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Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 9, 2021

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Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 9, 2021

An Economist
May 10, 2021
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 9, 2021

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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

Twitter avatar for @leightjessica
Jessica Leight @leightjessica
Integrates amazing data on scientific funding, scientific papers (all types, including econ), and paper citations in government docs, patents and media. Good news: papers that are “hits” in the academy (top 1% of citations) are much more likely to be cited in other domains. 2/4
4:28 PM ∙ May 5, 2021

^“massive data gathering exercise to piece together who funds scientific research and who uses it for what”

Twitter avatar for @albrgr
Alexander Berger @albrgr
Super interesting paper finding that the US extending patent protection to plants in 1985 led to a surge in new crop development and increased (especially large) farm profits and land values economics.mit.edu/files/18687
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8:00 PM ∙ May 3, 2021
140Likes36Retweets
Twitter avatar for @KRoyMyers
Kyle Myers @KRoyMyers
A key finding in our new version: Because spillovers are so large, the firms that receive R&D grants only capture about 25-50% of the net patent value their R&D stimulates
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12:43 PM ∙ May 3, 2021
Twitter avatar for @emollick
Ethan Mollick @emollick
Very cool paper analyzed Doctor Who episodes to find a way of increasing creativity: regularly shaking up a team by adding new members with new connections. Switching in team members upped creative quality; going against manager’s desire for stable teams. journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.54…
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9:28 PM ∙ May 8, 2021
313Likes93Retweets
Twitter avatar for @ProfDavidDeming
David Deming @ProfDavidDeming
The growing importance of decision-making is widespread. I stitch together two datasets of job vacancies over time and plot the share of job ads that include word stems like “decision making”, weighting it to make it representative. 4/x
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12:32 PM ∙ May 3, 2021
3Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @bfjo
Ben Jones @bfjo
Here is a new JEP piece on the rise of research teams, with messages for economics. The short story is: #1 Research teams have big benefits. Coauthored papers have increasing impact advantages, and solo-authored work is increasingly rare – in economics and other fields.
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2:17 PM ∙ May 4, 2021
345Likes101Retweets
Twitter avatar for @bfjo
Ben Jones @bfjo
#2 But teamwork obscures credit, which is central to the reward system of science. Junior economists now produce little if any solo-authored work before tenure, leaving letter writers and promotion committees to decide tenure on increasingly opaque grounds.
Different lines are different subgroups of economists who first publish in the noted year.  Subgroups are based on career total citations; the red line is the upper 1% of cited economists in each cohort and the green line is the upper 50%.
2:17 PM ∙ May 4, 2021
32Likes3Retweets
Twitter avatar for @maximananyev
Maxim Ananyev @maximananyev
Fantastic new paper on religion, science, and economic growth. Also, measuring religiosity with names is super-creative.
Twitter avatar for @JeanetBentzen
Jeanet Sinding Bentzen @JeanetBentzen
New paper: Societies in which religion played a stronger role in our past were slower to enjoy modern economic growth, compared to societies less centered around religion. New measure of historic religiosity. Comments welcome! With @larsharhoff https://t.co/TbuEUlFHRA 1/n https://t.co/aL9J6XYbJt
7:11 PM ∙ May 3, 2021
7Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @Jose_MariaRD
Jose Maria Barrero @Jose_MariaRD
Before the pandemic, WFH accounted for ~5% of working days (2017-2018 American Time Use Survey) During the pandemic it has risen to ~50% in our data, ~10x the pre-pandemic number After the pandemic, we project it will be ~20%, ~4x the pre-pandemic number 4/n
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3:39 PM ∙ May 3, 2021
Twitter avatar for @emollick
Ethan Mollick @emollick
A big study on COVID remote work using objective data on 10k IT professionals finds pretty bad outcomes for all. The charts tell the story: productivity fell 20%, but output was stable because people worked 30% more hours. Also employees got less coaching. bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl…
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4:10 PM ∙ May 8, 2021
218Likes101Retweets

^Matt Clancy comments

Twitter avatar for @dprbyrne
David Byrne @dprbyrne
Aaron documents how, via bid-rigging, a cartel supported extremely high insulin prices in Mexican, and how after changes in policy to limit the cartel’s effectiveness, insulin prices collapse by more than 75%.
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6:59 AM ∙ May 3, 2021
Twitter avatar for @MayaREden
Maya Eden @MayaREden
How should we discount the consumption of future generations? In this new WP, I show that Pareto implies: (1+SDR)=(1+r)*mu where: SDR = social discount rate r = interest rate mu = the relative distributional weights of two people born one year apart
cepr.orgCentre for Economic Policy Research
2:44 PM ∙ May 6, 2021
34Likes7Retweets
Twitter avatar for @ralucamursu
Raluca Ursu @ralucamursu
In the fashion category, the presence of ad-initiated searches is very prominent – 15% of all clicks and 53% of all website arrivals are a result of clicks on ads. Consumers click ads early in the search process, and spend less time on the website in ad-initiated searches…4/8
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3:55 PM ∙ May 7, 2021
4Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @eeshani_kandpal
Eeshani Kandpal @eeshani_kandpal
Many national safety nets include cash transfers to poor households. We show that giving transfers to some, *but not all* households can ⬆️ key food prices in remote & poor areas. AND these price increases can ⬆️ child malnutrition in households that *don’t* receive the cash 2/5
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1:33 PM ∙ May 8, 2021
22Likes5Retweets
Twitter avatar for @arpitrage
Arpit Gupta @arpitrage
This graph remains my favorite part of the Chetty et al. 2011 Project STAR Paper (didn't make it to the final draft) academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…
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6:21 PM ∙ May 9, 2021
112Likes19Retweets

More: lead pipes null result; present bias parameter meta-analysis; there was no housing bubble

Public goods

Twitter avatar for @paulgp
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp
Put links to each of the full set of lectures here for my applied methods PhD class here: github.com/paulgp/applied…
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12:29 AM ∙ May 7, 2021
3,222Likes576Retweets
Twitter avatar for @nickchk
Nick HK @nickchk
causaldata is complete in R, Stata, and Python! Or at least it now has all data sets from both The Effect by me and Causal Inference: The Mixtape by @causalinf (except for judge_fe, it's too big). Install instructions: github.com/NickCH-K/causa…
Twitter avatar for @nickchk
Nick HK @nickchk
I have a new package for R, Stata, and Python: causaldata. Data sets to run example code from causal inference books. Currently it just has mine, The Effect, but planning to add at least The Mixtape before uploading to CRAN/ssc/PyPI. Install instructions: https://t.co/NHshAFJQJ6 https://t.co/xVmrsrOv9q
8:17 PM ∙ May 9, 2021
340Likes55Retweets

Interesting discussions

Twitter avatar for @ProfNoto
Matt Notowidigdo @ProfNoto
On a more serious note, a short 🧵 about desk rejections I desk reject around 40-50% of the papers I handle at AEJ-Policy (i.e., reject a paper w/o consulting referees), and I always try to describe the thinking that led to my decision It's usually 1 of 3 reasons...
Twitter avatar for @ProfNoto
Matt Notowidigdo @ProfNoto
What I expected: The referees and I find your paper "unbelievable, super cool, outrageous, and amazing \ phenomenal, fantastic, so incredible, woo-hoo" https://t.co/xb64p1LuAF What I got instead: Desk rejection
2:13 PM ∙ May 9, 2021
136Likes26Retweets
Twitter avatar for @ethanbdm
Ethan BdM @ethanbdm
There is nothing like writing down a simple model and discovering how incomplete and/or wrong many of your intuitions were, even after a lot of hard thought. It is one of the very best parts of the job, the experience of which is very hard to communicate to modeling skeptics.
4:55 AM ∙ May 6, 2021
186Likes14Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jamesbrandecon
Jimbo Brand @jamesbrandecon
Niche post: Doing a lit review, it's amazing how confused the literature seemed to be about identification in BLP (demand side) given how quickly it became the workhorse. As recently as this year (!) I've had smart people claim that some parameters of BLP aren't identified 1/
5:06 PM ∙ May 6, 2021
104Likes15Retweets
Twitter avatar for @davidfromterra
David Schönholzer @davidfromterra
Hey #EconTwitter! Thinking about including modern diff-in-diff in a 1st year econ metrics class? Here are some ideas from a class co-taught with @kbburchardi and @arash_nekoei. Key elements: 1) MATRIX VISUALIZATION 2) UNIFIED NOTATION 🧵⬇️ Most of what I covered in one slide:
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12:48 PM ∙ May 7, 2021
677Likes154Retweets
Twitter avatar for @JoshuaSGoodman
Joshua Goodman @JoshuaSGoodman
OK, here's my version of "Types of Economics of Education Papers", based on 39 minutes of work.
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6:30 PM ∙ May 7, 2021
500Likes109Retweets

^last week’s edition has links to about 20 of these memes for different fields

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Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 9, 2021

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