Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 25, 2022 [2/2]
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 two of two.
Paper summaries
1/ New paper! nature.com/articles/s4158… with @_szhang @aaronclauset @DanLarremore.
🎓 We analyzed all 295K tenure-track faculty at US PhD-granting universities in 10,612 departments over 10 years to quantify hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention.
🦥 A summary:
^lots and lots in the thread. Data (deidentified…?) seems to be here. For economics, one bit:
Only 6% of economists move to a higher-ranked school than their PhD—the lowest % of all social sciences, third-last among all fields after Classics & Religious Studies(!)
(from the excellent new Wapman et al Nature article on US PhD production)
nature.com/articles/s4158…
Always liked this diagram, from Jones & Sloan's "Staying at the Top: The Ph.D. Origins of Economics Faculty."
Top 10 students get all the top 20 jobs, top 20 students all the top 50 jobs, etc.
Oliver Kim @oliverwkim
^positive not normative, obviously
Is inflation regressive? 🚨 New work 🚨 with @Conor_A_Walsh, @pipeton8 and @EricQian252 explores this question holistically by considering the impact of identified macro shocks on households' well-being, taking into account all parts of the budget constraint. Thread below! 👇
Today I'm presenting work with @ufukakcigit on US inventors at this year's FSRDC conference in KC. We are rolling out new data that will soon be available to approved projects. These data link patent inventors to survey, census, and admin microdata at the Census Bureau.
Is a “soft landing” possible?
In this new working paper with Anton Cheremukhin we contribute to the debate by bringing to the table a new theoretical argument that says that it is not only possible but reasonable in the current context of the labor market: 🧵(1/8)
Long-term real interest rates have broadly been on a declining path since 1300!
Stunning chart from Rogoff, Rossi & Schmelzing
nber.org/papers/w30475 #econtwitter
^🥴
Do higher public debt levels reduce economic growth? My meta-analysis is out in Journal of Economic Perspectives. By analysing 816 estimates, I find
-publication bias in favor of negative growth effects
-no uniform public-debt-to-GDP threshold
🧵with summary and free paper link
^the author misstates, this is actually published in the Journal of Economic Surveys, *not* in JEP (????)
Do e-scooter services affect traffic accidents? We use the rollout of e-scooter services across 93 cities in 6 countries to study that question.
tl;dr;
They increase accidents in the average city. But there's a large group where they don't: cities with good infrastructure.
1/8
Such smart technologies get positively assessed by engineers in the lab and have potential for energy conservation.
We analyze two field experiments to show that smart thermostats have at best a zero impact on energy use, and in some specifications actually increase energy use.
San Francisco implemented a RCT to test the effects of a restorative justice intervention. Restorative justice reduced the probability of rearrest by ~20 percentage points.
Paper by @juliaalissa, @yotamshemtov, S. Raphael:
yotamshemtov.github.io/files/MIR.pdf
More: Sierra Leone program eval; Covid learning loss; teacher pay; export diversification; rice and zinc; Spanish flu racial disparities; MW and ag employment; HK housing market; media coverage & macro
Interesting discussions
I've just updated the Research Tips page on my website, with new advice on 3rd and 4th years of the economics PhD. Hope this is helpful, or at least mildly amusing:
Do speakers who don’t take notes during their seminar presentations have amazing powers of recall or are they missing out on most feedback?
I did policy debate in HS & college: when I'm at the front of a hotel ballroom & someone criticizes my argument, I jot down what they said.
Was reminded today of this excellent list of scientific jargon to avoid, from R Somerville and @ClimateComms long ago but still completely relevant, especially as climate change work has become even more interdisciplinary.
^via @salonium’s great newsletter