Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 2, 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
Does temperature affect judge decisions? These two articles are using literally the same strategy and the same dataset, but finding 3x difference in magnitudes.
All the data and code are public, it would be a great class/twitter project to dig into this.
Links in thread.
^“Adversarial collaboration would be a much better approach here”
1/ Our paper on the effects of limiting campaign spending in elections is out in the AEJ Applied @AEAjournals It is based on a reform implemented in Brazil for the 2016 election following years of increasing campaign spending aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Brazil is the land of inequality. But how much of a child’s future depends on her parents' income? A LOT
In a new WP, @DiogoBrittoBr, @alex_fonseca__, @paolopinotti78, @Brenorsampaio, and I use admin and tax data to uncover social mobility in 🇧🇷
shorturl.at/bEP56
1/8
New paper in the JEEA: Do stricter data-sharing policies reduce p-hacking & publication bias in economics? Apparently yes. Introducing data-sharing policies has led to 31% decrease in t-values; especially excess statistical signifiance. academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-a…
We just posted a substantially expanded version of our paper "On the Nuisance of Control Variables in Regression Analysis" (w/ @beyers_louw): arxiv.org/abs/2005.10314
Main message: Don't bother reporting the coefficients of controls, because they are likely to be biased anyway.
♀️ + 🚴🏾♀️ = 💪🏾
Govt of Bihar's 🚴🏾♀️ prog [cash + conditions for enrollment] for girl's secondary school had spillover effects!
--> 6 yrs post-prog older ♀️ in HHs have ⬆️ decision-making, political participation + more
@AndersKjelsrud Mitra & Moene
/🧵
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/72…
We use an RDD strategy and focus on the case of El Salvador and its guerrilla group (FMLN) to show that areas governed by this actor have lower education, wealth, and luminosity, 15-20 years after this actor relinquished control.
Check out our new paper on the impacts of wildfire smoke exposure on test scores, expertly led by @jeffliwen. Smoke exposure during school year lowers test scores at end of year, w/ monetized costs in billions annually.
Graphs below from our paper. Left shows grant rate for all judges. Incredible how much variation there is across judges and courts. Right removes court x time fixed effects, still massive variation. Suggests that w/ asylum cases "your judge is your destiny" (Thompson, 2019) [2/8]
Public goods
We just found out about the #Data Liberation Project and can’t stop talking about it! It’s a project made possible by @jsvine which aims to identify, obtain, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest. data-liberation-project.org #datajournalism
Interesting discussions
What is "economic intuition" (in the context of academic economics)? How does one build up economic intuition? Is it something you're mostly born with, or is it something that's trainable to some extent? If trainable, how does one train it?
^a lot of good discussion in the replies
It seems standard to order an empirical paper as theory/model ---> empirical results ("here's a theory & now we test it"), but I think it often makes more sense to do empirical results ---> theory/model ("here are some results & let me offer a way to interpret it").
^and conversely some beautiful theory papers get buried underneath garbage empirical analyses
Is there a part 3?