Best of #econtwitter - Week of March 26, 2023: paper summaries
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.
Too many good ones this week!
Idiosyncratic favorites

📢New paper, fresh as @cepr_org DP, joint with @LukasHack_ & @MatthiasMeier
How to identify causal effects of systematic monetary policy on the propagation of shocks?
A 🧵 feat. FOMC hawks&doves, a novel IV + gov. spending shocks
cepr.org/publications/d…

Matthias Meier @MatthiasMeier1

Challenges:
1) SysMP may vary endogenously with the state of the economy or politicians may appoint certain type of central bankers because of economic conditions.
2) How to measure sysMP?
Our proposal: An IV that leverages exogenous variation from the FOMC voting rotation. 2/6

Using my classification of FOMC hawks & doves in Istrefi (2019), we construct (i) an IV capturing only variation in preferences among rotating voters (ii) a measure of systematic MP based on all FOMC voters ➡️ can study propagation of any shock 3/6


We develop a dataset of zoning reforms in 100s of US cities in new @USJ_online article and find:
—Reforms loosening restrictions—upzoning—are associated with a small increase in housing supply.
—Reforms tightening them are associated with higher rents. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

We use machine-learning algorithms to search US newspaper articles between 2000 and 2019 to generate the first cross-city panel dataset of land-use reforms.

What happens when Swedish people win the lottery?
For men, they get married and have kids.
For women, they get divorced.


We address two questions: 1⃣ Why do some armed actors exert sexual violence and others do not? 2⃣ Why does a given actor perpetrate sexual violence in some cases but not in others? The variation in the use of sexual violence is large:


We propose a novel Male Dominance Index at the ethnicity level to measure gender norms. The index is based on ten ethnic characteristics that relate to notions of gender (in)equality. There is large within-country variation in male dominance:


We analyzed 22,743 experiments from @Upworthy and you won't believe what happened next!
We found that negative news headlines drove online engagement. Each additional negative word in a headline increased clicks by 2.3%.
See thread below for details...


@Upworthy @CRobertson500 @NicProllochs @philipparnamets @stfeuerriegel @NatureHumBehav @Nature Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words on Upworthy, negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).
Each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.




Derek Thompson @DKThomp
^if other companies released their experimentation data, like the Upworthy research archive used here happened to be… 🤤
Paper summaries

🚨 New Working Paper! 🚨
How Are Gender Norms Perceived?
NBER WP:
nber.org/papers/w31049
Ungated paper:
yanagizawadrott.com/wp-content/upl…
1/ Why we should care and why the answer is (literally) surprising… A thread: 👇


New #FEDSNote by Brendan Price and Melanie Wasserman shows that “Gender Gaps in the Labor Market Widen Every Summer”. School closures for summer break—and accompanying lapses in childcare—lead to declines in women’s employment, LFP, and earnings. federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/…


We find that even temporary drops in income and health are associated with drops in consumption and most of the effect of temporary drops in health on consumption stems from the reduction in the marginal utility from consumption that they generate.

Institute for Fiscal Studies @TheIFS

Exciting new research on gender & tone in economics presentations is out! @haoyu906 and I have a new paper where we use a replicable, scalable, machine-learning approach to analyze dynamics in economics presentations. #EconTwitter #GenderInEconomics

This is interesting, on the impacts of starting child benefit payments in pregnancy rather than at birth. Sending pregnant mothers in the UK three months' worth (~£190) in the third trimester led to
1) higher average birth weight
2) fewer babies being born prematurely.


Mary Reader @reader_mary

7/ Using a regression discontinuity design in the date of birth of the baby, I show that the policy led to a significant increase in average birth weights


I want to do a quick thread on a new analysis from @InnovateEconomy on the emerging evidence on Opportunity Zones. Huge lessons for place based policy, and frankly some lessons on bias in the policy discourse


Sizzling new WP with the incredible @sdschwab!
TLDR: The powerful really *are* living their best lives. Using data from military hospitals where both docs and patients have rank (a measure of power), we find that powerful patients get more care and have better outcomes.
🧵1/9


I wrote a book! #EconTwitter 🧵
Our goal was to translate frontier economics research into a book for parents and students to help answer three questions:
Should you go to college?
Where should you go to college?
What should you study in college?
amazon.com/Metrics-That-M…

^“"Mobility" rankings don't reflect causal effects and are unhelpful to students.”

New IMF working paper with S. Ando, G. Dell'Arricia, @guido_lorenzoni, Adrian Peralta and @francisco_roch on Eurozone debt mutualization without direct transfers. imf.org/en/Publication… 1/N

In politically polarized societies where trust is low, things can look bleak. But we find that by encouraging folks to invest in broad financial assets that allow them to share in the risks & returns of others, we can build trust, & do so particularly among political partisans.

Chagai Weiss @chagai_weiss
AI

Will advances in AI now put a premium on novelty?
Great @PNASNews research looking at how advances in Go led to an uptick in more unusual moves in the game pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…


Excited to share our paper on the theoretical economic impacts of GPTs and GPT-powered software!
Excited that people are reading it, but I've seen a few tweets frame this as a prediction, and I wanted to share a few ways that is not the case.
Paper section here, tweets below.




If AI models get even better, their unchecked use will begin to pose serious dangers to society.
Most people agree it’d be great if countries could agree on rules to prevent AI misuse/accidents, & avoid an arms race.
But how could rules on AI actually be enforced?
Paper thread:
More paper summaries

We are excited that our paper on political ideology and international capital allocation will be published in the May volume of the Journal of Financial Economics! @KempfElisabeth @MancyLuo @LarissaSchfer9 @J_Fin_Economics
authors.elsevier.com/c/1goMo_,iI-f-…
It makes three main points:

What is the main result? Assuming a Taylor rule (any incarnation of the original one) when estimating a New Keynesian DSGE model is not a good idea, as it biases models deep parameters estimates. 2/11

New working paper w/ @GottliebEcon, Lozinski & Mourot:
"Market Size and Trade in Medical Services"
If you think medical services are non-tradable, buckle up! Lots of trade between US regions: 22% of care is physicians treating patients from another region.
1/6


🧐 Interested in incomplete markets, inequality and monetary policy?
A new paper 🥳 with @EricMengus in #journalofmonetaryeconomics shows myopic redistributions ensure long-run monetary efficiency in OLG economies!
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
A short thread 👇 1/7

🚨NEW PAPER🚨 w/ Nicholas Vreugdenhil: “Dynamic Regulation with Firm Linkages”
In this paper, we empirically measure the effectiveness of a dynamic linked regulation regime.
What is dynamic linked regulation, and why is it useful? Read on!🧵


🚨 New draft out! 📜 🚨 “The Racial Wealth Gap: the Role of Entrepreneurship”
@albuquerq_dan
Q1: What are the determinants of the racial wealth gap?
Q2: What is the potential role of policies in closing it?
Barriers to entrepreneurship are the key determinant
👇 Summary 🧵


🚨New working paper!🚨
With @pierrebachas, @AnneBrockmeyer and @Roel_Dom, we study how firms use tax incentives to lower their effective tax rate (ETR). How do ETRs vary with firm size? And what are the implications for the global minimum tax?
A short 🧵👇[1/6]

New paper released today! I had long wanted to write this paper. Finally, we could do it. Take a look! https://t.co/bLURVsmMBk

Global Capital Allocation Project @GCAProject