Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 29, 2022
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 summaries
Very interesting work on how economists perceive null results TL;DR.
1) Economists do penalize null effects
2) How to communicate the null matters.
3) Surprisingly, they penalize them even if that null effect is "surprising," inconsistent with bias in favor of surprising results.
Ingar Haaland @Ingar30
@btshapir My rule of thumb when reading papers is to multiply coefs by 1/3 and standard errors by 2.
You know how some people argue that media coverage of mass shootings increases the chances of future mass shootings?
Those people seem to be right.
Evidence: "The Effect of Media Coverage on Mass Shootings"
#SocSciResearch
iza.org/publications/d…
Since models of persuasion are a topic for NYT op-eds, it's time to share a draft: "Bayesian Explanations for Persuasion."
Tenure means writing weird papers with no obvious prospect for publication because you think it might be interesting/useful, right?
osf.io/ygw8e
More constructively, the title evokes Fearon (1995), and proposes a taxonomy of models of persuasion structured in a similar way. Fearon starts with a red herring result about why war should not happen, I start with a result about why persuasion should not be possible.
I find that in beauty contests, if priors on fundamentals are even slightly non-normal, equilibrium action distributions can be far from normal. So...
⚠️Be careful if you care about action distributions⚠️
Today will be the next-to-last time I ever present my paper "Supply Network Formation and Fragility."
Excited to talk at the Virtual Market Design Seminar Series, today at 10am New York/3 pm London/10pm Shanghai.
Please join if interested!
us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regist…
1/
Today marks the start of my first sabbatical and it's also the day I start writing my first book, tentatively titled The Poverty of Cash.
The book is a critique of using cash transfers as a tool for fighting poverty. Here's a quick thread that lays out the basic argument ...
Employers shifted from standardized pay, fixed by tenure or job title-based, to more flexible pay setting, like subjective merit assessments.
This change was fast: mid-1970s, 3/4ths of blue collar jobs had standardized pay; only half by 1991.
I'm very pleased that my paper "Getting Dynamic Implementation to Work" w/ Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun & Tom Wilkening is forthcoming @JPolEcon. Our goal is to harness the power of dynamic implementation mechanisms but ensure they're robust. A thread. Buckle up.1/18
Our paper “Too big to prevail. The paradox of power in coalition formation” is now forthcoming at Games and Economic Behavior!
It motivated the thread below on why Russia’s neighbours want to join Western alliances (NATO, EU). The paper also gives several other intuitions. A 🧵
Lionel Page @page_eco
More: Organizational Capital, Corporate Leadership, and Firm Dynamics; German wealth inequality; Germany labor market overview; qualitative interviews → NLP; teacher correlations; police killings data accuracy
Public goods
Together with E. Patacchini and V. Leone Sciabolazza, we are putting online all the data on social connections in the U.S. Congress that we have collected years for our research.
congressindata.com
A small thread
Interesting discussions
The world would be a better place if the default publishing format for scientific papers were HTML rather than PDF
@carly_urban Great thread. This is actually a more traditional career path in the history of economics, up to the 1980s or so, mixing research&teaching, with practice, public service, policy, etc. Obsession with numbers of articles is more recent. Congratulations on a life well lived too.
In our interview, @michaelshermer asked a question that I keep thinking back to: if norms are so great, why do we need government?
Our discussion is at 38:20, but here are some thoughts, now that the question has been marinating for a while.🧵
Michael Shermer @michaelshermer
