@_AlvinChristian In the top 10: top of the current market is 52ish (with a few schools going even higher than that for a few candidates), median seems like probably 40ish to me?
1:04 PM · Mar 7, 2023
2 Reposts · 26 Likes
^(most replies are lower of course)
Nick HK@nickchk
the list
7:34 PM · Mar 10, 2023
3 Reposts · 54 Likes
Replication
Rayhan Momin@momin_rayhan
Surprised journals don't hire teams of RAs to replicate papers before acceptance. It would honestly be remarkable training for grad school.
Andrew Charles Baker @Andrew___Baker
Peer review should include code review if we’re serious here. And all code - not just the ones that make the tables. A million places to make mistakes and yet we only freak out about where you cluster your standard errors and how rain works as an instrument. https://t.co/4YtbycqRUd
5:29 PM · Mar 8, 2023
15 Reposts · 333 Likes
Andrew Charles Baker@Andrew___Baker
Last point. If you’re an empirical researcher and you spend less than 10% of your time counting observations after merges then you’re doing it wrong. My coauthors hate me bc I’m so annoying about checking for duplicates and erroneous drops.
1:59 AM · Mar 9, 2023
24 Reposts · 453 Likes
Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi
This. Please. Instead of predocs, let's have replication police.
Rayhan Momin @momin_rayhan
Surprised journals don't hire teams of RAs to replicate papers before acceptance. It would honestly be remarkable training for grad school. https://t.co/0SKrNNUui6
9:51 PM · Mar 8, 2023
29 Reposts · 419 Likes
^bunch of discussion in replies
Joan Llull (Econ)@JoanLlull_econ
This 👇 is exactly what @AeaData does for @AEAjournals, @korenmiklos does for @RevEconStudies, and I do for @EJ_RES and EctJ @RoyalEconSoc. They are called reproducibility checks, and they are a necessary step for replication @p_morrow_UofT (1/9)
Peter Morrow @p_morrow_UofT
@fscoamodio @momin_rayhan @AeaData To be fair, AEA policy is only about whether the code runs whether the resulting results match those in the paper. Making sure things are done "properly" is something that @AeaData does not address. However ensuring that codes are available is a huge step in the right direction.
9:47 AM · Mar 9, 2023
24 Reposts · 111 Likes
Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
"found the bug in [famous economist]'s paper right before it would have been published" would make a very compelling recommendation letter from a sergeant of the Replication Police, better than most predocs get
Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi
This. Please. Instead of predocs, let's have replication police. https://t.co/W9gstIIXvW
10:31 PM · Mar 8, 2023
81 Likes
Kevin Chen@jiafengkevinc
@ShengwuLi @ben_golub i think the problem is "convincingly demonstrate" is vague. the obvious data issues are rarer than "oh but if you put in another x you no longer reject at 5%." In that latter case, do the results replicate?
11:26 PM · Mar 8, 2023
6 Likes
“The journal review process takes too long” “The journal process should do more” are two common complaints…
AI
Kevin Bryan@Afinetheorem
Ok, let's go with one more insane AI application. As in the French app I showed the other day, I coded this in one evening, knowing basically nothing ex-ante about Flask or AJAX. This time, let's build your personal research index!
11:28 AM · Mar 11, 2023
13 Reposts · 86 Likes
Kevin Bryan@Afinetheorem
The code is two parts. Part 1 grabs every pdf, latex file or text file in a folder you specify, "reads" them (more on this in a sec), and gets everything set for your queries. You do it once, it takes about five seconds per paper on my laptop, and costs about 1 penny per paper.
11:28 AM · Mar 11, 2023
2 Likes
Kevin Bryan@Afinetheorem
What papers did the lit review think was most related? Where do we go from here? Can you answer some details about the experimental design? No problem.
11:28 AM · Mar 11, 2023
1 Like
Philine Widmer@phinifa
A conference is coming up, and you need new slides? What if you had a digital assistant to convert your paper into a (draft) slide set?
A research team at ETH Zurich has been working on a tool to convert articles to slides.
To fine-tune the prototype, we need your help!
(1/2)
2:05 PM · Mar 7, 2023
69 Reposts · 318 Likes
Philine Widmer@phinifa
Can you share your research paper and the corresponding presentation (both in PDF and native format)?
To learn more and upload your files, please click here: tinyurl.com/mujpdrv3
As a thank you for your participation, you will get early access to our tool.
(2/2)
tinyurl.com
Google Forms: Sign-in
2:06 PM · Mar 7, 2023
2 Reposts · 30 Likes
Grad student feedback
Anthony Lee Zhang@AnthonyLeeZhang
Possibly controversial:
I feel we don't give enough mid-stage feedback to PhD students in econ/finance. Between 2nd year and job market, they have like 3-4 years of doing their own thing, and a lot of people seem to have not a great clue how they're doing
1:18 AM · Mar 10, 2023
5 Reposts · 148 Likes
Anthony Lee Zhang@AnthonyLeeZhang
Anecdotally a number of students have like a moment of shock when they hit the job market, as their expectations for how they're doing were like way off from the interviews/etc they get
1:19 AM · Mar 10, 2023
11 Likes
Arpit Gupta@arpitrage
@AnthonyLeeZhang One thing I’ve done, which I’d like to do more:
Have students send me short (<1pg) paper ideas. I evaluate and send back.
Typical idea is maybe just ok, but if you do a bunch can identify the best ones.
2:51 AM · Mar 10, 2023
20 Likes
Arpit Gupta@arpitrage
@AnthonyLeeZhang I actually think one of the biggest challenges is premature JMP adoption. So important I think to offer feedback in ways that don’t encourage just selecting a minimally viable project idea.
2:52 AM · Mar 10, 2023
7 Likes
Charlie Clarke@wagonomics
@arpitrage @AnthonyLeeZhang I remember Fama would tell the story of going to Merton Miller with 10 ideas from the summer, and MM liking one and that started his dissertation. Does anybody do it this way anymore? Like instead of spending months developing an idea and the advisor saying what’s bad about it…
2:59 AM · Mar 10, 2023
3 Likes
Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi
@AnthonyLeeZhang I think the degree of feedback varies a lot across programs, and across advisors within program.
1:19 AM · Mar 10, 2023
12 Likes
David Schindler@DSchindlerEcon
One of my grad students said yesterday that they came to realize that picking the right advisor matters more for career success than picking the right school. And I believe that's a message we need to deliver to all prospective grad students more frequently.
7:17 AM · Mar 10, 2023
139 Reposts · 1.19K Likes
David Schindler@DSchindlerEcon
@_AlvinChristian Fully agreed. What I'm saying is that, conditional on being in a program at school X, choosing the right advisor can overcome a lot of differences in outcomes to programs which are ranked somewhat lower.
5:16 AM · Mar 11, 2023
3 Likes
Emma van Inwegen@emmavaninwegen
I saw a great talk for mid-stage grad students that started with the quote
“We don’t know what doctoral students do in their third year, but it seems to take a year…”
Anthony Lee Zhang @AnthonyLeeZhang
Possibly controversial:
I feel we don't give enough mid-stage feedback to PhD students in econ/finance. Between 2nd year and job market, they have like 3-4 years of doing their own thing, and a lot of people seem to have not a great clue how they're doing
8:59 AM · Mar 10, 2023
6 Reposts · 100 Likes
Public goods
Matt Clancy@mattsclancy
Someone write the paper about whether twitter facilitates academic collaboration now! And send it my way when it’s done please 🙏
Sven E. Hug @hug_sven
An open dataset of scholars on Twitter
"This paper presents a novel and simple approach to match authors from OpenAlex with Twitter users identified in Crossref Event Data."
🔓Dataset including 500,000 scholars
https://t.co/Epk0omnhLR
🔓Paper
https://t.co/LJsLH2GZyT
8:12 PM · Mar 11, 2023
3 Reposts · 17 Likes
Emil Verner@EmilVerner
Check out this new database on balance sheets for national banks during the US national banking era. An impressive resource based on cutting-edge data digitization techniques developed by @StephanLuck and @Ogoun!
Stephan Luck @StephanLuck
Interested in using historical micro-data for your research? Interested in the 19th Century U.S. economy? @Ogoun and I just published a dataset that may be interesting for you. Please spread the word so it will be widely used!
3:10 PM · Mar 6, 2023
2 Reposts · 19 Likes
Emily Oster@ProfEmilyOster
In June of 2021 our @CSDH19 embarked on an effort to document school closures during 2020/21 school year.
Our goal: to be comprehensive; to create easy to use data for research & journalism; to make sure this information isn't lost.
We now have data from 47 states + DC. 🧵
8:53 PM · Mar 7, 2023
13 Reposts · 51 Likes
And private excludable goods:
Chris Stokel-Walker ~ @stokel@infosec.exchange@stokel
SCOOP: Twitter’s new API access starts at $42,000 a month for 0.3% of Twitter’s data. My latest for @WIRED speaks to researchers who say that’s a non-starter
wired.com
Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone
6:22 PM · Mar 10, 2023
587 Reposts · 1.33K Likes
SVB collapse
Justin Wolfers@JustinWolfers
Hey, if you're currently teaching micro (time for some game theory), macro (bank runs!) or even finance (maturity transformation!) you may want to add a bit about the Silicon Valley bank run.
Lemme try to give you a quick couple of slides you can insert into class. #TeachEcon
9:33 PM · Mar 13, 2023
63 Reposts · 364 Likes
Joey Politano 🏳️🌈@JosephPolitano
3 months ago, Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th largest bank in the US
Today it no longer exists
Here's what we know about the bank's failure—what caused it, if depositors will get their money back, the risks to the broader financial system, and more 🧵
apricitas.io/p/the-death-of…
apricitas.io
The Death of Silicon Valley Bank
1:05 AM · Mar 12, 2023
144 Reposts · 545 Likes
Stephen Williamson@1954swilliamson
10/Diamond-Dybvig model (as is often the case) isn't so helpful in understanding what is going on. DD is about banking panic equilibria associated with illiquid but solvent banks. SVB is insolvent. On Friday, in typical fashion, the FDIC closed SVB. This is typical in that the...
6:20 PM · Mar 11, 2023
3 Reposts · 30 Likes
^more on this line of argument here and here
Fin
Ryan Enos@RyanDEnos
A side-effect of the credibility revolution in social science is that scholars tie themselves in knots to say they are not making a causal claim when they are, in fact, making a causal claim.
6:32 PM · Mar 6, 2023
7 Reposts · 57 Likes
Brad Shapiro@btshapir
Drinking shit wine straight out of a bottle in complete darkness and complete silence with my roommates at our dining table right after we took our first micro exam.
No words, just shaking our heads and passing the bottle around.
Carly Anne York, Ph.D. @BiologyCarly
What is your most unhinged story from grad school?
Mine was probably the time I picked a dead flounder up off the lab floor and then ran to a public bathroom with it in my hands and sobbed over its body in a stall.
12:49 PM · Mar 9, 2023
3 Reposts · 149 Likes