Nicholas Decker 🏳️🌈🌐🇺🇦
@captgouda24
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GMU econ PhD student, liberal, aspie, bi. I post interesting papers. Michael Kremer stan. I ❤️ optimal auction design. Spend more on drugs. Open borders now!
George Mason University
Joined July 2018
There are now so many papers in the thread — 73 of them! — that it’s become entirely unmanageable. I am starting a new thread here. Please consider sharing if you find economics interesting.
Let’s learn together! This tweet will be a thread of threads — lecture notes, essentially, on some of the formative papers in economics. I hope this is a helpful guide to being an economist.
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Drinking sugared sodas is strongly lower-class coded
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Milyo and Waldfogel, “The Effect of Price Advertising on Prices” (1999).
In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled Rhode Island’s ban on liquor advertising unconstitutional. Afterwards, the prices of advertised products fell relative to Massachusetts. An underrated early difference-in-differences study. 1/
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Abundance isn’t just neoliberalism, and that’s bad. (It needs to cut Social Security and Medicare!).
For the purposes of giving the audience their money's worth, I will be occupying the bottom right quadrant so we can have a proper debate. But I want to give props to @maiamindel for having the courage to right a post occupying the top right quadrant.
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RT @AlexGodofsky: Note that nothing in this talks about the objective standard of living of the people involved. It's all strictly distribu….
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Milyo and Waldfogel, “The Effect of Price Advertising on Prices” (1999).
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They proxy for quantity with lottery purchases made at stores, which is clever. This is imperfect, though — consumers could stock up during times of discounts, and make fewer trips overall.
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Anyway, the results are rather mixed. Prices only fell on advertised items. An important point they raise is that, in the absence of quantity purchased, one cannot make welfare claims.
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I also found the data collection part really cool.
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The rules were extremely restrictive — you could not only not place ads, you couldn’t even publicly display your prices. The whole thing was designed to obfuscate price comparisons.
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In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled Rhode Island’s ban on liquor advertising unconstitutional. Afterwards, the prices of advertised products fell relative to Massachusetts. An underrated early difference-in-differences study. 1/
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I don’t even think the essay was all that great! Typically literary. Beautiful language, plodding thoughts.
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It seems that Thomas Pynchon predicted the world in 1984
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Now that Trump is trying to have the state own parts of companies, let’s consider what happens when politicians invest. In short, they squander it. They put it in the private equity firms who donated to them, and the PE firms lose money.
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Klein, Crawford, Alchian, “Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process” (1978).
Why do newspaper publishers own their own presses, while book publishers do not? Klein, Crawford and Alchian argue that as an output becomes more specialized, the more likely firms are to vertically integrate in order to stop opportunistic behavior. 1/
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Katherine Wagner, “Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance”, (2022).
Flood insurance is more than actuarily fair — it is actually giving away money to homeowners. Yet, 40% of high-risk consumers don’t purchase flood insurance. Why? And what does it mean for optimal policy? 1/
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Katherine Wagner, “Adaptation and Adverse Selection in Markets for Natural Disaster Insurance”, (2022).
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This means that making flood insurance actuarily fair would actually *decrease* welfare, not increase it. In addition, a mandate to purchase insurance would raise welfare by billions of dollars.
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