Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 23, 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
A 🧵 about an important and amazing paper by @RoeeLevyZ, my @MITSloan colleague @alexeymakarin and Luca Braghieri on:
The *Causal* Link between Social Media Use and Mental Health... Now forthcoming in AER.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Two stories in our @nberpubs paper. (1) 2% birth rate decline in 2020 largely driven by foreign-born women not traveling to US; (2) US-born women having a baby boomlet in 2021. @CCPRatUCLA @PrincetonEcon @PopResearchCtrs
Tom Vogl @tom_vogl
New paper on welfare measurement with non-homothetic preferences. Our paper is inspired by recent excellent work of @XJaravel and @DanialLashkari . We have a different angle on the problem we are excited to share. I think the intuition is pretty neat!
^file (again) under: empirically measuring inflation is always even more complicated than you think
🚨At least ⅔ ‼️ of the world’s youth do not reach even basic skill levels
That’s the bottom line of our new paper:
“Global Universal Basic Skills:
Current Deficits and Implications for World Development”
w/ @sarages & @EricHanushek
Out @ NBER: nber.org/papers/w30566
A🧵1/10
⚠️New paper at Nature Human Behaviour⚠️
Can posed smiles make people feel happier?
In a global adversarial collaboration, we found overwhelming support for this controversial hypothesis.
But we couldnt resolve one thing: concerns about a popular pen-in-mouth smiling task.
🧵
By exploiting quasi-experimental variation in the timing of matches and public opinion surveys between 2007 and 2019, I find that social cohesion tends to *improve* in the days after a match. (2/5)
What was the impact of expanding computerised machine tools on employment, productivity and skills? A short 🧵 on the recent @nberpubs working paper by @leah_boustan, Jiwon Choi and @dclingi. 1/
nber.org/papers/w30400
We find very little impact of party positions or voter opinions on the rise of the populist right. Instead, we find that most of the increase is driven by priorities.
To understand why we then dig deeper into each of these components 4/9
We found it, for example, in English language song lyrics, at least from the 60s... 2/4
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
^also news headlines; also literary fiction
Public goods
Let's rig the game then #EconTwitter . In this repository I collected fonts and instructions to allow students to makeWord outputs which are quasi-undistinguishable from their LaTeX counterparts. Just install the fonts and open the Word template: github.com/SemManna/LaTeX…
Matthew G Nagler @MatthewGNagler
What are the best advice documents for undergraduates interested in economics PhDs? Ones detailing the different types of programs, and the more recent developments like predocs.
raguide.github.io re-upping our guide to econ predocs from 2020 for this year's application season, made with @tsaocaro @ColyElhai @mathematikai 1/n
