Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 16, 2022 [4/4]

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 four of four.

Paper summaries

Sam Norris @sambnorris

What’s going on? This fig compares mortality for the incarcerated relative to the non-incarcerated before/after release. During incarceration, mortality risk is half that of the non-incarcerated (baseline 600 per 100k). But after release, mortality is the same.

Sam Norris @sambnorris

Why is this happening? Three main things. The largest part of the effect comes from murders, which are almost eliminated in prison. When not incarcerated, this population has 16x higher risk of being murdered than the general population, so this matters a lot.

^whole thread is 🤯

Jason Furman @jasonfurman

Preparing for class and just learned that the "pink tax" seems to be a myth. Identical (or nearly identical) goods marketed to women are, if anything, slightly cheaper on average than when marketed to men--contrary to this graphic and many more like it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

^“And it looks like there may be an actual pink tax--which is US tariffs which seem to disproportionately fall on women (largely because of tariffs on apparel”

^additional discussion:

Jason Furman @jasonfurman

I reached out to @tuchmanna about it and she gave me permission to share her response: "our prior was that the pink tax existed and we wanted to understand why women were willing to pay more... After seeing the results... we decided to do a re-write to the version you see now."

and this preview —

Kayleigh Barnes @kayleighnbarnes

In my upcoming JMP (with @jakobbrounstein), we find that women pay 4% higher prices than men do for similar goods (same product market) across the grocery consumption basket. We find that this is driven by women sorting into goods with higher marginal costs rather than markups.

Jason Furman @jasonfurman

Preparing for class and just learned that the "pink tax" seems to be a myth. Identical (or nearly identical) goods marketed to women are, if anything, slightly cheaper on average than when marketed to men--contrary to this graphic and many more like it. https://t.co/gtxojAujUd https://t.co/T1U8vZfSQH

^file under: ‘P=MC’ is a pretty good model

Paul Novosad @paulnovosad

The changing relative status of various occupations from 1800–1980. The graph shows the mean education rank of people with that occupation compared with others in their cohort. It's interesting, look closely! Source: Song et al. 2019. pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.107…

Asjad Naqvi @AsjadNaqvi

The ultimate clustering standard errors paper just dropped: When Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering? by some big names in the field :)

academic.oup.comWhen Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering?*Abstract. Clustered standard errors, with clusters defined by factors such as geography, are widespread in empirical research in economics and many other discip

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

Proximity in the office is particularly important to get code feedback for engineers — especially female and younger engineers. In person and digital feedback are complements: by @NataliaHEmanuel @emma_k_h Amanda Pallais drive.google.com/file/d/1vA7Xuz…

^see also: data on “third peak”; Arpit Gupta substack this week, Matt Clancy substack this week

dylan matthews @dylanmatt

Researcher was skeptical of the famous study showing that universal daycare in Quebec led to much greater aggression and antisocial behavior in boys. Did full-scale replication, concluded the results were if anything too small convivium.ca/articles/dayca…

^related: replication of Jamaica home visit study

More: soda tax; impact of climate change on risk preferences; unions; immigration; intergenerational correlations of social assistance; deforestation; colonoscopies; taxing multinationals

Interesting discussions

Sandro Sharashenidze 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @neocentrist

Whenever you see someone call economics the "dismal science", make sure to explain that it refers to how economists opposed slavery.