Econ PhD advice thread: @carolyn_sms and I co-wrote our job market papers, so we often get asked about the pros and cons of co-authoring with grad school peers. Now that we both have survived the market, I wanted to tweet out a few reflections on our experience. Traditionally, econ JMPs are solo-authored, and the typical justification is that hiring committees want a “pure” signal of ability. Although I think credit allocation is a relevant concern, I think people overweight this.

Here’s a fun entry for #EconWoodworking. I made these wooden counting tiles a few weeks ago using a CNC router. Fun way to teach math! Some behind the scenes. You can program any shape or design into the machine and it helps guide the cuts

Ok this thread is for all you Stata junkies out there that use reshape regularly.

Sometimes I have to do “unbalanced” reshapes, which is a task that is super inefficient using the standard reshape command.

So here's a hack you might find useful!
1/ I often reshape panels from wide to long that have many missings.
E.g. I have a panel of scientists with a wide list of pubmed identifiers for their papers. (In this case, these came from space-delimited strings that I split into a wide set of variables with the stub “pmids")
2/

Hey academics on Twitter:

Have you ever been scooped?
Do you worry about getting scooped?

My job market paper estimates the consequences of getting scooped in science using cool data from structural biology.
Let’s do a thread! The paper is called:
Scooped! Estimating Rewards for Priority in Science

It’s co-authored with my awesome classmate @carolyn_sms , who is a fantastic collaborator. Look for her on the econ market next year!

Paper link: economics.mit.edu/files/18001