Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 9, 2022 [1/3]

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 three.

Paper summaries

Fabian Eckert @fpeckert

We are super excited to put this out into the world with @Conor_A_Walsh and @sharatganapati. It’s the result of a long effort to think about the origins of the urban-biased growth that has been reshaping our politics and society for the last 40 years. A little thread 🧵

NBER @nberpubs

IT adoption at large business services firms can account for most of the urban-biased growth of the US economy since 1980, from @fpeckert, @sharatganapati, and Conor Walsh https://t.co/oyVW5E4ByI https://t.co/kBNsAcUwS6

Fabian Eckert @fpeckert

3/ Turns out, the Business Services sector alone account for all urban-biased growth. Business Services: Information, Finance, Management and Professional Services, Admin Services, and Real Estate. Outside these industries wage growth was very balanced across space.

Adrien Matray @AdrienMatray

Delighted to announce that our paper with the incredible @BauNatalie on how foreign capital reduces misallocation in India is officially forthcoming at ECMA 🥳🥳. A quick 🧵

Matteo Paradisi @MatteoParadisi

I am so happy that our paper on Career Spillovers inside firms is out on @RevEconStudies! It has been quite a journey since we started in 2015! Hopefully, this is just a first step of a broader agenda that we are working on. Summary of the paper below.

The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStudies

``Administrative data from Italy show that lengthening the careers of older workers blocks promotions and limits wage growth of younger coworkers, but only in nongrowing firms.'' From @BianchiEcon, Bovini, Li, @MatteoParadisi and @convexify: https://t.co/V6HKEbDmht https://t.co/ez24Xpz9Og

Stefanie Stantcheva @S_Stantcheva

Are you interested in running your own surveys to answer important questions? I often get asked to share best practices & advice. So I decided to write a comprehensive "how to" guide covering the complete survey process from beginning to end: scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantche…

Kevin Bryan @Afinetheorem

Really wild paper from DeepMind: deepmind.com/blog/discoveri… ; consider multiplying two 3x3 matrices. Using inner products like you surely learned, you need to multiply 27 numbers (plus some addition, but * is much harder computationally than +, so ignore that). But 27 isn't best!

deepmind.comDiscovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensorIn our paper, published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaTensor, the first artificial intelligence (AI) system for discovering novel, efficient, and provably correct algorithms for fundamental tasks such as matrix multiplication. This sheds light on a 50-year-old open question in mathematics about…

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp

New NBER working paper with @jwswallace and @jasonlschwartz on Covid mortality: “Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic” nber.org/papers/w30512 Ungated on arxiv here: arxiv.org/abs/2209.10751 Thread 🧵1/

^also: school districts’ choices of learning modality in 2020

Stefano DellaVigna @sdellavi

Thread. We build on our work on gender diffs in selection of Econometric Society Fellows. People asked us: is econ special? Eg, compare to a social sci w/ more females, psych, and to a science w/ underepresentstion of females like econ, math. How to compare apple to apple? (1/6)

NBER @nberpubs

Currently, women are 3 to 15 times more likely to be selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar publication and citation records, from David Card, @sdellavi, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri https://t.co/LsIgnursha https://t.co/007Af6IKD8

Interesting discussions

Paul Novosad @paulnovosad

What are the best movies about development economics?

David Evans @DaveEvansPhD

@leecrawfurd @paulnovosad I started this collection a while ago, but I haven't updated it in a while. "Movies for teaching development," sorted by topic docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

Jason Furman @jasonfurman

Terrific @aden_barton column on grade inflation & grade compression: "Because most students receive consistently high scores, the cost of experimenting with hard classes or new subjects substantially rises." thecrimson.com/article/2022/1…

Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht

What should I read to learn price theory? That’s the most common question people ask me in my DMs/email. Here are the (mostly free) books that I recommend to people to start learning price theory 🧵