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

Sinan Aral @sinanaral

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…

papers.ssrn.comSocial Media and Mental HealthThe diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to spe

Martha Bailey @martha_j_bailey

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

COVID-era 📉 in births attributable to foreign mothers. Super interesting stuff from @martha_j_bailey, Currie, and Schwandt. https://t.co/LZExyRfgQY

David Baqaee @DBaqaee

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

Ludger Woessmann @Woessmann

🚨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

^“Based on the micro data of international & regional achievement tests, we develop a new method to map achievement onto a common scale.”

Nicholas Coles, PhD @coles_nicholas_

⚠️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. 🧵

Juan Pedro Ronconi @jpronconi

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)

Jakob Schneebacher @j_schneebacher

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

nber.orgAutomation After the Assembly Line: Computerized Machine Tools, Employment and Productivity in the United StatesFounded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Oren Danieli @DanieliOren

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

Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto

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

Sem Manna @NothingbutManna

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

So much in academic economics is a signaling game. LaTeX is a signal of a certain insider group status - having invested in the group’s values and the group’s rituals https://t.co/zSZXOcu33p

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

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.

quan le 🍚🥢 @qlquanle

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

raguide.github.ioEcon RA GuideA community guide for research assistants in economics