Saturday Links

Saturday links

Well, it is officially my last week before I head to Europe, and I'm thrilled to share my travel plans with you. I'll be spending a week in Madrid for CodeChella, and we have exactly TWO STUDENT TICKETS LEFT (88 out of 90 tickets are now sold)! Get yours while supplies last!

After Madrid, I'll be in Turin, Italy, for a month as a faculty in residence at Collegio Carlo Alberto and the University of Torino (home to Vilfredo Pareto). Then, it's off to Scotland for a week in Stirling, where I'll be conducting a workshop on unconfoundedness and IV for grad students across the UK. Finally, I'll spend three weeks in the Basque Country, staying in a hotel in San Sebastián instead of searching for an Airbnb. After that, I'll be back home in the states, but in Chicago not Texas for the Northwestern Causal Inference Main and Advanced workshops.

This week's "Saturday Links" includes a mix of fascinating reads. There's news about OpenAI's new ChatGPT-4o model, a couple of articles on the effect of #MeToo on junior female and male economists' output, updates on cannabis and hemp-based THC legalization, and recent departures at OpenAI. Plus, sine random topics like the rise and fall of Kodak, the LDS Church's new missionary regulations, the evolving landscape of medical ethics, a variety artificial intelligence stuff, and more. Thank you all for your support and for tuning in every week. Enjoy the links, and have a great weekend!

Here’s one by Daniel Susskind in a talk he gave last November on how AI is going to transform labor. By now, we have like a dozen of these. I may need to feed them all into ChatGPT and just get a summary.

PNAS opinion piece on how AI is moving to the frontier of behavioral sciences.

Older article by Card and Dellavigna, “9 Facts about Top Journals in Economics” in the JEL 2013. Haven’t read this in a long time I realized when I saw it. I clicked “select all” then “copy” then “paste” into ChatGPT-4o window and asked Cosmos to load it in and summarize the 9 facts for me as I didn’t see them just spelled out in one place. Here’s what Cosmos gave me in less than 2 seconds. Astonishing.

1. Increase in Submissions: Submissions to the top-five economics journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. This increase was observed across all journals except the Journal of Political Economy (JPE).

2. Decrease in Published Articles: Despite the rise in submissions, the number of articles published annually in these journals declined from around 400 in the late 1970s to about 300 in 2012. This led to a drop in acceptance rates from 15% to 6%.

3. Dominance of AER: The American Economic Review (AER) increased its share of publications among the top-five journals from 25% in the 1970s to 40% recently, making it significantly more influential in the field.

4. Longer Papers: Published papers have become almost three times longer on average compared to the 1970s. This contributes to the limited space available for articles despite an increase in the total number of pages published.

5. More Coauthors: The average number of authors per paper rose from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012. This trend partly offsets the decline in the number of published articles by increasing the number of researchers involved.

6. High Citation Counts: Papers in top-five journals are highly cited. For instance, papers published in the late 1990s have a median of 200 Google Scholar citations, indicating their significant impact.

7. Stable Journal Rankings: The relative ranking of the top journals by citations has remained stable over time, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), which rose from fourth place to first over the past three decades.

8. Impact of Paper Length and Coauthors on Citations: Longer papers and those with more coauthors tend to receive higher citation counts. This trend suggests that the quality and thoroughness of research, reflected in length and collaborative efforts, are recognized by the academic community.

9. Field-Specific Citation Trends: While the distribution of articles across different fields has remained stable, the citation rates for these fields have changed. Recently published papers in Development and International Economics have seen rising citation rates, while those in Econometrics and Theory have seen declines.