Elliot Lipnowski
@ElliotLip
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To be specific, in the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. Work: @columbia_econ Life: @AveniaTapper
New York
Joined June 2012
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“We thank the referees for many helpful comments that have improved the paper.”
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Highly recommended online course:
Engaging and clear lectures. Great if you (like me) know nothing at all about CS and want to learn basic basics in computability/complexity.
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Economic theory is full of surprising results that are easy to describe to a layperson. Thinking about upcoming teaching, some (below) came to mind.
What other ones come to mind?
[I'm abusing tweeetic license and omitting caveats needed to make all these statements correct.]
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In undergrad, my group theory professor told us, "This is our first example of what we call a non-abelian group, named after the Norwegian mathematician Non-Abel." I think about that joke often.
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Cool slide deck by
@PhilHaile
:
I especially recommend it to students in economic theory. Among other things, it's a nice primer on the right usage of sometimes misapplied terms like {reduced form, structural, causal effect}.
A few highlights...
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Hey Siri, what's MMT?
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My favorite description of Brouwer’s fixed point theorem is that it’s the “you are here” theorem. It says that if you have a map of a mall inside the mall, you can write “you are here” somewhere on the map.
This interpretation also gives color to the need for each hypothesis:
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PSA: If you advocate a government policy on economic grounds, and the reasoning is fully described by something learned in the first half of a ‘Principles of Microeconomics’ course, your position might not actually stem from economics (or agree with economists’ views).
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The so-called Poisson distribution of statistics assumes that there are default fish who serve as the scale that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
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Many people use economics to understand the world.
But not everyone knows how to unlock all of its power.
I’ve spent years studying the best ways to do this.
Here is a thread on how you can hack your economics research and maximize the value you get out it.
1/
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Kind of shocking that this strengthening of BLUE/Gauss-Markov that drops estimator linearity is both (1) true and (2) not something we all learned in first year.
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Reading reference letters for PhD admissions. It's bananas how much some people will have RAs do and not offer them coauthorship.
I guess some areas of econ really are transitioning to a lab-science model—including having a similar relationship to hierarchy.
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Economic theory edition:
"Since the dawn of time, human beings have asked some fundamental questions: who are we? why are we here? is there life after death? To answer all of these, in this paper we will consider a 2-player, 2-action, 2-period game with 2 states of nature..."
Writing tip: always cast your work in the wider context.
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Word/LaTeX and Stata/R debates end friendships, but at least we can all agree figures should be made in MS Paint.
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I've seen a few "What should I read this summer?" tweets from people entering ~economics PhD programs this fall, or people looking for reading between year 1 and year 2. So this is a good time for this perennial recommendation:
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Zach Weinersmith made a comic about my parenting style!
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Today's edition of 'pretty theory papers worth knowing' is Dezsö Szalay's paper, "The Economics of Clear Advice and Extreme Options". The paper concerns itself with information acquisition choices under delegated decision making. Let's go through an example...
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Efe Ok's book-in-progress "Measure and Probability Theory with Economic Applications" (currently available for free on his website) is really lovely.
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“People play Nash equilibrium”
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Rebrand "economics" to "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck on the Margin"
Congratulations, you invented the first order condition of a utility maximization problem.
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@ShengwuLi
I don't mean to brag, but I've only been rejected by Harvard's econ PhD program once.
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Today's edition of "striking examples in economic theory":
This paper shows how repeated play can sustain cooperation even when players observe nothing about past behavior.
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Airlines finding innovative ways to fit more passengers per trip
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Now that’s a fucking abstract
We provide a complete answer regarding what social choice functions can be rationalizably implemented.
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Biden showing up at Ken Arrow’s house and telling him he’s wrong
“Without democracy nothing is possible, with it, everything is “. - President Biden
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@instrumenthull
@KhoaVuUmn
It’s like microeconomics, but where there’s one person in the world instead of two
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Tried to access my office while Columbia is locked down, but security told me my research was "not of general interest"
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Your daily separating hyperplane tweet
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@AnthonyLeeZhang
This very useful thread brought to mind a NYT Sargent quote from when he won the prize thingy: "I think you’ve got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist."
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A master economic theorist provides real-world motivation for their results
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Okay, I’m convinced, linear programming is actually pretty cool
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Men will literally take a Labor Prelim instead of going to therapy
Labor prelims, University of Chicago, spring 1979.
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Today's edition of "classics in game theory" (Ben-Porath and Dekel, 1992) gives a cool example demonstrating the power of signaling in strategic interactions.
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Some notsohumblebragging: we were talking about a Burger King being right next to a McDonald’s, and 5yo basically rediscovered the best-response map from the Hotelling model.
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I may be too late on this Suez ship discourse, but in the various “what an instrument!” threads, has anybody made an orthogonality joke?
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Today's edition of "papers everybody should know":<>
This lovely JET paper says any non-pathological space of available choices to a decision maker must be 1-dimensional if it admits *any* continuous choice function.
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Another rule I find useful: have one *presentable* project. At any moment, you should have at least one project that you'd be happy to give a seminar/conference talk on given the opportunity. YMMV, but this is the number one constraint I keep in mind for pipeline management.
A lesson from my PhD that continues to shape my research decisions today is the "6 Projects Rule" (credited to
@ProfNoto
): “At any point, you should aim to have 2 projects at the submission stage, 2 at the “active research” stage, and 2 at the project development stage”.
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Today's edition of "recent papers you should know" is Amanda Friedenberg's 2019 paper, "Bargaining Under Strategic Uncertainty: The Role of Second-Order Optimism". It's a wonderful example of a paper that delivers new insights from studying an old game.
<>
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I said “I’m very difficult to trick” and 5yo said “How do you know you are?” and I’m just so fucking proud
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My papers typically sell for $0-$0
It's a ludicrous amount of money, but made crazier by the fact that most projects are 7-10 years
That means most contracts are about $0+ and are sold in 1 four-year submission
My consulting work typically sells for $2,500-$3,000 per day
It's a ludicrous amount of money, but made crazier by the fact that most projects are 3-4 months
That means most contracts are about $150K+ and are sold in 1 call.
Here's how the "sales calls" typically go
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In this paper, I estimate the returns to education by viewing a parental Nobel prize as a shock to school attendance
It's been a busy morning for
#NobelPrize
winner Guido Imbens and his family! After waking everyone up when they heard the news shortly before 3 a.m.,
@Susan_Athey
told their kids Andrew, Sylvia, and Carleton that they could decide if they wanted to go to school or not today.
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@p_ganong
Figure out which seminars have the best free food, and tailor your research interests accordingly.
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Econ theorist:
- Writing clean stylized models that isolate a single force
- Making LaTeX macros
- Being smug about knowing undergrad real analysis
- Stanning Hagomoro chalk
- Having beef with physicists
In the same way that baseball superstars are “5 tool players,” superstar academics are “5 tool researchers.”
Baseball:
- Speed
- Fielding
- Throwing
- Hit for Power
- Hit for Average
Research:
- Research taste
- Cleaning data
- Analyzing data
- Writing
- Presenting
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The 100-word abstract
Name something that 𝙞𝙨𝙣'𝙩 an Olympic sport, but 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡𝙨 like an Olympic sport 🤔
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You can't infer causality with a double machine learning model.
But it works if you train 3 models.
The intuition behind Triple Machine Learning, and how you can use it for causal inference
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@johnjhorton
@ben_golub
To paraphrase Lucas:
One of the functions of Twitter is to provide fully articulated, artificial economic systems that can serve as laboratories in which policies that would be prohibitively expensive to experiment with in actual economies can be tested out at much lower cost.
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Network economics is gossip with sufficient statistics.
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Forthcoming in
@JPolEcon
, one of my favorite papers—by {
@doronravid
, Roesler, Szentes}. It studies a game between a buyer and a seller. Simultaneously, the seller decides on a price to post for a good, and the buyer decides how much information to acquire about the good's value.
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Summarize economic theory with one out-of-context tweet:
Trivial linear algebra with applications to political science.
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Audience member: "What are some applications of your model?"
Theorist:
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My Gödel sentence has people asking questions not answered by my Gödel sentence
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Once again, folks, you're allowed to be a theorist
#EconTwitter
Have you replaced your dynamic TWFE event-study with an event-study from one of the recent DiD methods for staggered timing?
If so, you may be interested in this short note on interpreting event-studies from these new methods. A short 🧵
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Rebrand idea: change “p-hacking” to “statistical power posing”
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There are people who start refereeing a paper the day after they're invited. 😳
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I just used the implicit function theorem. Does this mean I'm finally an applied theorist?
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This page from Matt Jackson’s book “The Human Network” is 🔥
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Today's edition of "striking examples in game theory"
A nice compact/continuous game in which the unique Nash equilibrium entails weakly dominated strategies.
From Simon & Stinchcombe 1995; h/t {
@dylanista0524
,
@msiniscalchi
}
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Obligatory shameless self-promotion
Forthcoming in the AER: "Rank Uncertainty in Organizations" by Marina Halac, Elliot Lipnowski, and Daniel Rappoport.
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An important, often overlooked part of the hidden curriculum for economists: learning many synonyms for the word "cause" that aren't similarly protected
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Dear promising PhD students deciding whether to pursue theoretical or empirical research,
Please stop using "cd" (in Stata) or "setwd()" (in R) all over the place. Once (maybe, not really), that's enough. Can we mark those commands as "deprecated"?
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First lecture of 1st-year PhD info econ class. Found this in the classroom, which must be a good omen:
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Prepping a lecture on Myerson-Satterthwaite, I spent some time trying to figure out a qualitative description of their argument—ideally, one that never requires computing an integral. I think the following works. I'm sure it's not new, but it's new to me. A short thread!
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Highly recommend
@Tim_Roughgarden
's Foundations of Blockchains video lecture series. The content is interesting, but I also recommend it on pedagogical grounds: A really nice example how to give layperson-accessible proof intuition.
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7yo just said “technically it will never be tomorrow” and I’m so fucking proud
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Today in university operations: A reimbursement request in Concur was sent back because it didn't have a receipt for a $5 hotel booking fee. The booking fee was to Concur, which we were encouraged to use for such bookings. This rejection caused extra work for (me+) three admins.
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I love reading a sentence in a paper—often in a footnote—and being certain that the author(s) put that sentence there because of a referee comment they found silly.
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Costly signaling: Even if an investment like education were 100% productively useless, it could still be that people would choose to invest in it, and it could perform a valuable sorting function.
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Live footage of Minnesota macro seminar
DeepMind training bipedal robots to play soccer using deep reinforcement learning.
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I was recently reminded of this lovely blog post <> that has some tips on how to effectively read mathematical papers. A really nice tip worth highlighting: First "project" the paper onto a simpler version of the paper, and read that version.
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Myerson, Holmstrom, and Milgrom all being juniors at MEDS at the same time
What’s an event in history that is so ridiculous it sounds fake?
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@NavSamarakoon
The red curve is the max of blue curves (I've drawn 3 of them, but there's one for every point on the red curve). Look at a point on the red curve, say the purple one. The envelope theorem says the tangent line of the red and blue curves through this point are the same (green).
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2yo just proudly proclaimed that he prefers to “let the data speak”
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HAPPY DAVID BLACKWELL'S BIRTHDAY EVERYONE. What are you all doing to celebrate? I'm gonna make a bunch of decisions under uncertainty, some of them dynamic.
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Finally, somewhere in the US where I can learn about ergodicity economics without fear of criticism
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So glad
@VSET_contact
is trying something new and including speakers' faculty photos in the announcement
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Economic theorists reading math papers from the 1990s
San Diego: Armored truck dumps cash on freeway. Freeway shuts down while people collect $100 bills
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Dear Referee: I would have cited your seminal work on the topic, but my daughter insisted I claim novelty
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You heard it here first: DO NOT work hard in the first year of your PhD. As average Econ PhD length is increasing, you probably shouldn’t work on assimilating any information in the first 2-3 years. Instead, churn out as many pages as LaTeX will allow.
2. College grades matter for getting into econ/finance PhD. Some PhD students actually work hard in 1st year and try to ace their classes, not realizing that this basically has 0 direct effect on whether you'll find a job after PhD, it's all about writing papers
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The real market failure was the friends we made along the way
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My advice to
#econtwitter
grad students is that, even if you like both food A and food B, it may be a culinarily poor decision to eat A and B together.
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So there’s people who get PhDs without ever drawing two disjoint convex blobs on a whiteboard and then drawing a straight-ish line between them? How?
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5yo just invoked transitivity. No future in behavioral econ :(
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Weirdly nobody is dunking on him for not reading this
I'm reading a book a week in 2023. Classics, sci-fi, nonfiction, or anything people highly recommend. I'll keep adjusting the list. Start on Monday, done by Sunday. Might make lowkey videos of takeaways. If you want to read along, the current list is here:
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Estimation idea: bootstrapping, but with n draws and without replacement
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Rebrand idea: Change “game theory” to “spicy decision theory”
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