Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 18, 2022 [3/3]

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 three of three.

Paper summaries

Sinan Aral @sinanaral

We worked with @LinkedIn to analyze a set of experiments on their People You May Know (PYMK) algorithm, which recommends new ties to @LinkedIn members. Members were randomly assigned to different variants of the algorithm that gave them more weak tie or strong tie recommendations

Sinan Aral @sinanaral

We then waited, for 5 years, as experimental subjects professional networks and job mobility outcomes evolved... To estimate whether making more weak tie connections (or strong tie connections) increased job mobility over time.

^another thread from coauthor: “moderately weak ties produced the greatest prospects of them finding new positions”

Lukas Freund @_LukasFreund_

👉 Individuals who excelled in the International Mathematical Olympiads born in poorer countries are systematically less likely to engage in knowledge production. "Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster" by @RuchirAgarwal_& Gaule (2020, AER:I).

Daryl Fairweather 🌥 @FairweatherPhD

A new research study from @mattkahn1966 @RDMetcalfe @S_Olascoaga and myself found that @Redfin users who viewed homes with severe and/or extreme flood risk prior to a Redfin experiment proceeded to bid on homes with 54% less risk after gaining access to risk data. 2/11

Juan Mateos Garcia @JMateosGarcia

"Superhuman science" This paper explores the potential impact of AI on scientific fields where innovation is about searching big spaces of possibility (e.g. new drugs, materials, architectures to build better AI systems...). brookings.edu/wp-content/upl… #econai ht @mattsclancy

Dominique Roche @dom_roche

Not quite the results we were expecting (or hoping for!) but they are what they are... Work lead by @iliasberberi 👏 (see 🧵⬇️) OA version: osf.io/preprints/meta… Paper: nature.com/articles/s4155…

Jūra Liaukonytė @JuraWho

1/ Do you remember the Spotify boycott in January and headlines like this in the media? Did you wonder what happened to the actual Spotify revenues and subscriber numbers?👇 cc @tuchmanna @zhu_xinrong #EconTwitter #MarketingTwitter

^nothing, nothing happened

Jessica Leight @leightjessica

Excited to share a new working paper #EconTwitter: what are the short- and long-term effects of cash for work in Tunisia? Joint w/Eric Mvukiyehe (formerly at WB DIME, now Duke)

Kevin Bryan @Afinetheorem

It is very hard for startups to hire - even Google had to hire their landlord (by luck, the great Susan Wojcicki!). Hypothesis: it's hard b/c no one knows which startup is actually great. @AmirSariri , Mitch Hoffman & I looked into this in a new draft:

More: lemons and non-lemon real estate; childcare program eval; time-varying disaster risk; impact of drought on employment

Interesting discussions

John Horton 🇺🇦 @johnjhorton

Idea: If you publish a paper in a journal, the journal should let you add public comments about that article in a very low-cost way, so future readers can contextualize that work. It would extend the useful life of old papers.

Robert Farley @drfarls

We have spent decades trying our best to pretend that research excellence is somehow tied to the capacity to teach undergraduates. It has never made even a lick of sense; indeed, the opposite is more likely to be true.

Bret Devereaux @BretDevereaux

So I was watching a recorded lecture on a topic - I'm not looking to rubbish anyone so don't ask for details - by someone teaching at an Ivy League and I was just really struck by how teaching skill and quality is entirely untethered from school cost/reputation.

Robert Farley @drfarls

If you work for a major state university in the social sciences or humanities you are being paid to teach. And yet hiring and promotion decisions are almost completely indifferent to teaching. And of course *everyone* knows this.

Dmitry Grozoubinski @DmitryOpines

@mattyglesias @drfarls It's honestly insane, and at the extreme ends means dragging genius researchers away from vital work so they can completely fail at teaching, while driving fantastic educators to nervous breakdowns by gatekeeping their careers behind "publish or perish" mandates.

^John Cochrane says this would inevitably cause teaching to be outdated, but isn’t the obvious solution to have frontier researchers *teaching frontier courses* i.e. PhD courses — which is typically the desire anyway — and have specialized lecturers teaching the intro/intermediate courses, for mass consumption?

Senior PowerPoint Engineer @ryxcommar

In Dec 2020 I created an animation of the FWL theorem. (Link to original post at end of thread) I think it would be more clear why the x1 coefficient sign flips going from univariate (y ~ x2) to multivariate (y ~ x1 + x2) with residualization if the points were different colors.

John Whitehead @johnwhitehead81

Twitter has come down heavy on the notion that you get better feedback at a seminar if you haven't written the paper yet. But, what about distributing a paper for comments? Do we do that anymore? I thought I would do it for the seminar paper that I just finished for 1/2

John Whitehead @johnwhitehead81

I think I've learned that seminar culture has changed. No one wants to write the paper before they present the paper in an external seminar. I'm a little surprised that no one chimed in and said, yes, we'd like to see the paper that an invited speaker is presenting. https://t.co/DkSgkcGI65

John List @Econ_4_Everyone

When I first presented at U. Chicago in 2002 they all had read the paper (on discrimination) and that was our starting point for the 1.5 hours. Now the ending point (goal) is trying to get people to understand what you are thinking about writing! H/T @johnwhitehead81 thread

Florian Ederer @florianederer

Economics Journals as Tennis Tournaments 🧵(for an extremely niche audience) Quarterly Journal of Economics = Wimbledon The oldest and most influential event, but also clubby, snobby, and elitist. To win it you must train on a very particular surface/ZIP code.