Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 11, 2020
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 11, 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.
Happy Nobel Prize’s day eve!
Paper summaries
My coauthors @abehrer, @JoshuaSGoodman & I are excited to share our new paper, published today in Nature Human Behavior (@NatureHumBehav)
“Learning is Inhibited by Heat Exposure, Both Internationally and Within the United States.”
Many thanks for sharing this, @sinanaral and @rodrikdani.
Paper here bengolub.net/papers/naivele…, and tl;dr version here bengolub.net/papers/naivele…
and an even shorter version below.
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Dani Rodrik @rodrikdani
^clear summary and seems potentially very relevant to current trends
This was great fun to write with superb coauthors (incl. @Ahu_Yildirmaz). We study the patterns of nominal wage adjustments using administrative payroll data from @ADP in order to shed light on questions principally surrounding wage rigidity. Thread 👇
AEA Journals @AEAjournals
Cool paper on the impact of TV ads:
a) They work!
b) Efficacy is higher downballot than in presidential races
c) Little evidence of diminishing returns
d) Good evidence that early ad spending is largely wasted because ad effects fade out
Chris Warshaw @cwarshaw
Hugely important new paper forthcoming at Restat by Yotem Shem-Tov, at Berkeley. In some jurisdictions, if an offense has multiple offenders, and neither can afford a lawyer, they’ll be seemingly or explicitly randomly assigned to either public defender or a private attorney 1/n
1/n Is Schumpeter's creative destruction occuring? Mara Faccio & John McConnell of @PurdueKrannert take a long-view look in new paper. Thread with some highlights nber.org/papers/w27871 #Growth #economy
Accepted in JET: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… (with Jim Albrecht, @xmingcai1 , Susan Vroman). In models where workers apply to one job per period and search is directed (the terms of trade are determined ex ante), the equilibrium is typically socially efficient. But .... 1/6
A (lifelong) dream come true: my co-authors & I wrote a paper with an Oxford comma!
"Common Ownership, Competition, and Top Management Incentives" proposes & tests a mechanism through which common ownership affects firm behavior & product market outcomes.
florianederer.github.io/common_ownersh…
New paper: "Inference with a single treated cluster"
Thread: (1/12)
TLDR A mild restriction on some but not all heterogeneity allows inference in research designs with a finite number of heterogeneous clusters where only a single cluster received treatment. This includes DID.
Large effects of personalized social cues in advertising. What is the effect of showing one or more friends' names who like an ad?
Using a very large field experiment on WeChat, @ShanhHuang et al. find that showing a single friend liking an ad increased CTR by 34%!
Economics profession navel-gazing
Current fire chat with AERe editor Esther Duflo:
“The limitation is not the page number. I could publish 20 papers in an issue if I had them, and we've gone from 4 to 10 issues a year. The limitation is the referees. You are hard on each other.”
CSWEP @AEACSWEP
^got a lot of attention; see also
As some econ researchers move toward a lab model, norms need to be updated. e.g. coauthor thresholds, author order.
Should we just copy the sciences' model? If you were designing a system from scratch, what would it look like?
🧵
Likely unpopular opinion on #EconTwitter :
Econ PhD programs should require one semester covering the history of economic thought. Some space to exclusively cover ideas💡
Maybe review every Nobel prize? Maybe half a semester with easy readings like "The Worldly Philosophers"?
Was thinking about it some more, and have a question for #econTwitter: what is the most important thing you learned in econ that IS NOT covered in econ 101? I'm genuinely curious hmu 📈
Talk went well and I appreciate all the suggestions people gave. Here's a link to my slides if people are interested (we're in the middle of revising our draft and should have a new draft posted soon!): dropbox.com/s/wg3y7bjhs1zm…
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp
#EconTwitter, for fun: What’s the most hilariously destructive comment you ever got at a #seminar? I think for me it’s “not everything is wrong with your paper.” 😂
Job market
Let's do this!
Women on the econ job market in AY 2020-21, in no particular order:
\begin{very long thread}
I don't know how to help JMCs with all this *waves arms crazily* around, but if it's useful, here are my non-JMP Job Market Materials: bit.ly/3d2UhVk
I had lots of feedback on my JMP but felt in the dark about all the other "stuff" I had to include in my apps.
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