Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 5, 2023: paper summaries

Mar 09, 2023

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.

Late edition this week (sorry!) but a LOT of good stuff…

Idiosyncratic favorites

Amanda Geiser@amandaegeiser

Does happiness increase with income or level off beyond some threshold? An adversarial collaboration of Killingsworth & Kahneman on the relationship between income and well-being, just out at PNAS: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

10:10 PM · Mar 1, 2023

160 Reposts · 516 Likes

^key figure:

Raza S@RazaSN

Important study reconciling research on co-linearity of ↑money~↑happiness If you are a generally unhappy person, money has diminishing returns for happiness (flattening effect) If you are a generally happy person, ↑money will continue to ↑happiness pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

3:11 AM · Mar 2, 2023

3 Likes

^(some pushback eg here, here?)

Sergio Ocampo Díaz@socampdi

3/7 Distribution of self-employment (SE) and Earnings 1⃣SE high among lowest and highest earners 2⃣SE highest among lowest earners in developing countries (inverted for developed)

7:54 PM · Mar 2, 2023

3 Likes

Jonas Jessen@jonasjessen

🚨DP ALERT🚨 Do raises in potential benefit duration (PBD) cause higher aggregate unemployment? Economic theory: unclear🫤 For Poland we find: Yes✅ Unemployment increases, driven by directly affected. Inflows play a major role with @RobinJessen+3 iza.org/publications/d… 1/X 👇

4:09 PM · Mar 3, 2023

9 Reposts · 52 Likes

Armand Domalewski@ArmandDoma

South Dakota implemented 24/7 sobriety program—alcohol abstinence orders with frequent alcohol testing (2x daily breathalyzers, monitoring bracelets) + swift, certain, and moderate sanctions for noncompliance (1 to 2 nights in jail)—reducing death rates by 50% over 5 year period

11:24 PM · Mar 1, 2023

34 Reposts · 421 Likes

Alvaro Ortiz | BBVA Research & IE Business School@alvaroortiz1968

High-Frequency Transmission of Monetary Policy (MP): 1️⃣MP Shocks transmit at Short! & Long lags 2️⃣Larger Effects for Sales(but lagged) than Consumption 3️⃣More Sticky Employment(Frictions?) 👇shorturl.at/buwIR @R2Rsquared @NunoGalo @ECB_Research @BIS_org @CebraOrg @AMLEDS1

5:18 PM · Mar 2, 2023

1 Repost · 1 Like

^“short and variable lags”

Vincent Pons@VinPons

@clpennec First, our main result (2/10):

12:41 PM · Mar 3, 2023

1 Repost · 4 Likes

^“17% to 29% of voters make up their mind during the two months before the election”

Devin Pope@Devin_G_Pope

What is the probability that that price offers were rejected by consumers? The graph below shows a discontinuous jump in rejected price offers at each dollar threshold.

8:25 PM · Mar 3, 2023

5 Reposts · 23 Likes

Florian Frühhaber@flo_fruehhaber

Who's most hurt by contractionary monetary policy? In the latest JEP, @AlisdairMcKay and @ChristianKWolf look at the heterogeneity of consumption reactions to expansionary MP - here is what their results imply for MP tightening (assuming symmetry) 👇 1/7 pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

6:15 PM · Mar 3, 2023

10 Reposts · 27 Likes

Florian Frühhaber@flo_fruehhaber

💡 Interest rates affect households very differently, but overall consumption reactions are pretty evenly distributed. This figure (see linked paper) presents numbers from a back-of-the-envelope calculation for an interest rate decrease. But ⚠️: state dependence matters! 7/7

6:15 PM · Mar 3, 2023

1 Like

Imke Reimers@ReimersImke

We find that Amazon’s US toy prices increased significantly following the Toys R Us bankruptcy. For the most popular products, prices rose by 5.3%. The sales-weighted average price increase is 4.7% - almost half of Amazon’s reported price advantage pre-exit. 3/n

7:15 PM · Feb 27, 2023

13 Likes

Shengwu Li@ShengwuLi

🥳 Conditionally accepted at Econometrica: Algorithmic Mechanism Design with Investment. (w Mohammad Akbarpour,@skominers, Kevin Li, and Paul Milgrom.) VCG mechanisms aren't always feasible—many real-world allocation problems are NP-hard, so we can't compute optimal allocations.

3:19 PM · Feb 27, 2023

29 Reposts · 453 Likes

Navel gazing

Jörg Peters@jrgptrs

Is Economics self-correcting? We have a new discussion paper, joint with N Fiala & @flneubauer. Quick answer is: No, rather not. We reviewed all replications published as comments in the AER. Plus, we surveyed the authors. A short thread 1/. bit.ly/3y0wMYp #EconTwitter

2:06 PM · Mar 4, 2023

306 Reposts · 892 Likes

Jörg Peters@jrgptrs

Comments have no effect on the original paper’s citation trend 6/.

2:13 PM · Mar 4, 2023

4 Reposts · 37 Likes

Jörg Peters@jrgptrs

It’s also not surprising but still striking to see how little agreement there is between original authors and replicators – reflecting the sense that there’s no convincing definition or understanding in economics of what is an un/successful replication 8/.

2:20 PM · Mar 4, 2023

4 Reposts · 37 Likes

Separately:

Paul Hünermund@PHuenermund

"We find that median article quality is lower in the QJE if authors have ties to Harvard and/or MIT than if authors are from other top-10 universities, but higher in the JPE if authors have ties to Chicago." (ht @NicolaiFoss) docs.iza.org/dp15965.pdf

9:27 AM · Feb 28, 2023

125 Reposts · 677 Likes

Separately:

apoorva.lal@Apoorva__Lal

Applied econometrics as a signaling game - researchers are more likely to razzle-dazzle the reader/referee by mentioning that they compute the "Kleibergen-Paap" F statistic when their first stage is weak.

12:24 AM · Mar 6, 2023

16 Reposts · 137 Likes

Paper summaries

Joanna Venator@JoannaVenator

New working paper with @ArpitaPatnaik6, Gwyn Pauley, and @realMattWiswall ! This paper asks: does exposure to same-gender speakers increase women's take-up of econ major DUE to same-gender channels or does ANY speaker increase take-up? nber.org/papers/w30983 [1/N]

7:48 PM · Feb 28, 2023

16 Reposts · 48 Likes

Joel Waldfogel@JWaldfogel

Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men, but book authorship has become an exception. In 1970, women published a third as many books as men. By 2020, women authored the majority of new books.

8:57 PM · Feb 28, 2023

2 Reposts · 5 Likes

Anton Bobrov@TonBobrov

Just 3 years of data make a significant difference in trend estimates. Here is the change in the linear trend on economic profits from 1981-2014 achieved by varying the sample start year. Over 30% of the trend disappears from 1985!

5:47 PM · Mar 1, 2023

2 Likes

^“t-hacking”

Colin Angus@VictimOfMaths

Our new paper looking at alcohol, drug and suicide mortality during the first 2 years of the pandemic in the USA and the UK nations has just been published in @RSPH_PUHE Lots of attention on these deaths early in the pandemic, so what actually happened? doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe…

A screenshot of the title page of our new paper: Increases in 'deaths of despair' during the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA and UK which has just been published in the journal Public Health.

11:26 AM · Feb 28, 2023

92 Reposts · 212 Likes

Craig Palsson @ Market Power@MarketPowerYT

Since everyone is talking about the dangerous effects of smartphones (cc @Noahpinion), I'll share this finding from my 2017 paper. Kids started going to the hospital more after the iPhone was released. Likely cause: parents were distracted by their phones.

1:42 PM · Mar 2, 2023

70 Reposts · 379 Likes

Jon Steinsson@JonSteinsson

“Engels' Pause” – the fact that real wages did not rise much in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution – is sometimes cited as evidence that rapid technical progress can hurt labor. Is this relevant in the modern context? 1/

7:11 PM · Mar 2, 2023

29 Reposts · 115 Likes

^and also:

Jon Steinsson@JonSteinsson

Are past periods of persistent prosperity (e.g., Greece, Rome, Song China, etc.) inconsistent with Malthusian economics as historians often claim (sometimes in scathing critiques of work done by economists)? Turns out they are not. 1/

7:41 AM · Mar 1, 2023

31 Reposts · 184 Likes

Erin Wolcott@DrErinWolcott

The steady rise in CPS nonresponse since 2010 is from households refusing the survey. Robert Bernhardt, @D_Munro_Econ, and I offer a correction method to adjust labor market indicators for selection: erinwolcott-econ.github.io/BernhardtMunro…

Nick Bloom @I_Am_NickBloom

Fascinating piece by Torsten Slok arguing that declining survey response rates are making data more volatile. More volatile data is making markets more volatile. This is raising uncertainty, and may damage growth. https://t.co/Bt182lbM8r

7:11 PM · Feb 27, 2023

13 Reposts · 37 Likes

Ludwig Straub@ludwigstraub

Recent inflation and consumer spending numbers have remained strong. Why? One idea that people seem to dismiss somewhat: Excess savings “It’s been two years since Biden’s stimulus, everybody already spent it” A short 🧵 on why that is the wrong way of thinking about it... 1/N

The Wall Street Journal @WSJ

Inflation firmed and consumers stepped up spending in January, likely leaving the Federal Reserve on track to keep raising interest rates https://t.co/6YnH6OWLly

3:14 PM · Mar 1, 2023

153 Reposts · 608 Likes

Hessel Oosterbeek@hooster1

Ten years after its inception, our paper on the performance of school assignment mechanisms is published in @JPolEcon. We use a unique combination of register and survey data from Amsterdam to compare allocations under Deferred Acceptance (DA) and adaptive Boston.[1/9]

2:56 PM · Mar 1, 2023

12 Reposts · 97 Likes