“Best” papers
I left economics a few years ago but it keeps “amazing” me over and over. Here are the “best” (not necessarily econ) papers I’ve read in each year, i.e. my “best” paper awards.
2024: feng shui geomancer (算命先生)
Hong, Justin Jihao, and Yuheng Zhao. 2024. “The Costs of Leader Biases: Evidence from Superstitious Chinese Mayors.” Paper Presented at NBER Development Economics Program Meeting (2024 Fall). https://hjihao.github.io/justinhong_leader_jmp.pdf.
[…] when mapping local leaders’ […] unfavorable zones, we seek the assistance of established spatial astrologers and cross-validate their predictions.
[…] zones perceived as unfavorable to mayors […] have an average 2 percent lower GDP […]
2023: Matray constant (篡改结果)
Boissel, Charles, and Adrien Matray. 2022. “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital.” American Economic Review 112 (9): 2884–920. doi: 10.1257/aer.20210369.
Matray divides pre-treatment DID coefficients by a factor of $1.8$ to make the unparallel trend parallel.
2023 honourable mention: PhD $\ll$ Master (别读博)
Marini, Giulio, and Golo Henseke. 2023. “Is a PhD Worth More Than a Master’s in the UK Labour Market? The Role of Specialisation and Managerial Position.” Studies in Higher Education 48 (10): 1538–50. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2023.2254806.
Realistically, a PhD holder takes no less than 10 years (even more than 20 years for, say, those who studied STEM) to recover the costs incurred from the pursuit of a PhD
If my reading is correct, you need 33 years to catch up if you do a PhD lol.
2022: masturbation (正太控)
Karl, Andersson. 2022. “I Am Not Alone – We Are All Alone: Using Masturbation as an Ethnographic Method in Research on shota Subculture in Japan.” Qualitative Research. doi: 10.1177/14687941221096600.
I […] read[…] the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating.
The paper was retracted. It can be found in Wikimedia Commons.
2022 honourable mention: torch.manual_seed(3407) is all you need (调随机数种子)
Picard, David. 2023. “torch.manual seed(3407) Is All You Need: On the Influence of
Random Seeds in Deep Learning Architectures for Computer Vision.” arXiv: 2109.08203.
[I]t is surprisingly easy to find an outlier [random seed] that performs much better or much worse than the average.
I actually quite like this paper, not in a sarcastic way:
- even with “modern” optimisers, we still easily get stuck in a bad local optimal if we start with a bad random initialisation
- pre-training works but does not 100% solves the above problem
- some random seeds work better than others, but the difference is not very big though. A small improvement may thus not be a real improvement, but a lucky seed
- my prior is that many SOTAs in CV are created by p hacking random seeds…
2022 honourable mention: adverse incentive (打不过就开摆)
Brown, Jennifer. 2011. “Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars.” Journal of Political Economy 119 (5): 982–1013. doi: 10.1086/663306.
- this paper is very much consistent with my personal belief: if the skill differences are too big, then I may just give up, since I won’t be able to beat the opponent even if I try hard
- I don’t know how golf works, but in some multi-stage games, such “quitters”/”lose quickly” may be attributed to other concerns, e.g. save energy for the next stage. A very good example is that some badminton players lost game on purpose in 2012 London Olympics, so they would meet “easier” opponents in the next round and got disqualified eventually.1 I’m not saying the paper is wrong, but just it may not be easily apply to other fields
- and of course, not sure if it’s reproducible at all (Babington et al., J. Sport Econ. 2020; Connolly and Rendleman, 2014)
2021: sunlight causes collectivism (太阳光把我照瞎了所以只能依赖集体)
Fredriksson, Per G., and Aatishya Mohanty. 2021. “Sunlight and Culture.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 188: 757–82. doi: 10.1016/j.jebo.2021.05.033.
Populations exposed to [more sunlight] have higher incidence of […] eye disease […], rais[ing] the level of uncertainty avoidance […] and […] facilitating […] collectivism.
2020: online exam cheating (作弊大师)
Bilena, Eren, and Alexander Matros. 2021. “Online Cheating amid COVID-19.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 182: 196–211. doi: 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.12.004.
I’ve taken one and only one exam under such proctoring: my job application online assessment in 2022 for a securities firm in Shanghai. And I was convicted of cheating, because my mobile phone camera resolution was not high enough, so my computer screen wasn’t very visible. Ridiculous.
2019: RCT intercourse (随机性交)
Loewenstein, George, Tamar Krishnamurti, Jessica Kopsic, and Daniel McDonald. 2015. “Does Increased Sexual Frequency Enhance Happiness?” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 116: 206–18. doi: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.021.
We […] randomly assigning some couples to increase their frequency of sex
2019 honourable mention: I Ching master (周易大师)
Fisman, Ray, Wei Huang, Bo Ning, Yue Pan, Jiaping Qiu, and Yongxiang Wang. 2023. “Superstition and Risk Taking: Evidence from ’Zodiac Year’ Beliefs in China.” Management Science 69 (9): 5174–88. doi: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.4594.
We focus on widely held beliefs in bad luck during one’s “zodiac year”, which occurs on a 12-year cycle around a person’s birth year, to study superstitions and risk taking.
I went to a seminar of this paper in 2019, and the author photoshopped a book with a title of “周易大师” (I Ching master) and the author being himself. It was very fun. I don’t think it’s a Management Science paper, but the seminar presentation was very good and very easy to follow.
One author of our 2024 best paper feng shui geomancer (算命先生) is the student of one author of this paper.
2019 honourable mention: fairy (舞法天女)
Ma, Chun, Fei Jiang, Feng-Tao Sheng, Yinchun Jiao, Guang-Jian Mei, and Feng Shi. 2019. “Design and Catalytic Asymmetric Construction of Axially Chiral 3,3’-Bisindole Skeletons.” Angewandte Chemie 58: 3014–20. doi: 10.1002/anie.201811177.
I thought chemistry would use more serious cover images…
2018: bridges (修桥)
Brooks, Wyatt, and Kevin Donovan. 2020. “Eliminating Uncertainty in Market Access: The Impact of New Bridges in Rural Nicaragua.” Econometrica 88 (5): 1965–97. doi: 10.3982/ECTA15828.
We build bridges that eliminate this risk [that] unpredictable flash floods … cut [villages] off from outside food, labor and product markets for days or weeks at a time.
A bridge costs $40,000, and they built six bridges.
In old working paper version, they wrote “[w]e build bridges that eliminate this risk”, but the published version above writes “[w]e study the impact of new bridges that eliminate this risk.” I love the old one. Sounds richer.