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 🧵

1:04 AM · Apr 27, 2021
43 Reposts · 170 Likes

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

12:31 PM · Apr 26, 2021

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).

4:00 PM · Apr 30, 2021
10 Reposts · 36 Likes

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…

4:13 PM · Apr 28, 2021
37 Reposts · 222 Likes

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) 👇👇👇

2:24 PM · Apr 30, 2021
18 Reposts · 79 Likes

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
11:43 PM · Apr 29, 2021
2 Reposts · 19 Likes

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
7:10 PM · Apr 30, 2021
7 Likes

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.
7:40 PM · Apr 30, 2021
13 Reposts · 103 Likes

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.org
A Brief History of Human Time: Exploring a database of ’notable people

5:50 PM · Apr 27, 2021
17 Reposts · 86 Likes

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!

6:41 PM · Apr 27, 2021
4 Reposts · 21 Likes

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)

12:08 AM · Apr 30, 2021
30 Reposts · 181 Likes
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

2:33 PM · Apr 29, 2021
39 Reposts · 200 Likes
Interesting discussions

Maxim Ananyev@maximananyev
My attempt at this joke. Econ papers

5:07 AM · Apr 30, 2021
2.1K Reposts · 10.8K Likes
^“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):
7:19 PM · Apr 26, 2021
130 Reposts · 609 Likes

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
10:17 PM · Apr 26, 2021
9.69K Reposts · 51.4K Likes
^“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:




8:54 PM · Apr 29, 2021
130 Reposts · 343 Likes

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.

4:02 PM · Apr 30, 2021
44 Reposts · 327 Likes

Maia 🏳️⚧️@EGirlMonetarism
The debate over development aid, explained
someunpleasant.substack.com/p/the-end-of-a…
12:55 AM · Apr 27, 2021
576 Reposts · 2.37K Likes
^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/

8:49 PM · Apr 28, 2021
18 Reposts · 284 Likes

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.
9:02 PM · Apr 28, 2021
4 Reposts · 92 Likes

