Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 16, 2021

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

Ben Moll @ben_moll

Do wealthier households save a larger share of their incomes than poorer ones? I suspect most people's prior is that the answer is "yes." Turns out that's incorrect, or rather: things are considerably more subtle, at least in our Norwegian wealth tax registry data. A short 🧵:

Felix Koenig @Feli_Koenig

We use social security records to track work patterns during the staggered roll-out of television broadcast towers🗼across the US. Government priority rules led to quasi-random variation in TV exposure across towns. What happened in treated towns? 3/7

Felix Koenig @Feli_Koenig

Workers close to retirement are by far the most responsive, while effects on prime-aged workers are modest. We find that cheap round-the-clock entertainment led to a substantial increase in retirement rates but not much change elsewhere. What’s the takeaway? 5/7

Anna Stansbury @annastansbury

One recent paper that's substantially influenced my thinking is German Gutierrez & @so_piton: "Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-Housing) Labor Share" The headline: (non-housing) labor shares have *not declined* in any major advanced economies except the US and Canada 🧵

Jesse Bruhn @jmb112485

🚨🚨WORKING PAPER ALERT🚨🚨 "Competition in the Black Market: Estimating the Causal Effect of Gangs in Chicago" Read this thread to learn how I obtained 15 years of gang maps from the Chicago PD and used them to study how gangs influence neighborhoods 1/N

Brown Economics @Brown_Economics

Bravo Working Paper # 2021-004 Competition in the Black Market: Estimating the Causal Effect of Gangs in Chicago by Jesse Bruhn (@jmb112485 ) #EconTwitter https://t.co/rRMR0fcdFc https://t.co/klQ71cO00p

^a map here

Dean Eckles @deaneckles

We replied to 2000 users' tweets of false info with a fact-checking link. What effect did this have? Not exactly what we had hoped:

Mohsen Mosleh @_mohsen_m

RESULTS: Social corrections... 🡆Decreased quality (by ~1%), increased partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets 🡆No effect on primary tweets [This suggests effect is driven by redirecting people's attention, rather than causing reactance per se] 4/ https://t.co/YS0LB2cTA5

commie lee jones @commieleejones

MIT researchers 'infiltrated' a Covid skeptics community a few months ago and found that skeptics place a high premium on data analysis and empiricism. "Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution." arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993…

Karthik Muralidharan @karthik_econ

India's ICDS is the world's largest early-childhood development program. In a new @nberpubs WP bit.ly/2QYgTjl, @aganimian @c_r_walt & I show with a large-scale RCT that adding a worker to ICDS centers improved education, and nutrition, and was highly cost effective 🧵1/

Stephen Holt @SteveBHolt

A 4-yr old who randomly won a seat in Boston preschool: -⬆️likelihood of graduating HS (6 p.p.) -⬆️likelihood of attending college (5.4 p.p.) -⬇️suspensions and likelihood of juvenile incarceration -⬆️likelihood of SAT above bottom quartile. nber.org/papers/w28756

Elizabeth Weber Handwerker @ElizWebHand

I have a paper with @sarapfmoreira and Dave Piccone in this AEA P&P! “The Life Cycle of Businesses and Their Internal Organization” examines the managerial composition of 1.8 million U.S. establishments “born” since 1992. 1/5

AEA Journals @AEAjournals

The May 2021 issue of AEA Papers and Proceedings (111) is now available online at https://t.co/SooN7ALmtG.

Jaime Arellano-Bover @J_ArellanoBover

Very happy to have this article come out in @AEAjournals Papers & Proceedings! The session, "Long-Term Effects of Early Life Outcomes", was joint with two great papers by Ashna Arora + @urfriendlen + @HjortJ and @SteveRo48195125 + Patralekha Ukil 1/n

Justin Sandefur @JustinSandefur

Do high-stakes exams promote consistent educational standards? New working paper + blog post with @jrossiter0 @mabrehkojo and @aishadanali, looking at exams taken by millions of students across West Africa. cgdev.org/publication/do… cgdev.org/blog/can-ghana… 1/

Liliana Varela @liliana_vvarela

Thrilled to see this paper (finally) coming out! Below is a short summary. 1/5

The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStud

Exchange Rate Exposure and Firm Dynamics   https://t.co/OD2emevFTv   Juliana Salomao, University of Minnesota & NBER & CEPR and Liliana Varela, London School of Economics & CEPR   #economics https://t.co/QvlpKNPJeA

More: labor market power; government debt maturity management; MP transmission; immigration restrictions and patents; unemployment and entrepreneurship; graphics in applied econ papers; synthetic control; Craiglist and local newspapers

Meta

Apostolos Filippas and John Horton develop a model of econtwitter matching some stylized facts (and predicting some new ones) in a way that will be striking to econtwitter regulars:

Luke Stein does an ex post video discussion, linked here

Public goods

Melissa Dell @MelissaLDell

(1/2) Knowledge base on deep learning methods for data curation is up: dell-research-harvard.github.io/blog.html Covers methods from computer vision and NLP. I found it overwhelming at first to tackle the vast DL lit, hope links to resources for getting started will be of potential use to others

dell-research-harvard.github.ioBlog

Interesting discussions

C. Kirabo Jackson @KiraboJackson

Yes. I landed a job offer based on positive impressions of my work on a referee at the QJE. The paper was rejected, but that apparent "failure" turned out to be quite fortuitous!

Joshua Goodman @JoshuaSGoodman

Yesterday in a mentoring session, I accidentally said something helpful. A mentee later wrote: "One of the things you said that really stuck out to me is to realize rejections (to journals, conferences, etc.) are another way in which I am getting my name and my work out there...

Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi

Here’s a thing I didn’t realize in grad school about doing theory: Your role in research can stay the same for most of your career. In some other econ fields, assistant professors get ‘promoted’ to a more managerial role, overseeing a team that does the late-PhD stuff. 🧵

John Cawley @cawley_john

A new memo from our AEA ad hoc committee on the job market has been posted. In brief: there is evidence of a rebound in the demand for PhD economists. Summary w/ graphs follows... 1/5 #EconTwitter #EconJobMarket @AEAInformation @JOE_listings @EconSpark

aeaweb.orgAmerican Economic Association

Steven Ruggles @HistDem

/1. The Census Bureau plans to add intentional errors to the 2020 census to protect the confidentiality of census respondents. The Census Bureau insists that the intentional error is necessary to combat the threat of “database reconstruction.”