David Slichter

This affects maybe 5-10% of econ papers.

Perhaps the field of economics should take that as some kind of warning.

One fun thing about forecasting is having a record of what you find surprising about a paper's results. My biggest surprise about this interesting new paper is that I figured subfield experts would know more than non-experts. But no, apparently they don't.

From Prohibition to Choice: The Impact of Abortion Legalization on Fertility and Child Investments in Nepal In societies with son-preference, the transition from high fertility to low fertility is often accompanied by a skewed sex ratio at birth. How expanding reproductive autonomy in such societies changes fertility and early-life investments in children remains unclear. We study this question in the context of Nepal by evaluating the impact of the 2002 abortion legalization. Using a triple-difference design comparing girls and boys across firstborn-sex families before and after the reform, we find that the abortion legalization substantially reduced son-biased fertility stopping: the gap in the number of children between firstborn-girl and firstborn-boy families fell by nearly three-fifths, while the probability that a girl is missing due to sex-selective abortion rose by 1.8 percentage points. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that roughly 1 in 75 girls is missing from post-reform birth cohorts. On investments, daughters in firstborn-girl families gained about two months of breastfeeding, closing most of the pre-existing deficit. Taken together, the policy response to abortion legalization in a son-preferring society indicates a quantity-quality trade-off: lower cost of achieving desired family size and sex mix can lead to intensified prenatal selection against girls and increased early-life investments in those who are born.

I am excited to be on the #EconSky job market. My #EconJMP on Nepal's 2002 abortion legalization finds weaker son-biased stopping, more prenatal sex selection (~1 in 75 girls missing), and longer breastfeeding for surviving girls, a clear quantity quality tradeoff.

Website: jijeebishabhattarai.com

I am excited to share that I am on the job market. My JMP explores how maternal work hours affect children's cognitive outcomes in India. By exploiting bunching designs, I find that work hours have a positive but small and statistically insignificant effect on children's cognition.

🚀 I’m excited to share that I’m on the #EconSky job market this year! In my #EconJMP, I study how teachers in Finnish upper secondary schools impact students’ socio-emotional skills – and the labor market returns of these effects! (🧵, 1/N)

I grew up in Illinois, where "downstate"=not Chicago, so I find it perplexing when people in New York think there are places outside of metro NYC which are not part of upstate.

I am excited to announce I am on the #EconSky Job Market! In my #EconJMP, I find that weighting a teacher's test-score impacts differently across students increases the predictive power of test-score value-added measures for a teacher's impact on high school graduation.

Website: casetatro.com

Aren't you not disinclined to decline to not provide a reference? (Y/N)

Like, if costs were linear in SE reduction (ok, false) and all we cared about is power (ok, also false), this would be a proof that 80% power cannot possibly by the optimal point to stop. The current norm is "let's stop making hay as soon as the sun starts shining."

If anything, it's a justification to go beyond 80% power. Once you're at that point, there's a higher power payoff per SE reduction than there is at essentially any other power level, so unless the cost per unit SE reduction is skyrocketing, it's almost certainly worth your while to past 80%.

Your firm sells N sandwiches for the market price of $10 each. The n-th sandwich costs $n to make. Profit-maximization: produce until marginal cost is $10. Your framework: stop after the first sandwich, it has the highest benefit/cost ratio ($10/$1).

This sounds like an argument *against* optimality: Why stop at 80% power if, at the margin, you're getting amazing benefits per unit of cost?

An economist reached out and asked where they might publish a review they'd written.

Here's my (certainly incomplete) list of 30+ journals where economists publish reviews. bit.ly/3QfaE6m

(Additions welcome with a specific review example!)

MIT names professorships after its professors, and I find it funny that they *don't* do this. Like, why is the Peter A. Diamond Professor anyone other than Peter A. Diamond? Surely he is the most Peter A. Diamond-ish professor available.

Conceptually, what goes in your school VA? Sulagna and I found that variation in school quality within county/district was ~80% teacher quality, but there are substantial county/district effects which are not explained at all by teacher quality.

Looking forward to reading your paper!

Reasonable people can absolutely update their views about causal questions based on evidence which does not involve obviously as good as random assignment of treatment! Famous examples: effect of smoking on lung cancer, effect of CO2 on global temperature.

This is a factual question and the answer is that there exist sets of assumptions which do not include exogeneity but which identify causal parameters.

But also, if we average across many research questions, some methods will usually perform better than others. This is how I usually interpret the idea of the hierarchy of evidence. This doesn't mean that, say, RCT is universally better than DiD regardless of sample size, context, etc.

Sure, not a strict hierarchy. But the typical distance between the parameter you want and the estimate you get is not the same for all methods.

(2) If so, is the ratio of long-run to test score effects for these policies similar to the implied ratio e.g. in that JPAM paper, in which variation is not necessarily even coming from any state-level policy, let alone the same one? (3) Would the same thing happen if other states tried to copy?

Absolutely, things which increase test scores usually help long-run outcomes. My main uncertainties: (1) Were these trends actually caused by the state ed policies people have in mind?

Test scores, schools, and the geography of economic opportunity Do standardized test scores in a community indicate whether schools there are effective at producing human capital? Counties with high average test sc…

This is a nice article and the story makes sense. But worth remembering that the logical step "this place is doing well in standardized testing, therefore everyone should copy what their school system is doing" involves assumptions which don't always hold:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

AnotherSpaceSavingTipIsThatIfYouCapitalizeTheFirstLetterOfEveryWordYouDon'tNeedSpaces

Darkly funny how a strong emphasis on unbiasedness via the credibility revolution plausibly ended up making the published literature more biased.

Both policies produce winners and losers, so I wouldn't call either one costless. If you mean housing reforms increase the size of the pie, well, cutting taxes reduces DWL. But utility gains from housing reforms are more widely shared across income brackets, because indirect effects are stronger.

I'd define trickle-down as directly helping rich people with the expectation/excuse that this will indirectly help poor people. Helping the poor via vacancy chains is exactly that! But in housing, unlike taxes, the indirect effects are actually large enough for the argument to make sense.

(Though I can't vouch for the accuracy of claims about the psychology literature contained within...)

I always really liked this piece:
www.alfiekohn.org/article/five...

For OLS, this is simpler than Aronow and Samii (2016 AJPS) (or pretending you had an IV equal to treatment residualized on controls) because you don't have to construct residuals and inference is simpler.