AlexBartik @AlexBartik Twitter profile

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AlexBartik

2 months

How do households change their consumption and household balance sheets in response to large, but time-limited, unconditional cash transfers? We study an experiment that provided $1000 a month for 3 years to 1000 young, low-income households. 1/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Never expected Wooldridge to get on twitter and just go so hard. It's amazing. No filter, no bullshit, just metrics to the face.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Just got rejection email from job I applied to 3 yrs ago on the job market. Savage.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

One of the most interesting articles I've read during the pandemic (and a fascinating mini-history of scientific thought in one area)

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

I think if ameteurism in college sports is so important, then the really important step is to stop paying the coaches and have student coaches. Why are we denying students who want careers as coaches the possibility of building their skills?

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

Autocomplete is great and all, but the Gmail ml feature I really want is a 'it looks like you're reply-alling to a large email chain, are you sure want to do this'

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

You can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Would really like to see a shark tank version of the debates where candidates pitch Joe Manchin on their plans

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

My parents just sent me this note to the future that I wrote in 1998 and hid in their desk. I have no recollection of doing this, but it's definitely my handwriting as a child. You're welcome, future generations you, for this knowledge I bring from the past.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

How has the COVID-19 crisis been affecting hourly workers at small businesses? I've been working with @joinhomebase along with Marianne Bertrand, Feng Lin @rothstein_jesse @mattunrath @CAPolicyLab @UChiPovertyLab @RustandyCenter @ChicagoBooth to find out [1/10].

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@fabolange Great chance to resolve co-author disagreements in your favor.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Always blows my mind when I'm looking at a paper from AER 1978 and it is 4 pages long and basically derives a marginally different version of a theoretical result from a paper released a year before.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Have to get 50% of my calories from bananas over the next 3 days because I miscalculated banana ripening in my grocery store run last week.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Household catastrophe averted when I prevented gf from throwing out ACS survey invitation.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@arpitrage @greg_shill Look, it's important that we maintain the historic character if our breads. Consequently, a local comittee must approve all changes to bread recipes.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Really feel like someone needs to talk to the Wild Kratts creators on how we make all educational content - the animal fact retention levels resulting from the show are shocking.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@paulgp Don't you mean, 'clean_data4.csv'?

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

@jenniferdoleac I would be in favor with econ departments requiring a 'cs for econ' class, where you learn general programming ideas, data structures, key syntax from a few statistical computing languages, and version control.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@arpitrage Really this is a devastating result for your followers

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

@arpitrage I do think that hybrid work arrangements reduce academia's amenity advantage non-trivially.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Ah, my tried and true method of fixing weird coding errors: re-run the shell script the next day and see if it starts working.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@autoregress draw the dag

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Always remember the old Norwegian saying 'there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing'

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

On the grad level the class I'd like departments to offer is a philosophy of science class. What's the purpose of a model (theoretical or empirical)? What type of evidence is useful?

AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

@jenniferdoleac I would be in favor with econ departments requiring a 'cs for econ' class, where you learn general programming ideas, data structures, key syntax from a few statistical computing languages, and version control.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Black population decline in large cities has gotten a lot of press in the past few weeks. For example, see this excellent article in Politico: . @evan_mast2 and I have a recent paper that examines this decline and related patterns. 1/9

The Black exodus that’s changing politics

www.politico.com

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Hasn't realized that Costco has solved the shortage of household toilet paper by just selling the business toilet paper

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Labor economists be like 'i know a spot', but it's only for compliers

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@ikuziemko @mattyglesias It does definitely remind me of how confident good hs / early college students can be after reading a few articles on something and mastering the key relevant vocabulary words but not having really thought about the subject much.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Every Sunday I hope the revolutions podcast starts part ii of the Russian revolution series, and every Sunday my hopes are dashed

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

@snaidunl The beauty of this take is it's ambiguity

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Combined with @dynarski 's recent work at Umich, this suggests there may be large gains to working to get students from underrepresented backgrounds into flagship state schools.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Awesome from Chuck Lanfear. I've always meant to write a R/Stats/Python Rosetta Stone for common coding tasks social scientists do ,but it looks like Chuck has done the R/Stata part !

scott cunningham

@causalinf

5 years

Beautiful side by side coding that I'm going to see if I can make work given the constraints of a physical book.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

@dynarski Pandemic pouch

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

How have job posts and applications been evolving for small firms in retail, hospitality, and food services? @JesseRothstein , Marianne Bertrand, Fern Ramoutar, and @dsantoscar have been using @joinhomebase data to better understand the evolving labor market.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Really didn't realize the risk of remote conferences would be that I would literally forget I was participating in them... and try to schedule them for the same time

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

I've always liked the idea of a paper "wiki" that continually amends and updates papers. The issue would be to create professional incentives for folks to conduct work like this.

Jeff Brown

@Illini_Hiker

3 years

Indeed, it raises a question of why any paper ever needs to be published in its “final” form. Why not continue to improve it indefinitely as new methods and new data emerge?

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

11 months

@arpitrage , @DMilo75 and I just released “The Costs of Housing Regulation: Evidence From Generative Regulatory Measurement”. I’ll provide a sense of the patterns we’re seeing for 3 regs: min lot sizes, frontage requirements, & affordable housing mandates/incentives. (1/11)

Arpit Gupta

@arpitrage

11 months

📢New paper on AI and Zoning with @AlexBartik and @DMilo75 We introduce generative regulatory measurement: a new method to use LLMs to parse the underlying meaning of regulatory texts We use AI to figure out what zoning and housing regulations are, and connect them to outcomes

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Didn't really anticipate shelter in place leading to me developing an expertise in Scandinavian and Eastern European crime shows, but here we are.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

new remote work achievement unlocked: couldn't find a meeting time this week to show how to do something to a collaborator, so I recorded a video using OBS demonstrating how to do it and just sent the link to them.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@D_Kuehn This is one of the underrated advantages of RCTs where you set it up - more like to to talk to participants and institutions involved, yielding richer understanding. @cblatts has talked about this before.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@causalinf A lot of empirical strategies at the unit level are equivalent to estimation at some group mean level. In these cases, estimating stuff at the group mean level will a) be easier/faster and b) avoid confusion about identification assumptions.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

New book just dropped. Interested to read.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Hadn't really thought much about how MN pop trends diverge so much from the rest of the upper MW.

Kyle Kondik

@kkondik

3 years

House apportionment changes, 1960-today. Massive shifts from Frost Belt to Sun Belt

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Would read a 10k word explainer as to why there is no waffle house in the Midwest. I know there is waffle house in southern Ohio /Indiana, just proves those places are a different region. Don't @ me.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Every New Years, I think about when I was maybe 19 and I asked @TimBartik whether he had made any New Years Resolutions. He angrily responded "I don't make News Years Resolutions, they have no point. I make decisions."

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

Relative to the control mean, the largest treatment effect was on gifts and loans to family and charity. 5/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Read Jesse's whole thread on our paper, but I particularly want to call out how different this recession looks from other large recent downturns (in terms of industries hit, speed it's happened, and worker expectations of returning to their previous jobs).

Jesse Rothstein

@rothstein_jesse

4 years

This recession looks much different than the Great Recession. The overall 2-month employment decline was 60% larger than the 2+ year GR total, and concentrated in in-person services rather than construction and manufacturing.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Legitimately at first reacted by wondering why people were discussing census Public Use Microdata Areas

Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

5 years

tldr, I’m old enough to remember the PUMAs.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

We estimate that the transfer increased measured expenditures by $310 per month, or around 8 percent of control group monthly spending. In dollar terms, the largest treatment effects were concentrated in core expenses like rent, food, and car payments. 4/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Can't tell if I'm helpfully informing people on ways to enjoy the winter/snow or a psychopath for aggressively telling people to just "put on long-underwear, good socks, and mittens and go outside" when they complain about the snow.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Saturday night Michael's trip and I'm having to really resist the temptation to get these stamps to put on graded exams and psets.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

@mattyglesias Classic Yglesias, shilling for Big Social Science

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

One way that households may use unexpected rises in unearned income is to pay down debt. We find no evidence that households in this sample reduce their total debt holdings. The estimated effect on total debt is positive $1.8k (although imprecisely estimated, se $1.9k). 16/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

Higher expenditures enable some households to make substantial changes in some consumption choices. For example, the share of participants moving to new housing units or neighborhoods both rise over 4 percentage points for the treatment group relative to the control group. 7/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

These student coaches could receive scholarships and admissions preferences, but it would be incredibly important for the game's integrity that they not get paid.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Fact 1: Firms have dramatically reduced employee hours. Each sub-plot in this figure shows distribution of hours across firms, measuring relative to average hours per week. By Mar 22, over 40% of firms shut down entirely and most others have large hours reductions. [3/10]

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@seanjtaylor In a sense I've been working on heterogeneous treatment effects since my first little league game. Tommy L. was the....

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

I find major newspapers habit of not including links to the text of bills they're discussing incredibly frustrating.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Really should be a rule that to use email you have to understand that reply-all'ing a thread is never how you get yourself removed from a mailing list.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

brain so broken by this year. def gonna accidentally comment 'draw the dag' or 'fit the cubic' apropos of nothing in a seminar sometime in the next two years

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

You truly love to see it.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@greg_shill @arpitrage Obviously, people who have free time on Wednesday afternoons, as well as those with strong, idiosyncratic views on bread recipes.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

The transfer improves short-run financial health and some measures of liquid savings. However, they do not substantially improve net worth, credit access, or other outcomes that might be expected to generate persistent improvements in the household financial position. 29/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Definitely embedding this in all copies of my syllabi from now on.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Gonna become an inflation truther because of rising tooth fairy prices for teeth

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@FrankSchilbach @betsylevyp The focus on novelty encourages overclaiming and disparaging (or ignoring when convenient) previous lit too. Makes it more work for the reader outside the lit to figure out what's actually being added

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

@abiylfoyp I do find that rewriting an already written piece easier than writing from scratch sometimes.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

I really like Owen's advice below (and a bunch of the other responses to Ivan's q), but I have a few thoughts on a different aspect of project choice during grad school

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Being strong. Not getting involved in rabbit hole thread about vague claims.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

The transfer not only changes the level of expenditures, but also the variance. The standard deviation of log monthly expenditures declines by 0.14, suggesting that households are better able to maintain a consistent level of spending. 8/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

One thing to highlight is that in our figure 3, even states that don't have a shelter in place order have had an over 50% decline in hours of hourly workers (among homebase clients), suggesting that many states might be experiencing severe emp declines even w/o these orders

Jesse Rothstein

@rothstein_jesse

4 years

We've updated our Homebase analysis with data through April 11. With @AlexBartik , @mattunrath , Marianne Bertrand, and Feng Lin.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

We estimate that the transfer increased financial savings by $1k to $2.3k, depending on the measure. These estimates are somewhat imprecise, and for some measures we cannot reject no treatment effect on financial savings. 14/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Really useful thread from @ben_golub , but although I think this thread is right as to what is privately optimal, I'm not sure it's optimal for the discipline the the optimal approach for the first few years of grad school is to essentially take the core three times.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 years

Do you have data and programming skills and want to work on big, ambitious RCTs ? Apply for this job at open research and work with me, @elizabethrds , @evavivalt , @smilleralert , and @dbroockman .

Eva Vivalt

@evavivalt

2 years

Two job postings: 1. OpenResearch is hiring a Data Associate for its basic income RCT. You would work with them, but also interact with @AlexBartik , @dbroockman , @smilleralert and I on the project. Great opportunity for recent grads! @econ_ra 1/2

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Weird Al and I'm not ashamed.

Keith Harris

@useful_noise

4 years

only one of us is walking out of here alive, Sting

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

There's definitely some type of no arbitrage condition that doesn't hold between lines of adjascent Starbucks. In this paper, I will

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

That point of the pandemic when you're pumped about some new masks you ordered arriving ....

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

@dylanmatt Unless you're having a gigantic wedding, this will be super underpowered.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

Taking stock, our results suggest that large, but temporary, cash transfers substantially increase consumption. Spending is allocated primarily to core expenses such as rent, food, and car expenses, but in different proportions than an in-kind transfer would have been spent. 28/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Finally, while city decline has gotten more attention lately, our paper is focused on the related trend of rapid Black suburbanization. To see how large this movement has been, compare the distributions of Black population in LA census tracts in 1970 and 2018. 7/9

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

6 years

Using stata for so many years has given me the brain disease that I always think missing values are infinite numbers, no matter what programming language I'm using

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@seanjtaylor Draw the dag

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Great write-up of our paper on how small and medium sized businesses are being affected by COVID-19 and how businesses are reacting to the policy response (joint with Zoe Cullen, Chris Stanton, @mike_luca , Edward Glaeser, and Marianne Bertrand).

Working Knowledge

@HBSWK

4 years

Small Businesses are Worse Off Than We Thought -- A lack of liquidity and skepticism of government programs are compounding the #COVID crisis.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

How long can I hold out before I watch the tiger show ?

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

@seanjtaylor Totally. This is actually something I think PhD programs with healthy cultures provide (a lot of the learning is asking a classmate 'how the hell would you do this') and ways to create that in workplaces (of any sort ) are super valuable.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

This paper is part of the Open Research Unconditional Income Study (ORUS). 2 weeks ago we released papers showing that the transfer reduced earned income & had little effect on health. How was the remainder of the transfer spent? We use surveys & credit records to find out. 2/

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

I feel an underrated part of the (many) barriers to entry to PhDs in the US are the limitations of even supposedly advanced math education in the US primary and secondary educational system.

Wojtek Kopczuk 🇵🇱🇺🇦

@wwwojtekk

4 years

This is an aside, but I still find it mind-boggling that "proof-oriented courses" are the definition of advanced in the US. Logic and proofs should come early in math education, the earlier the better

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

@JohnHolbein1 It's really important to distinguish between topics that you a) want students to have a high level understanding of vs b) you want them to be able to understand the details and be able to implement.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

@economeager Totally agree. In addition to courage, I'd emphasize that successfully implementing a big experiment takes lots of skill and brilliance too. I think many who have never run a large social experiment underrate the intellectual challenges encountered in running a field rct

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

5 years

Ran into my favorite army officer at the big house

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@annastansbury I think some of this is information rents - ie dentist pays very well and it's actually easier to become a dentist than a doctor. Would be interesting to see how correlated this is with some estimate of earnings + money metric amenities relative to ed group average.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Something I always find funny is when someone (who I don't follow and who doesn't follow me) likes a tweet from like 8 months ago. Were they just scrolling through old tweets? Is the algo surfacing random anodyne threads from months ago?

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 years

I used to always see the motorcycle death stats and think 'why would anyone do this?'. Then I drove a motorcycle for the first time for a weekend around Camiguen in the Philippines and realized there were very clear reasons.

Agnes Callard

@AgnesCallard

2 years

As an ex-motorcyclist, I can tell you that all motorcyclists know this, and the update the rest of you need to make is: yes, they are THAT fun

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Am now somehow a member of a farm share, meat share, and beer share. Classification of the beer thing as a share is dubious though, I don't think there's that much beer production uncertainty.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

@economeager Totally people esp ignore heterogeneous preferences. Folks answer these advice questions as if the only argument in your objective function is a dummy for being tenured @ Stanford by 40 (or, in the less extreme case, tenured in an academic econ department somewhere at age 40)

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

Logistics of pfizer vaccine distribution are fascinating:

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

4 years

You love to see it

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

3 years

Moving to the neighborhood level, Black city population decline is concentrated in high-poverty areas, not areas that gentrified. Neighborhoods that were high-poverty & majority Black in 1970 have since lost over 60% of their Black population and 40% of total population. 3/9

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

7 years

@saskatchewin @economeager @besttrousers Can one put excellent memes in a tenure packet? Asking for a friend.

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AlexBartik

@AlexBartik

2 months

In our paper on the employment effects of the transfer, our preferred estimate is that the transfer reduced hh earned income by ~$210 a month, so about 22 cents of every dollar of transfer received was allocated to leisure (see here fore details: ). 21/

The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States

www.nber.org

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