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Andreas B Profile picture
@AndreasShrugged
Jan 13, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
There's a new paper by John Ioannidis and co-authors that's intended to push their anti-lockdown message by performing a flimsy empirical analysis. Adding to @GidMK's thread, I will just highlight one flaw that should have prevented this paper from being published but hasn't. Image
What they basically do is regressing case growth in Spring (terrible data) on a bunch of NPIs. Then they're puzzled bc their results indicate a positive "effect" of some NPIs on case growth. Well, that's not puzzling at all, that's because NPIs and case growth are endogenous! ImageImage
NPIs tend to get tougher the worse the case growth gets. But case growth might already be taking off when you've just tightened your NPIs, making cases further grow exponentially before the NPIs do anything. This results in a positive correlation between NPIs and case growth.
But obviously, this correlation is not causal; it's not the NPIs driving cases higher, it's the worsening epidemic. For the paper, this means their estimates are biased and worthless for what they want to investigate bc they don't come close to causal effects of NPIs.
The funny part is: They admit that in the paper; they're saying that as long as NPIs aren't randomly allocated, which they clearly aren't, there's bias. Their excuse: 'Everyone else is having the same problem!' Image
I'm fairly certain that in economics, this paper would have been rejected with some very unfriendly comments. But the journal has already published several highly criticized Ioannidis papers in 2020. Note that this type of analysis is quite far from the journal's aims and scope. Image
Link to Gideon's thread: and a bit more background on endogeneity and COVID-19: intereconomics.eu/contents/year/…

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More from @AndreasShrugged

Andreas B Profile picture
Aug 29
I'll go on a little rant about this paper in @QJEHarvard if only for its treatment of the literature. As it's clearly not the first paper to analyze Black economic progress after slavery, we'll focus on the value-added over previous research. An important reference here is Sacerdote (ReStat 2005) "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital".Image
Now Althoff and Reichardt do cite Sacerdote twice - in Sections IV.B and V.A, rather en passant alluding to what they see as conceptual shortcomings in his approach. They never cite Sacerdote in their review of the existing evidence though. Despite the Sacerdote paper having asked a very similar question, A&R never tell what his conclusions were and how they may contrast with their findings and why.Image
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Clearly, both data and empirical strategy of Sacerdote (2005) may seem outdated in the 2020s. On the other hand, the @ipums U.S. census extracts used by Sacerdote laid the groundwork for the complex census linkages of today. Sacerdote is also well-aware of the limits to identification in his approach but nevertheless realizes he can put bounds on the true effects - which I personally find pretty clever.Image
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Read 9 tweets
Andreas B Profile picture
Jan 13, 2023
Zeitgleich zum neuen Corona-Podcast 😉 auch ein neues, informatives Video von Oberst Reisner zum Ukrainekrieg. Neben den beobachteten, wechselseitigen Anpassungsdynamiken (Russland an HIMARS, Ukraine an Drohnen und CM) ist besonders lehrreich, warum...
...beide Seiten sich derzeit (wieder) in den Abnutzungskrieg verkeilen: Russland fehlt v.a. die fähige Infanterie, der Ukraine die (Schützen-)Panzer und Artillerie für größere Angriffe. Keine Seite kann also ähnlich wie im 1. WK einen schnellen K.O. erzielen. Russlann kann es
sich aber leisten, Söldner und schlecht ausgebildete Soldaten für geringe Geländegewinne zu verheizen, während die Ukraine kein Gelände kampflos aufgeben will und deshalb ebenfalls viele Soldaten einsetzen und ggf. opfern muss. Im Hintergrund bildet Russland
Read 4 tweets
Andreas B Profile picture
Dec 21, 2022
The primary purpose of the vaccines was to decrease the harm resulting from people's initial infection with SARS-CoV-2. This goal has largely been accomplished, despite intense GBD lobbying to the contrary, as large majorities have accepted the vaccines early enough. Take the L.
The cope is strong in "Look how the necessity for vaccines has changed since then!" Obviously, it has, at least beyond the most vulnerable, and so it should. Similarly, the effectiveness of vaccines obviously declines in a population that is already past its initial infection. 🤷‍♂️
Here's Fauci saying exactly that in October 2020: "The primary thing you want to do is that if people get infected, prevent them from getting sick, and if you prevent them from getting sick, you will ultimately prevent them from getting seriously ill."
finance.yahoo.com/news/fauci-vac…
Read 6 tweets
Andreas B Profile picture
Oct 4, 2022
This tweet is so wonderful because it demonstrates that nobody needs to be wealthy or smart or special in any way to come up with a better view on Ukraine than Mike or Elon. In fact, everybody who is aware that he isn't any of this is already light-years ahead of the two.
For example, everybody can count to 2. So everybody can count how many times Russia has attacked Ukraine in recent decades: 1, 2 times. And everybody can count how many times Ukraine has attacked Russia: 0 times. Everybody knows 2>0, so everybody knows the bothsidesism is BS.
Everybody who doesn't know about ethnic relations between Russia and Ukraine can google "Russia-Ukraine relations" and click on the Wikipedia page. Everybody can read that Ukrainian attitudes on Russia were splendid ten years ago and that this doesn't square with "ethnic hatred".
Read 5 tweets
Andreas B Profile picture
May 5, 2022
As I've already explained in German, there's no actual study backing up this claim. There's data being collected as part of a survey, but the researcher making this claim hasn't documented it in a publication or disclosed the data. Hey, maybe that's why it's on Disclose. Haha.
The absence of a documentation makes it impossible to compare the stated rate of complications to that from other studies. What is clear though is that participation in the survey is not random but voluntary, meaning there's potentially a huge self-selection bias problem.
As @doc_ecmo pointed out, the claimed rate of severe complications of 0.8% seems quite absurd. Germany administered ~15 million 2nd doses during June 2021, which would have resulted in 120,000 cases of severe complications flooding the hospitals soon after. But it didn't.
Read 4 tweets
Andreas B Profile picture
May 1, 2022
I actually find it absurd to expect African or Asian countries to condemn and sanction Russia openly. Some reasons:
1. Economically, sanctions would inflict much more pain on these countries than on us. Here it's some % GDP loss at a high income level, there it's poverty lines.
2. Clearly, these countries are negatively affected by the disrupted agricultural exports from Ukraine and partly Russia due to Russia's war, but siding openly with the west wouldn't help them with that.
3. Russia might retaliate economically by further blocking trade routes etc.
4. Russia might retaliate politically and militarily by supporting insurgents and separatists in already fragile countries with a high propensity for unrest and violent conflict.
5. Some countries might depend on China and hence look carefully at what China says and does.
Read 6 tweets

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