Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 24, 2021
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
Jacob Moscona's BREAD paper is fascinating.
On why agricultural research knowledge doesn't get transferred to poorer countries.
Will try to keep up in a thread. Livestream:
^more from BREAD: adaptation to temperature/drought changes in Brazil
Thrilled to have this paper on Geography and Agricultural Productivity with Tasso Adamopoulos forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies. Low-quality land endowment is not the main source of low agricultural productivity in poor countries. A thread. 1/11
The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStud
We build a proxy for different aspects of job quality for each US occupation using representative survey data
We estimate effect of parent income on likelihood of choosing each US occupation (controlling for education, etc)
The two are highly correlated across occupations 2/n
A 30 tweet thread discussing my new Mercatus working paper on the Princeton School of macro, which revolutionized monetary theory, providing a framework for our understanding of stabilization policy in the ultra-low interest rate 21st century.
More: publication bias in prejudice reduction experiments; UST valuations; why cement is expensive in Africa; low interest rates and market structure; comparing different estimates of top incomes; time-varying prices and electricity consumption; social capital and monetary policy shocks; classifying network mechanisms; MeToo triple diff; agriculture misallocation and land reform; reallocation and partner violence
Public goods
I'm excited to announce the release of the zip code Social Connectedness Index!
It captures the rate of Facebook friendships between zip codes.
This data set allows for much more granular uses than before. A 🧵 of examples:
New working paper alert (with @patesta and @LiyangZhou6)! Introducing new area- AND population-based crosswalks for harmonizing boundaries of U.S. counties (i) to congressional districts and (ii) across U.S. Census years. Paper: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom… (1/7)
I get some rando Stata questions in my DMs, and unless I have an answer right at hand, tell folks to sign up for Asjad’s good Discord👇
Check it out if you’re looking for friendly advice in a chat-style forum
Asjad Naqvi @AsjadNaqvi
Interesting discussions
I think people (esp. older academics) don’t appreciate how valuable it is as an academic to have an independent distribution channel for your work. Nearly 20k followers means anything he writes will get some attention. That’s huge.
Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn
A major difference between econ and epi is that econ is more authoritarian while epi is more democratic. This has positive and negative consequences @EpiEllie
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD @EpiEllie
happy to see Econometrica being very explicit about their expectations. these are great guidelines that hopefully will improve the review process.
Garance Genicot @GGenicot
Here is a 🧵 of terms related to money/funding in academia that no one explained to me until I was applying for faculty jobs (or after I'd started), that I pretended to understand until then, and that would’ve been very helpful to learn earlier than I did.
1/a whole bunch
^also: AP salaries by department for one university
Really cool resource here — income returns information by major and school; downloadable.
Here, for example, are estimated earnings for some "tech" majors vs. liberal arts at age 35. cc @AnthonyLeeZhang
Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana
On reading the ‘classics’: in my own work, I have often come up with a seemingly new idea, only to discover that it is an old idea that resisted formalization. 🧵
^a lot of discussion on this topic this week, most of it bad, stay safe out there — comment, comment
You may have heard about this year's Economics Nobel Prize winners - David Card, Josh Angrist (@metrics52) & Guido Imbens.
Their publicly available work has helped us solve tough problems @Twitter, and we're excited to celebrate by sharing how their findings have inspired us.
Just thinking about Princeton. One thing people maybe don’t appreciate is that while the three winners are now at MIT, Berkeley and Stanford, the award quite frankly is an award to Princeton and it’s post 1970s empirical labor group.
^ICYMI: special edition of the newsletter on the Nobel last week