Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 26, 2021 [2/2]

Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.

This is part two of two, this week. Part one is here.

Paper summary threads

Eva Vivalt @evavivalt

An interesting slide from NBER econ of AI conference. @akorinek et al. surveyed attendees. Seems like economists interested in AI are more pessimistic about human-level machine intelligence (HLMI) than AI researchers, but not by much - maybe 20-40 years’ difference, depending.

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

Super cool NBER WP on College Value Add by Jack Mountjoy & Brent Hickman, a modern updating of Dale & Krueger: - Colleges vary a lot in value-add - But it's unrelated to SAT scores - Seems related to BA Completion, STEM degree nber.org/papers/w29276 ht @gorby_gorbachev

Katherine Stapleton @KathAStapleton

Great to have the opportunity for @alexlcopestake to present our work on AI in India @nberpubs 2021 Econ of AI Conference &💯agree with @BetseyStevenson that this conf is one of the most fun - huge kudos to @professor_ajay @avicgoldfarb @joshgans & @ce_tucker 👏 A 🧵on our WP:

Pinar Yildirim Honold @Prof_Yildirim

How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by networked information technologies? Our paper "Information Networks and Collective Action: Evidence from the Women’s Temperance Crusade," forthcoming in AER, answers these questions. A thread:

AEA Journals @AEAjournals

Forthcoming in the AER: "Information Networks and Collective Action: Evidence from the Women’s Temperance Crusade" by Camilo García-Jimeno, Angel Iglesias, and Pinar Yildirim. https://t.co/2raQiEIxJl

Julian Reif @JulianReif

2. The burden fell more on the young than death rates alone suggest. Adults <65 lost more life-years in aggregate than adults 65+. While adults ages 85+ had a death rate 40 times higher than adults ages 35-44, they lost only 2.8 times as many QALYs per capita.

Lionel Page @page_eco

Fascinating experiment in top scientific conference shows the large part of randomness in peer review: Submitted papers went to 2 review committees. 👉50% of acceptance decisions were different! 👇 Correlation between the 2 review scores was only 0.55. arxiv.org/abs/2109.09774

Chris Conlon @conlon_chris

So Julie Mortimer and I are finally finished(!) with our paper on Efficiency and Foreclosure Effects of Vertical Rebates for @JPolEcon. This paper is about understanding HOW firms use exclusionary contracts to exclude superior rival products bit.ly/3hZFoGX 1/

Thiemo Fetzer @fetzert

Excited to have this working paper out: "De-escalation technology: the impact of body-worn cameras on citizen-police interactions". We started working *five* years ago. Its hardly the first RCT on #bodyworncameras, but here is a short 🧵on what makes it special... 1/n

Esteban Moro @estebanmoro

Thanks for your votes. You got it right! In our study we found that (on average) Science Museums are the places with more income diversity. Much more than other museums and also than workplaces and supermarkets. Less diverse places are Pawn Shops and Check Cashing

Esteban Moro @estebanmoro

In our last study https://t.co/npw9J1ltUp, we found places in the US have very different income diversity. Although there is a large spatial variability, we found some patterns. Which places (on average) do you think are more diverse in terms of income of people there?

Lionel Page @page_eco

Why is overconfidence so widespread, given that it often fosters costly conflits where everybody loses out? One possibility is that overconfidence brings *relative* benefits: you get more than others. 👇Our paper now published @ Psychological Science. A 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

More: free savings accounts; World Bank Doing Business report report (sic); Bayesian analysis of factor zoo; simulating global automation; medical innovation & disparities; effects of fiscal rules;

Paper criticisms

Special pop-up section this week: some critiques of papers which have been featured more-or-less recently in this newsletter

Alexey Guzey @alexeyguzey

New essay: Issues with Bloom et al's "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation guzey.com/economics/bloo… Key takeaways:

Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman

As I poined out to Prof. Ang, the paper doesn't distinguish civilian calls for service from officer CFS — it just lumps them together. But if civilian calls were flat, and officers are behind the drop, then there can't be a legitimacy effect.

Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman

@ProfDesmondAng Hi, Prof. Desmond. How are you differentiating police CFS from civilians from police CFS from officers? The two are often lumped together in call data, and you don't really cover this in the data section.

Also: useful Reddit (/r/badeconomics) critique of the RDD paper on anti-racist pedagogy, thread

Interesting discussions

Paul Novosad @paulnovosad

What are the most important econ concepts where many non-economists have wrong intuitions with policy consequences? Some ideas: - long run economic growth is really great - pricing carbon correctly would be nice - building houses lowers house prices What else?

Caitlin Knowles Myers @Caitlin_K_Myers

What do economists have to say about abortion? A whole lot, it turns out. Some of the highlights from our brief to @Scotus in the case that will likely decide the fate of #RoeVWade. #EconTwitter @ReproRights 1/

Chris Blattman @cblatts

My understanding is that they are in between Social Science editors and so it is a tough time to submit. But to me it speaks to limits with the model of professional editors.

John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1

PSA to social scientists considering submitting to Science right now: It appears that a hodgepodge of editors are handling social science manuscripts at the moment. We just had a political science paper desk rejected by a zoologist. "Not a novel enough contribution."

Bruno Ferman @bruno_ferman

💡Identification in synthetic controls💡 After including SC in my applied metrics class, I had the impression that it was hard for students to get the intuition on the identification assumptions from the main references. Thought about writing a short thread about it. 1/10

Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi

Rising soccer star: quits pro soccer to study economics. Economists: debate whether soccer player’s choice confirms to rational economic model.

Colin Camerer @CFCamerer

@arindube 1/ This is a great debate example about economic intuition. I do not think that “well, it is his reasonable preference” should *necessarily* be the default conclusion instead of “is there an implicit judgment this 18-year old is making that could be wrong? What’s the mistake?”

^also