Best of #econtwitter - Week of November 22, 2020 (1/2)
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
There was a very high quantity of good content this week, so we’ll have a special two-part edition this week.
Paper summaries
Does biology drive child penalties? Check out this AER:Insights paper with data from Denmark. Figure 1 is striking:
AEA Journals @AEAjournals
[1/N] 📕✏️New paper! How well do people know their social position relative to others in society? How does their social position shape their views on fairness? Does their income history shape views? With @okoctk & @KBHvidberg Paper here: scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantche…
Summary thread ⬇️
🚨New paper!🚨
Do market prices incorporate public information properly?
Setting: betting markets on soccer matches
Natural experiment: knife-edge situations when a shot hits a post
👉Prices incorporate surprisingly quickly & efficiently public info 1/
nyuad.nyu.edu/content/dam/ny…
Extraordinary estimates of the impact of Chinese development finance, forthcoming in AEJ Policy. So large I struggle to believe them. Is Chinese dev finance very different from others, or should this move our beliefs about development finance in general?
^interesting discussion in replies
More evidence of roughly log normal cost effectiveness estimates, from climate in this case:
Amanda Glassman @glassmanamanda
New short paper documenting an easy recipe for incorporating machine learning into linear IV to boost instrument strength *essentially for free*: arxiv.org/abs/2011.06158
Joint work with Daniel Chen and @econ_greg
#EconTwitter #CausalTwitter
This new paper in economic history by Tianyi Wang (PhD Pitt; postdoc Copenhagen) is timely and timeless. He uses variation in a racist populist show caused by topological factors to estimate the effect of the show on voteshare, as well as increase pro-Nazi groups. 1/n
Job market papers
Hi #EconTwitter!
I'm a PhD candidate at @VanderbiltEcon specializing in IO, trade and networks.
I'm on the job market this year and would like to tell you about my job market paper: ebehii.github.io/publication/iy…
🚨 JMP thread 🚨
Hi #econjobmarket #EconTwitter, my JMP on occupational licensing can be found here: sites.google.com/view/bobbywchu…
Spiel: (1/N)
Thx @jenniferdoleac! In my JMP, inspired by a 1920 USDA report of a similar title, I create a new dataset of women linked across censuses to show how gender segregation in farming, and the problems caused by it, led to an exodus of women during the 1920-1940 US farm crisis. (1/7)
Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac
Katherine's JMP examines the effect of state influenza vaccination requirements for nursing home workers and residents; she finds that they increase take-up of vacc by 4-6% and reduce Dx of flu-like illness by 11-15%. 2/8
Public goods
By popular request, I've posted the slides from last week's lecture on Shift-Share IV methods here:
dropbox.com/s/m7uy42q7lire…
Thanks again to @arindube for the opportunity to develop these for his course. Questions/comments/other guest lecture opportunities are all very welcome!
Fantastic! Let me add my 1-slide overview on German administrative micro-level price data: https://t.co/etOxcpbonK
Running an experiment on MTurk with 1,000 subjects calls for my first 🧵
I learned a lot during this process and want to share some tips for those who are planning to run a large-scale experiment. (1/n) #ExperimentalEconomics #EconTwitter
Interesting threads/discussions
The switch from stamp duty (housing transaction tax) to land tax is often framed as a no-brainer. But there’s an underdiscussed trade-off that goes to the heart of a key issue in optimal taxation, which itself has been understudied. A wonkish thread. 1/10
This should never happen, what a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
If it got this far in the process, publish it and let the scientific community decide how to interpret it.
Published papers don’t have to be right (most aren’t)— they just have to be worth thinking about.
Wilhelmina van Dijk @WillavanDijk
@causalinf @imbernomics @nberpubs i think the better way to view it is as a big reading group / conference that got started in the 80s by some powerful people and slowly took over the profession -- the starting tastes and preferences in the 80s had a big influence.
^in reference to NBER
If you look at autocorrelated data, pick any random day, and look for a break in linear trend on that day, you will find a statistically significant break a ludicrous amount of the time. In this random AR(1) data with delta = .8, I reject the null at 95% about half the time.
Kim Border was an extraordinarily generous person, an encyclopedic store of knowledge, and an amazing producer of public goods. One of my first economics teachers.
I'll use this thread to share a few favorite examples of his writings. I hope some others do as well.
1/
PJ Healy @pauljhealy