Best of #econtwitter - Week of November 8, 2020
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.
Paper summaries
1/7 De Nardi, Fella, Knoef, Paz-Pardo, Van Ooijen (2020), forthcoming: JPubE. What drives labor market income risk? We use Dutch and U.S. data to decompose earnings changes between hours and wages and to study how the family and the government help to insure against them.
THREAD. In my latest working paper, @dwschanz and I find that EITC expansions increase employment. On average, employment increased by about 5 percentage points by the fifth year following an EITC expansion.
#cash #nutrition - 23% decline in #stunting in #Indonesia - huge effect https://t.co/kZ8obFnWW4
Ugo Gentilini @Ugentilini
1) Big Monday for all the automation heads out there. New Stats Can study shows confirms what @dk_munro @vviet93 and myself have been saying for a while: firms automate to improve productivity, which *increases* firm-level employment
Insanely large (10pp!) effects on voter turnout in South Africa from telling people their party is polling just ahead in this @kateorkin RCT: dropbox.com/s/0gp6ora3bxao…
New @nberpubs working paper w/ wonderful coauthors @felbarrera @paul_gertler @hpatrinos
Low-cost, group-based information intervention increases parental involvement in schools, changes parenting behavior at home, and reduces disciplinary action in schools.
A thread 👇
1/N
🎯How can we learn to target interventions when we care about outcomes that are only observed after a delay?🗓️
This comes up in settings as varied as clinical trials (5 yr all-cause mortality) and marketing (customer lifetime value).
Our new paper:
arxiv.org/abs/2010.15835
On the off chance you're wanting a break from US politics...
Here's a new version of "Creating Confusion" (just accepted by JET) on the politics of disinformation, joint with Yang Lu. 1/
chrisedmond.net/Edmond%20Lu%20…
[@jayrosen_nyu getting cited in economics journals now]
Job market papers
Very cool paper by @NinaRoussille. It's not surprising to me that there is a gender ask gap in salaries, but it's very surprising that the gap can be completely eliminated by pre-filling the answer box AND that women do not face penalty for asking the same wage as men.
Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac
*Check out this JMP* by @Ebehi_Iyoha of @VanderbiltEcon: "Estimating Productivity in the Presence of Spillovers:
Firm-level Evidence from the US Production Network."
Headline: new approach for estimating production spillovers in networks + empirical estimates. @ben_golub
Want to learn how to incorporate present bias into your macro model to better match empirical evidence on consumption behavior?
Check out "Present Bias in Consumption-Saving Models: A Tractable Continuous-Time Approach" by Harvard PhD student Peter Maxted scholar.harvard.edu/files/maxted/f…
Ben Moll @ben_moll
Good discussion threads
Why do we vote? Our reasons often reflect a mixture of ethical considerations and social motivations, and we've seen this on #ThisEconomistVotedBecause.
If you're looking for a newsbreak, here is a tiny subset of papers to read.
(Writing this is my newsbreak).
1/15
I found @EpiEllie's article thought-provoking but I fundamentally disagree with her main thesis: I think we urgently need more work by economists analyzing questions that are traditionally analyzed by epidemiologists.
Ellie Murray @EpiEllie
In a world with @NateSilver538 and @Nate_Cohn doing the analytical low-hanging fruit, it's hard to imagine that trying to eek out a slightly lower mean-squared error is a good use of time for people with sufficient capital and quantitative skills.
^interesting thread on prediction markets and other social institutions for information aggregation
