Thread by @ProfNoto

Coming in just under the wire -- and keeping w/ my annual Twitter tradition -- here are my 10 favorite economics papers of 2019

[Same rules: 10 papers, published in 2019, ordered alphabetically]

https://twitter.com/ProfNoto/status/1072711932686336000

1) Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dubé, @jessiehandbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell QJE paper on food deserts academic.oup.com/qje/article/13…

Great package of reduced-form results (using "events" like household moves & supermarket entry) and model-based estimates

Authors conclude that "nutritional inequality" in the US is not primarily about access to affordable healthy food, but rather comes from differences in demand

Also, I liked the paper title of an earlier version :-)

"Is the focus on food deserts fruitless?" [Answer: Yes]

2) Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem Coşar, Ali Hortaçsu QJE paper using a structural trade model to look for lost ancient cities academic.oup.com/qje/article/13…

Last 2 yrs I've listed 10 papers w/o ranking them, but this year I'm going to say this was my favorite paper of the year

I think the paper is interdisciplinary research at its absolute best

This is the paper that I talk about the most when I talk to my non-economist friends & family members, partly to "wow" them about what modern empirical economics can do

I also think the paper is an incredibly creative idea, and it really "jolted" me (and one of my co-authors) when we first saw it as a working paper

It was a wake-up call that we should try to be more ambitious & creative in our own work

3) @aislinnbohren, @alexoimas, Michael Rosenberg AER paper on the dynamics of discrimination aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

This paper provides theory and empirical evidence on how the dynamics of discrimination can help identify its source

The fact that the authors find evidence of gender discrimination on @StackExchange is probably not that surprising, but the way the authors use economic theory to interpret their experimental results is the kind of research that I aspire to do

4) @sdellavi & Matthew Gentzkow QJE paper on "uniform pricing" academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…

The paper very carefully documents a new fact: retailers tend to choose uniform prices across stores

When I used to teach MBA students, I would say that consumers are probably more "behavioral" than firms

I still think that's true, but this paper makes me appreciate that firms can be "behavioral", too. This relates to the wisdom of @R_Thaler that "firms are run by people"

5) Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, & Franklin Qian AER paper on the effects of rent control on tenants & landlords aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

Using amazing data & a fascinating natural experiment in SF, authors find:

[short run] Rent control prevents displacement & benefits incumbent renters

[long run] Landlords sell to owner-occupants & redevelop buildings, driving up market rents & undermining goal of rent control

This paper also gives a great answer to the question of "What does an applied micro-economist do?"

Answer: "Spend lots time trying to find amazing data that lets you answer a classic question better than anyone has ever done before"

[Note: this is so much harder than it looks]

6) Patrick Kline, Neviania Petkova, Heidi Williams, Owen Zidar QJE paper on rent-sharing academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…

Paper estimates pass-through of patent allowances to wages by comparing firms w/ allowed & rejected patents

Focusing on particularly valuable patents, authors conclude that workers capture ~30% of surplus generated by patent

I think this paper is a great template for doing "event study" analysis (along w/ @agoodmanbacon's recent papers; see, e.g. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/69…)

7) Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, Mark Shepard AER paper aeaweb.org/articles?id=10… estimating "willingness to pay" (WTP) for health insurance using a regression discontinuity design & data from MA state health insurance exchange

Perhaps surprisingly, the authors find low-income adults in MA have a very low WTP (<1/3 of average costs)

This contradicts the standard models that I teach to undergrads (where WTP is average costs *plus* a risk premium)

Good reminder that research can bring surprises!

Authors speculate that uncompensated care may help resolve this puzzle, citing one of my own favorite papers (w/ @C_Garthwaite & @talgross) on "Hospitals as Insurers of Last Resort" aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

Given the recent very high quality work on health insurance & mortality (see NYT article nytimes.com/2019/12/10/ups…), the low WTP -- even accounting for uncompensated care -- is quite surprising to me

Research I'd like to see: health insurance saves lives, so why is WTP so low?

8) Amy Finkelstein & @ProfNoto QJE paper using RCT to study take-up & targeting in SNAP academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…

Obvious conflict of interest is obvious

[since, you know, it's my paper]

Acknowledging the COI, I am proud of this paper. My colleagues said this was one of the papers that helped me get promoted this year. It was also the first major project I started after getting tenure (and it only took ~5 yrs from start to finish!)

9) Chang‐Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles Jones, Peter Klenow Econometrica paper econometricsociety.org/publications/e… using Roy model of occupation choice. Finds that banning women & minorities from entering certain occupations reduces aggregate productivity through the mis-allocation of talent

I view this paper as a good example of what is discussed in the recent Econometrica Editorial onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.39…

"We want to increasingly compete for the best empirical research ... without insisting that it pushes the methodological frontier."

This paper doesn't make a major methodological contribution, but it uses economic theory & data to answer an important question ("What is the effect of discrimination on aggregate productivity?"), which would be very difficult to answer using a "natural experiment"

10) Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, Eric Zwick QJE paper academic.oup.com/qje/article/13… on "Capitalists in the 21st Century"

[I'm going to need another COI on this one since I'm friends w/ most of the co-authors]

This paper builds & analyzes a new data set linking 11 million pass-through firms to their owners. Authors find most business income at top of the distribution is pass-through income

Going over the list today, I see a few themes worth more discussion (e.g., breakdown by gender, journal, & pedigree), but I'll leave those topics for 2020

Instead, I want to end with this:

Several of papers in this "top 10" list were rejected prior to publication (in some cases multiple times). I think that's a good reminder of the randomness in the publication process

Happy New Year!

[Gosh darn it; this should have said @nhendren82 instead of Erzo Luttmer; I'm going to resist the urge to delete all of these tweets and start over again]