Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 4, 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

David Schönholzer @davidfromterra

Road traffic accidents are a leading cause of death in low- and middle-income countries, and more than half may involve informal public transit. What can be done to mitigate this huge loss of life? Erin Kelley, Greg Lane, and I ran some experiments in Kenya to see what works.

Joachim Voth @joachim_voth

Did slavery facilitate Europe's early rise to riches? Steve Redding @ReddingEcon, Stephan Heblich, and I focus on the single biggest slave-trading nation, Britain, and revisit the famous "Williams hypothesis". We combine theory and geographically disaggregated data to show

Sylvain Catherine @sc_cath

🧪New Working Paper🧵 with @MehranE6790, @DSraer, @dthesmar 1⃣ We propose a simple inexpensive approach to better understand structural models. We apply our method to illustrate identification, robustness to moment selection and model misspecification. dropbox.com/s/rolu4h2zn20f…

Josh Angrist @metrics52

Just-identified IV is little biased unless endogeneity is egregious. And bias is halved by screening on sign(first-stage t-stat). Just in: M. Kolesar and I show that among pretests of the form t>c, setting c=0 minimizes bias, while c>0 can increase bias

nber.orgOne Instrument to Rule Them All: The Bias and Coverage of Just-ID IVFounded 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.

Daniel Millimet 🇺🇦 @dlmillimet

Happy to see @jondr44's paper finally out. It's an important reminder that, in any context, if you condition your choice of estimator based on the result of a prior spec test, you end up with a new estimator: θ_3=I(fail test)*θ_1+I(pass test)*θ_2 with different properties! Poof

Martin Halla @HallaMartin

There is by now a voluminous literature on #populism in #economics. Now surveyed by @sguriev & @EliasPapaioann2 in "The Political Economy of Populism", forthcoming in @AEAjournals (Journal of Economic Literature).

Adrien Matray @AdrienMatray

Finally out in the AER 🥳🥳!! ⬆️ dividend taxes leads to ⬆️ investment and reduces capital misallocation as firms ⬇️ dividends and reinvest 30% of the unpaid dividends, particularly when they have high ex-ante marginal revenue returns to capital and investment opportunities. A🧵

Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman

Excited for the release of this NBER paper today, with some good news: estimates of US wealth inequality have largely converged There remains disagreement about the very top 0.01%, which we examine in this paper: gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SZ2022NB… Are the superrich poorer than we think?

Owen Zidar @omzidar

Re NBERWP 30396 gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SZ2022NB…, we have written a lot of replies and assembled a lot of evidence on top wealth in America. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/qje/qj… Appendix: ericzwick.com/wealth/wealth_… Reply to SZ21: ericzwick.com/wealth/reply_t… Reply to SZ20:

^more back-and-forth

Interesting discussions

Neil Malhotra @namalhotra

I am excited to announce the launch of Aletheia, a new platform for communicating peer-evaluated research. My collaborator on this project is @JakeJares. aletheia-platform.netlify.app 1/14

aletheia-platform.netlify.appAletheiaAletheia, a research dissemination platform dedicated to transparency and efficiency.

^all submissions accepted; all peer reviewed (?); all reviews public

Davis Kedrosky @dkedrosky

The top 5 papers (and some books) assigned in economics classes since 1990, thanks to @opensyllabus (ht @emollick). AJR win by a pretty big margin, followed by Mankiw-Romer-Weil, Coase, and "The Tragedy of the Commons."

Normative economics

Itai Sher @itaisher

Here’s how I view the debate of the last couple of days: some economists want to think that there is a class of things that they can *advocate* that are somehow scientific, and so a different kind of advocacy than being a political activist.

Itai Sher @itaisher

But I don’t see why one kind of advocacy is different than the other. Saying you should do something is never just science. I think that economists gain a lot of clout by the impression that their advice is just science (as do others, e.g., in public health)

^this is contra this (among others):

Wojtek Kopczuk 🇵🇱🇺🇦 @wwwojtekk

There were three types of comments on yesterday’s thread on optimal policy and politics, I’ll collect and summarize what I think about them

Also:

Itai Sher @itaisher

4 arguments for (iii), more graduate training in normative matters in econ 1. If you are going to make normative appeals implicitly, it is better to explicitly study what you are talking about. 2. Whatever you are supposed to just accept without critical reflection will be weak

Paolo G. Piacquadio @pgpiacquadio

@MayaREden @BrianCAlbrecht @itaisher @kristoberg Thanks @MayaREden for bringing up our paper. My view: (i) there is an enormous richness of normative criteria accommodating various ethical views; (ii) more research is needed to explore this richness; (iii) normative economics should be taught (more/better) at grad school.

^editorial injection: philosophers view economists discussing these issues, in the same way that we view nutritional scientists discussing causality. Very smart folks are simply unaware of fundamental issues 😬

Maya Eden @MayaREden

A few more details here: consider a policy that has unknown normatively-relevant characteristics x, where x is a large vector. The optimal social decision rule is to adopt the policy iff F(x)>0. (1/3)

Maya Eden @MayaREden

@ash_craig @itaisher @soashworth 100%. I’ll add that the decision of what to measure is not neutral from a normative perspective, in a “Bayesian-persuasion”esque sort of way (it focuses the public discussion on some aspects of the issue but not others)

^more: Price Theory substack post; more; more; more; …