Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 8, 2022 [1/3]

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.

This is part one of three.

Paper summary threads

Guillaume Blanc @gguillaumeblanc

Using online genealogies to document novel stylized facts on migrations in an out of urban centers and fertility during the transition from stagnation to growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe 🧵 My latest paper 🔗 bit.ly/online_genealo… #EconTwitter

Guillaume Blanc @gguillaumeblanc

➡️ Stylized fact 2: the decline in fertility first took hold in France, in the mid-eighteenth century and more than a hundred years earlier than in any other country. (already known but only anecdotal evidence)

Yuzuru Kumon @YuzuruKumon

I use rural servant contracts from Japan, 1610-1870, to measure wages and append them with medieval wage estimates. Wages per day were extremely low at 2-3 barebones baskets! A divergence between Japan and England had emerged by at least the medieval times. 2/5

Yuzuru Kumon @YuzuruKumon

Another difference is that the Japanese worked much longer - around 325 days a year from at least the 17th century! This was much longer than in Western Europe and long preceded the European "Industrious Revolution". Yet there was no Industrial Revolution. 4/5

joe francis @joefrancis505

Sound the <New Regional GDP Estimates for the United States in 1840 and 1860> klaxon! They're still a work in progress, but here's a thread🧵 on what I've found so far. 1/

Dr. Isabel Z. Martínez @IZMartinez86

Happy to announce that my last PhD thesis paper is now published in the @JUrbanEcon 🥳 Full paper *freely* available here until June 03, 2022 authors.elsevier.com/a/1evaBLPdAttW… Did top earners move to the Swiss canton of Obwalden after it introduced a *regressive* income tax? Summary 🧵

Lucas Goodman 🏳️‍🌈 @goodmanl

New working paper alert! "Automatic Tax Filing: Simulating a Pre-Populated Form 1040." Joint with Andy Whitten (@rawecon), Katie Lim, Bruce Sacerdote. nber.org/papers/w30008. Short thread follows. (All opinions in paper + thread are ours and not those of our employers.)

Ralph De Haas @ralphdehaas

We use a lab-in-the-field experiment with >300 Turkish loan officers. We show that even when officers do not discriminate against female entrepreneurs in obvious ways, they pile on additional requirements (guarantors) that make loans de facto unattainable for many women (2/N)

Joshua Gans @joshgans

I have two new papers out @nberpubs today looking at AI adoption in competitive and monopoly markets respectively. They are two papers because the end up making distinct points despite having the same underlying framework. 1/3

Giovanni Bonfanti @GBonfantiEcon

Can econ actually explain *any* macro fact across the 🌍? With predicting the distant past, we're not that bad: structural change (from agriculture to services) is mostly due to societies getting richer (wonkish: income effect) 1/13

Public goods

https://twitter.com/Econ_jobs_

^new account / newsletter (no affiliation!) rebroadcasting job moves in econ/finance academia. Thoughts?

—

Alex Albright @AllbriteAllday

📢Updated online public goods📢 [1] Collection of ~links~ to data/R/economics profession resources: albrightalex.com/public-goods cc: #RStats & #EconTwitter people

Phoebe W. Ishak @PhoebeIshak

Super exited that Jobs of the World Project by @iza_bonn is finally out! It compiles labor market outcomes across countries and time using micro data from IPUMS & DHS. Indispensable source for low and middle income countries 👉 jwd.iza.org

jwd.iza.orgG²LM|LIC - Jobs of the World Project

Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers

Free econ posters for high school teachers!!! aeaweb.org/hsposters

Tatyana Deryugina 🇺🇦 @TDeryugina

PhD students on #EconTwitter: do you have a complete paper draft? Would you like free feedback on the introduction & abstract from a more experienced economist? Sign up here:

docs.google.comFree abstract/introduction feedback wait listPlease note that only PhD students WITH COMPLETE PAPER DRAFTS are eligible for this list. The wait list is NOT first-come first-serve; the order in which free feedback is given will be determined by need and availability of appropriate economist to provide feedback. You do not have to provide a p…

Interesting discussions

Wei Yang Tham @wytham88

Let's talk about tables. There are too many of them in presentations. The strength of tables in a manuscript is their weakness in slides. Tables compress a ton of info efficiently, but it takes more time to extract the info. Think of having to unzip a compressed file (1/n)

Wei Yang Tham @wytham88

My rule of thumb is that if you're comparing more than three numbers, you should use a graph instead. SEs/CIs count (maybe as half a number, but not zero)! It's not perfect, but here's an example of an alternative format I quite like (3/n)

Chris Blattman @cblatts

Happy mother's day! And the natural question for the occasion: Would there be less war in the world if moms were in charge? The research says 'probably yes', but perhaps not for the reasons you think. A 🧵, starting with the Peloponnesian War and a play called Lysistrata.