Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 12, 2023: interesting tweets
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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
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?
^existing incentive structure under rewards synthesis
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!
Some thoughts on creativity and the research process, featuring Hirschman, the Beatles, and Van Gogh:
oliverwkim.com/Creativity/
For students recently admitted to econ phd programs: can you comment/dm what stipend your program offered? Asking for union reasons.
@_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?
^(most replies are lower of course)
Replication
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
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.
This. Please. Instead of predocs, let's have replication police.
Rayhan Momin @momin_rayhan
^bunch of discussion in replies
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
"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
@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?
“The journal review process takes too long” “The journal process should do more” are two common complaints…
AI
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!
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.
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.
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)
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)
Grad student feedback
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
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
@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.
@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.
@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…
@AnthonyLeeZhang I think the degree of feedback varies a lot across programs, and across advisors within program.
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.
@_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.
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
Public goods
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
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
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. 🧵
And private excludable goods:
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
SVB collapse
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
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…
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...
^more on this line of argument here and here
Fin
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.
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