Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 4, 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
🚨 Should conferences be in-person or virtual or...? 🚨
Many factors to consider, especially: how effective is each modality for learning?
New paper with @park_soya @ProfNeilT @karger shows that academics learn a LOT at in-person conferences!
arxiv.org/abs/2209.01175
1/n
Using schedules of 1960 users at 20 C.S. conferences over 6 years and taking citing a presented paper as proxy for learning, we find that papers with scheduling conflicts are cited a LOT less
5/n
Our paper on what PhD students expect about the academic job market - and how providing information can impact their beliefs - is now up at the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Thanks to @k_langin for covering it today in @ScienceCareers! 1/6
Katie Langin @k_langin
🚨 Reducing status bias in peer review 🚨
Double-anonymous peer review helps reduce bias, but most journals don't use it because it's laborious to enforce, change is hard, etc. Can we get bias-reduction simply by *encouraging* anonymization?
Yes!
(1/n)
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Very few people read the actual papers in tweets*
*Unless they hate the conclusion, in which case, I find people will skim the paper to find one thing they think is wrong (often a result of misunderstanding the methods) and & declare the whole paper dumb. asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
New WP w/ @ReimersImke about the digital challenge to public libraries. A little background: libraries are huge information sources, accounting for the majority of US book consumption. 1/n
More: HCI for eliciting beliefs; standards; RCV; college admissions screening; PE and health care; SCC; school fees
Interesting discussions
An R&R resubmission where there are 100 pages of responses to the referees, but nothing substantive in the paper is changed.
What a waste of time for everyone involved.
Sadly, this is my modal experience when refereeing R&Rs.
The fault is not with the authors, it's with the rules of the game where this is equilibrium behavior.
Here's a simpler, better system:
1. An R&R is a commitment to publish the paper
2. The referees get to write a "limitations" section that comes after the introduction
It's incentive-compatible — if you disregard the referee comments, readers get to understand the referees' perspective and judge for themselves.
If referees are excessively mean, readers can also judge.
^pair with: the new Aletheia journal linked in part 1 this week
Contrast with the limitations section of current econ articles:
"There are no limitations (see Appendix pages 56–112)."
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."
It's the first day of class for my Econ 101 students, and I'm wondering: If you've been in their shoes, what advice do you wish you had been given at a similar point in time?
Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers