Best of #econtwitter - Week of November 6, 2022 [1/2]
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
This is part one of two.
Paper summaries
🎃👻 Halloween treat 👻🎃
Glad to finally post a (quite long) 🧵on a new paper on reward credit cards, joint with @sumit_prof, @andrefjsilva & Carlo Wix #EconTwitter
Fascinating new paper in JDE by @mqpellicer @VimalRanchhod analyzing the effect of racial classification in South Africa on economic outcomes, exploiting a discontinuity induced by policy: cohorts born after 1951 less likely to be classified as white
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
^check out those discontinuities 👀
Differences in life expectancy by state of residence and of birth are spatially clustered; regional life expectancy inequality is higher based on life expectancies by state of birth, from @jasonmfletcher, Schwarz, Engelman, Johnson, Hakes, and Palloni nber.org/papers/w30572
^request for thread
Our paper w/ @CMD_Hart & DNF on (+) and ⬆️ effects of voucher school choice scale up/maturity in FL is now in AEJ:EP: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…. Larger effects for disadv. students but (+) for all. Both local and district-wide competition matters! Hollowing out effect in sch. qual.
It’s finally out – my article on how & why the Home Owners Loan Corporation made its #redlining maps: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…. Here’s an illustrated thread summarizing the major findings … (1/19)
@SAGE_Publishing @HOLCRedlining @SACRPH @UrbanHistoryA
DSGE models
^provoked a lot of discussion, seems like there may have been an important coding error
An update to my previous thread on the McDonald-Shalizi paper. After looking at their codes I believe the findings in this paper are a result of coding errors. Not to do with the optim. procedure, but with the definition of model and data. Explanation in the following tweets.
As promised, I wrote about the recent paper by Macdonald and Shalizi (MS) which claims that there are many issues with the estimation of macro models. In short, I think their critiques are significantly overstated. 1/n
Marco Del Negro speculates on the coding error as well. Other discussion:
@ShengwuLi The issues with identification/inference in DSGEs are well known, when using unconditional observational data (as in that blog). But you wouldn't say that a demand-supply model is not useful because one cannot identify elasticities from data on prices and quantities alone.
^more on this point; also:
This paper gets a lot of attention on Twitter. I will leave aside other issues with it. But swapping series is NOT a check whether the structural parameters are in fact structural, as the paper claims and goes as far as to rewrite SW model with swapped series 1/n
Cosma Shalizi @cshalizi
Interesting discussions
Computers revolutionized the way academics do data analysis and calculations.
Today, computers can help the whole WRITING process. No, I don't mean typesetting.
Here are 3 new AI tools that I'm using everyday 🧵
Third, a parting thought:
There's good economics in which households & firms reduce demand and substitute as prices rise, demand curves are downward sloping, and modern capitalist economies adapt.
If someone tells you otherwise, it's bad economics.
Simple as that.
