Johannes Matzat

Lots of talk on X today about rethinking the results produced by close elections RDDs.

So, I thought I'd drop a few recent articles about issues that arise in this space so that folks can have them all in one place. 1/N

Big fan of Paper Picnic 🧺
Every Friday night, it pulls new articles from over 60 political science & economics journals.
If you sign up to the mailing list, you receive a weekly email with a list of all new papers, sorted by journal.

Excellent work, @moritzmarbach.bsky.social!

paper-picnic.com

Very happy to share our paper on the “Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S.” with J. Brown, E. Cantoni, @ryanenos.bsky.social & E. Sartre! 👇👇👇
Quick thread on what we do and find (1/10)

Fascinating new @nberpubs.bsky.social working paper from @edankaplan.bsky.social, Cody Tuttle and Jörg Spenkuch that shows long-run effects of busing to desegregate schools in KY in the '70s:
• ⬆️ Alignment with the Democratic Party
• ⬆️ Support for redistributive programs
• ⬇️ Belief in a "just world"

We're looking for research assistants! Whether you enjoy diving into data or handling organisational tasks, consider applying. Both skills are highly valued!

What is economic growth? And why is it so important? The goods and services that we all need are not just there; they need to be produced. Growth means that their quality and quantity increase.

This may be a good start..

LinkedOut? A Field Experiment on Discrimination in Job Network Formation* Abstract. We assess the impact of discrimination on Black individuals’ job networks across the United States using a two-stage field experiment with 400+ f

#QJE Feb 2025, #6, “LinkedOut? A Field Experiment on Discrimination in Job Network Formation,” by Evsyukova (@yuliaevsyukova.bsky.social), Rusche (@felixrusche.bsky.social), and Mill (@econmill.bsky.social): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Here are the first five sets of slides:

01 Introduction: psantanna.com/DiD/01_Intro...

02 Classical 2x2 setup: psantanna.com/DiD/02_two_b...

03 Clustering issues: psantanna.com/DiD/03_Clust...

04 Functional form: psantanna.com/DiD/04_Funct...

05 Covariates: psantanna.com/DiD/05_Covar...

How do unions and collective bargaining work around the world? And how do they affect the wage structure?

A new paper with Suresh Naidu and Benjamin Schoefer
@schoefer.bsky.social out NBER WP today and prepared for the Handbook of Labor Economics.

Thread below. 👇

This is a remarkable paper. Substantively, it convincingly argues that what looks like weak state capacity is often *captured* capacity. Methodologically, it’s a triumph of mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

On the flip side, broadly applicable findings are often so abstract that they become useless for concrete actors (e.g., NGOs, local governments..)

Results do not replicate [in different environments] and accumulate into a coherent theory because the simple statistical model did not fit the complex causal process.

External validity - not only an issue in econ ...

Here are the more "meta" reflections that I wish to share on this joint work with @jschneebacher.bsky.social
and Christina Palmou. The paper title is quite plain, but I wish to highlight the direction of travel and ultimately, the foundational questions that this work raises around...

To collect income taxes, almost all countries require employers to withhold monthly tax prepayments which are then fully credited against the final income tax liabilities of their employees. Despite being a fundamental component of income taxation systems worldwide, the impact of these withholding taxes on labor supply is poorly understood. We investigate their importance in the context of married couples in Germany where the withholding tax liability can be redistributed between spouses. We exploit a reform that reduced the withholding tax for some married women more than for others, while inducing no differences in income taxes. Using administrative data for the full population of German taxpayers, we estimate an elasticity of labor income with respect to the withholding tax eight years after the reform of 0.14. Additional evidence from a self-conducted survey suggests imperfect understanding of the tax system and limited pooling of resources within the household as the main mechanisms. As the majority of couples shift parts of the withholding tax liability from the husband to the wife, our results suggest that the increased withholding tax liability of married women contributes to their low labor supply. This highlights the need for governments to be aware of the distortion of labor supply incentives when the design of withholding taxes does not match actual income tax incentives.

Hello #EconSky!

📢Excited to share my #JMP 📢

It provides a missing piece to understand how people react to income taxation.

Tldr: By changing tax pre-payments governments can - with almost no costs - increase perceived work incentives of secondary earners and reduce the gender gap.

Thread below👇🧵

A very interesting new working paper by the greats Ashesh Rambachan, Rahul Singh, and @vivianodavide.bsky.social: arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10959

It seems that this is another area where the empirical common practice was "too fast,'' and econometrics is catching up!

Cool and empirically relevant stuff!

Going to give this website a try - with a new profile picture! Definitely feels like an econ bubble, but I guess that’s the point.

Expect a thread on my newest work, Malthusian Migrations (with @romainwacziarg.bsky.social), soon! 🚨

www.guillaumeblanc.com/files/theme/...

Please add me! That would be amazing :)

Economics Conferences (Compiled by Anne M. Burton and Barton Willage)

Quick econ tip: here's a list of over 100 economics conferences: docs.google.com/spreadsheets.... Curated by @anne-m-burton.bsky.social and @bartonwillage.com.

Quick Stata tip: I've written a book that compiles 97 of my Stata tips.

You can download "Quick Stata Tips" and the companion .do file for free at toddrjones.com/quickstatati...

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson We've recently updated our website to make signing in easier and more secure

A propos of nothing: “Who goes Nazi?”

https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

Observant essay on American high society 1941.

GitHub - chaisemartinPackages/twowayfeweights: || Stata | R || Estimates the weights attached to the... || Stata | R || Estimates the weights attached to the two-way fixed effects regressions studied in de Chaisemartin & D'Haultfoeuille (2020a), as well as summary measures of these regression...

We have just released important updates for the twowayfeweights (@cdechaisemartin.bsky.social) package.

Improvements:
1) Run time reduced to a few seconds even with very large data.
2) New look for the output.

Supported languages: Stata, R. Available also on the SSC.

Hey Stata users, please check out the Stata Gallery run by @asjadnaqvi.bsky.social . Lots of great tutorials on data viz, making maps, working with do files, and more! Highly recommend! 👍

medium.com/the-stata-ga...

A Local Projections Approach to Difference-in-Differences Event Studies Founded 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, an...

Public Service Announcement

STATA package for Local Projections Diff-in-Diff (LP-DiD) now available

LP-DiD is a convenient, general and flexible regression-based framework for DiD (www.nber.org/papers/w31184)

Type: ssc install lpdid

by @alexanderbusch.bsky.social & me

cc @arindube.bsky.social

Econometrics Thread (#EconSky)

Today, I will talk very briefly about a few recent methodological papers that I think are super useful to applied researchers. Basically, below, you will find some new tools that may help you to answer relevant empirical questions.

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Millions of archived VOC documents now searchable online, including slavery records From Wednesday, five million scanned documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) will be digitally searchable at the click of a button thanks to a text recognition project by the...

Five million documents from the Dutch East India Company will be searchable starting on Wednesday, with an improved version of the database expected next year #archives
nltimes.nl/2023/10/08/m...

Very useful

Hi #econsky! I am Johannes. I am a PostDoc at U Lucerne & Hebrew U.

Here to spread your novel data and thoughts on political econ, migration, development, applied econometrics. :)