Favorites October 14th 2021

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

We need to have variant-specific boosters every year like for flu vaccines.

Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter

Must-read thread on the likeliest Covid end-game. Bottom line: an ongoing state w/ approx 40-100k deaths/yr in US, about double the toll of flu. A tragic new societal burden, yet probably not bad enough to lead to the super-high vax/booster & mask rates that might drive it down. https://t.co/Gq0gtVoVsb

Here's the linked thread with more details, we're going to need to get better at making effective boosters manufactured and distributed each year.

Graph Crimes @GraphCrimes

There's a lot going on here

Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers

Everything is adorable about watching Guido Imbens' kids interview him after winning the Nobel. Utterly delightful to see Guido's love for his kids shine through in every moment, even as they grill him as hard as you might imagine @Susan_Athey's kids would

youtu.beStanford economist and Nobel laureate Guido Imbens discusses his work with his kidsGuido Imbens explains his pioneering work in econometrics and statistics, which made it possible for social scientists to draw causal inferences from observa...

His eldest described an idea for an experiment that now I want to know the results of!

Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 @hamandcheese

New study using Norwegian administrative data finds earnings elasticities from tax incentives are 70% lower than structural models predict because of information frictions. Relevant to the debate over the CTC's / EITC's phase-in. dropbox.com/s/msqaqfp0amzn…

Andreas R. Kostol @AndreasKostol

Comparing people receiving the letter to those not receiving it allows us to estimate the earnings elasticity /w without information. We find that the earrings elasticity doubled from 0.06 to 0.15 due to the information treatment. 5/8

Shorter: making your policy complicated makes it less effective because people don't understand it.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Is store theft increasing because Amazon makes it easy to fence stolen goods?

Sam D'Amico @sdamico

@Noahpinion I didn’t realize how easy it was to sell stuff on Amazon — think that may have supplanted the higher friction old way of sending any electronics stolen from cars abroad via a shipping container and selling at electronics markets. https://t.co/5CCCRc7vdF

Yglesias has a whole article about how Amazon doesn't negatively impact labor markets it enters. But the frictionless marketplace does have downsides, they're just, unexpected.

NBER @nberpubs

Night lights data reveal a significant negative impact of the US-China tariff war that was highly skewed across locations within China, from Davin Chor and Bingjing Li nber.org/papers/w29349

When they say "night lights" they mean that literally. What an interesting way of investigating economic outcomes.

October 2020