Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 2, 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

Tommaso Porzio @PorzioTommaso

📢 After too many years, new working paper with Dauth, Lee, and @SebastianFind finally posted 👇 Result: adoption of West institutions in East Germany led to labor reallocation, unravelled previous misallocation and triggered wage growth. Link: bit.ly/3sUkCLA. A 🧵

Todd Morris @ToddMorrisEcon

In 2007, Australia's most populous state banned first-year drivers from carrying 2+ passengers between 11pm and 4:59am. Using daytime outcomes as controls, we observe parallel pre-trends in relative crash rates and a sharp reduction in late-night crashes upon implementation. 2/9

Chris Warshaw @cwarshaw

Consistent with prior work on Fox News (e.g. @gregmartinphd), we find that Fox boosted Republicans in recent presidential elections. A one SD decrease in FNC channel position increased Trump's vote share by .6 percentage points in 2016/2020 (enough to tip several close states).

Robert Metcalfe @RDMetcalfe

Very excited that our paper on the efficiency and equity impacts of energy subsidies is out today in the American Economic Review. aeaweb.org/articles/pdf/d…

pierrecboyer @pierrecboyer

New publication AEJ: Economic Policy @AEAjournals “The Role of Electoral Incentives for #PolicyInnovation: Evidence from the US #Welfare Reform” (joint with Andreas Bernecker and Christina Gathmann) 👇👇👇

Tommaso Porzio @PorzioTommaso

Awesome paper offering a structural perspective on one of the most discussed recent macro fact: the increased in markups. Key result: structural transformations in the economy reduced welfare by 9%. obvious 🙋‍♂️: what if technological progress is endogenous? Would results hold?

Simon Mongey @Simon_Mongey

1/New working paper with @jan_eeckhout and Jan De Loecker. Short 🧵 (https://t.co/ZdKRYz5deS) https://t.co/mUYXWkCjev

David Baqaee @DBaqaee

How does welfare respond to price and technology shocks when preferences are non-homothetic and subject to shocks? We generalize Domar aggregation, which is the basis for constructing economic aggregates, to answer this question. 2/N

Arindrajit Dube @arindube

A few methodological points about our paper on UI which is out today in AEJ-Policy. Potentially relevant for those interested in DiD. [Almost feels like a clickbait these days to say it ...] 1/

Ethan Kaplan @KaplanEthan

Out today: a small positive, statistically insignificant (statistical zero) impact during the Great Recession of increasing UI duration from a median of 26 weeks to up to 99 weeks: https://t.co/F9KyEAqQy1.

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky

THIS PAPER IS SO COOL! They digitized millions of Wikipedia person-entries to create a "history of notable people." They show trends in the migration, gender ratio, industry background, geography, life expectancy, etc, of "notable people."

ideas.repec.orgA Brief History of Human Time: Exploring a database of ’notable peopleThis paper describes a database of 1,243,776 notable people and 7,184,575 locations (Geolinks) associated with them throughout human history (3000BCE-2015AD). We first describe in details the various

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky

So the notable people in America 1750-1890 were apparently *overwhelmingly* politicians. They were displaced over time *primarily* by celebrities and athletes. And that's the history of civics in America folks!

Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers

Things I didn't know: The share of the population identifying as left handed varies with economic development. (And there's a whole paper about it: ftp.iza.org/dp14237.pdf)

More: life insurance; experiment with FB job applicants; voluntary disclosure theory

Public goods

Michal Feldman @MichalFeldman9

👫 Auction Theory for Kids 👫 A new booklet for curious children Joint work with my daughter, Adva Feldman. Thank you Adva for the beautiful illustrations! A pdf version: mfeldman.sites.tau.ac.il/kids

Interesting discussions

Maxim Ananyev @maximananyev

My attempt at this joke. Econ papers

^“Types of X paper”, the meme format of the week. More (non-comprehensive): development; macro; trade; applied metrics; economic history; economic sociology; history of economics; health econ; management; marketing; Argentinian econ; market design; applied micro

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp

What are some striking economic statistics that you think everyone should know? I'll start with five facts that have informed my research (with sources):

Stephen Holt @SteveBHolt

A convo last night noted that, anecdotally, low-income people often take entire days for routine appointments that high-income folks usually schedule for a long lunch. I got curious about the income gap in time spent waiting for things, so I looked it up in the ATUS. 1/n

^“You should write this up into a short paper” folks it’s 2021 just cite the tweet

Beatrice Cherrier @Undercoverhist

1/ In the wake of the NYT article on Robinson, I got emails asking how to feminize history of econ reads & teaching. I didn’t find any online reference list on the history of ♀ economists, so here’s a half-baked one:

Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi

For new APs / postdocs in economics: Probably you’re about to say yes to too many referee requests. Declining is easier when you have a rule. This is the finite automaton that implements my rule.

Maia 🏳️‍⚧️ @EGirlMonetarism

The debate over development aid, explained someunpleasant.substack.com/p/the-end-of-a…

^not to be confused with the last one of these

Ben Golub @ben_golub

I've been playing around with a virtual talk format that's different from traditional slides, which deals with my biggest complaint about slides: lack of persistence of information. Almost always, I want to see "setup" again during the first result/example, but it's gone. 1/

Ben Golub @ben_golub

PS/ I think there is a LOT of denial about how unsuccessful the traditional econ slide format is at getting information across. Speakers rely on way more memory than there is.