Mostly Economics

Interesting research by Natalia Vasilenok  of Stanford University (HT: MR Blog). It is her job market paper.

In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy.

To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia.

Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.

Hmm.

Obviously the author would not have managed to do such research in Russia.One is alsi surprised that Russians can still read books on authoritainism!

If the Russian authorites get whiff of this paper, they might control and regulate the books in Russia’s largest book store mentioned by the author of the paper. The same store will be flooded with books on how god has send Russia’s current leader to restore past glories of Russia. The other media outlets such as newspapers will sing praises all day long for the greatest leader as it is happening in some of the countries today.  Everything is a reform and everything is a blessing from the new god.

IMF F&D magazine profiles Prof Guido Imbens of Stanford Univ who was awarded Nobel prize in economics in 2021.

There have been a couple of times in Guido Imbens’ life when he has been seriously underestimated. Once, as a diligent schoolboy in The Netherlands, young Guido was unceremoniously banished for weeks from his first economics class after clashing with a teacher over a textbook. Years later, during a faculty interview at Harvard University, a combative associate professor—who ultimately became Imbens’ closest friend and corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics—voted against hiring him. “He thought the work I was doing in my thesis was boring,” Imbens says. “It was very dry and technical,” Joshua Angrist recalls with a chuckle three decades later.

There are some things in life and in economics that you can’t fully know. Imbens shared the 2021 Nobel Prize with Angrist, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and labor economist David Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, for transforming how economists understand cause and effect. Imbens and Angrist developed tools to answer life’s What if? questions, not only to explain what actually occurred but also to use natural experiments to estimate what would have happened if circumstances had been different. 

How he met fellow Laureate Angrist while doing laundry:

The turning point in Imbens’ career came in the early 1990s at Harvard, when—despite a rocky start—he struck up a collaboration and lasting friendship with Angrist. Their partnership took shape not in a classroom but in a local laundromat. The two were junior faculty members who often found themselves folding shirts and trading ideas to the hum of tumbling clothes dryers on Saturday mornings. “It’s more fun to work with your friends,” says Angrist. “I tell my students that you want to pick your collaborators as carefully and thoughtfully as you pick your spouse,” he joked to NobelPrize.org. That friendship led to their most influential contribution, the development of the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) framework. It offers a rigorous way to estimate how an intervention—like going to college—affects people who experience it only because of some random circumstance, such as winning a scholarship.

Today, LATE is a standard tool for turning messy data into credible insights. Imbens describes it as a way to focus not on everyone, but specifically on the people whose choices are shifted by an outside force—a law, a rule, or a change in circumstance. Policymakers, for example, use it to assess how the availability—by law—of government-paid health insurance at age 65 impacts health care use and to measure the earnings effect of staying in school longer because of compulsory education laws. In industry, Silicon Valley uses it to evaluate new features in tech platforms through randomized rollouts. By focusing on the people whose behavior is nudged by real-world events, LATE has helped move economics from theoretical models to practical, evidence-based policy.