So excited to start my sabbatical year at Caltech! Thanks to the legendary + incredibly kind
@CFCamerer
for inviting me.
The journey, the grad school, the tenure .. it was all worth it to be able to return to my alma mater as a faculty member. I'm honored. 🙏🏼🙏🏼
We should do hackathons in economics. E.g. a bunch of researchers get together + analyze a dataset for a couple of days, and present and share the results. Maybe this could work for theory too?
Would be a nice break from the 100-page paper / 6-year publication lag equilibrium.
Yup. I almost died in childbirth at a conference and the profession has never stopped punishing me for being derailed on tenure track.
It's ironic that Goldin won the Nobel prize for studying women, childbirth, and job flexibility, but it still feels like no one is listening 👂🏼
Fewer women reported being satisfied with the climate in the economics profession in 2023 compared to five years ago, according to a new survey via
@economics
One thing I wonder about is how much spam phone calls have destroyed the social contract. We don't answer the phone anymore, don't answer polls, surveys, contact tracing.
The FCC could have easily put a stop to them decades ago, and I wonder what outsized toll that's taken.
It's amazing how much my status dropped when I went from MIT student to mid-ranked professor. Which makes no statistical or logical sense 🙄
We focus too much on affiliation + not enough on subject matter expertise, and that harms knowledge creation. Let's do better!
After all these years, I'm still amazed at some people's behavior at conferences:
a) Some just ignore you if you don't have the "right" affiliation on your name tag
b) Some just leave you in the middle of a conversation as soon as they spot a more important person 🤷♂️🤣
1/3
My paper with Feng Liu +
@talgross
+
@ProfNoto
+
@ray_kluender
about the 2005 bankruptcy reform is forthcoming in the AER! 🎉🔥
With this ambitious Biden-Warren reform plan, our paper might be relevant in the next few years 👇🏽👇🏽
It's been a brutal path to tenure. I'm so excited to start giving back and paying it forward. 🙏🏽💝
Thanks to so many amazing friends on
#EconTwitter
for helping me endow the Hervey Scholarship at Philander Smith, a tiny + mighty HBCU in Little Rock, Arkansas
Life goal unlocked!
Why does our profession denigrate data work? 🤔
Carefully collecting a dataset + measuring outcomes are just as laborious + intellectual as writing a model or designing an IV
It feels like some of the recent scandals are partially the result of this bias. I hope this changes 😊
Since Ben Bernanke asked me about this in a seminar last week, I've been completely obsessed 📈
Can't believe I missed this story - business starts increased dramatically in 2020! 👇🏽
Also true in some other countries 👇🏽
Thread 🧵
A couple years ago, I stopped reading the NBER WP email and journal table of content alerts because it was too painful to see the great work everyone else was doing, when I couldn't work due to family health issues.
It felt like my whole career + life was circling the drain 🚽🧻
Excited to organize the next NBER household finance conference on innovative data with Scott Baker + Steve Zeldes!
This year we're focusing on household transaction data. What are the most exciting new papers, applications, industry + policy topics, etc you want to see? 👀👀
Wow, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession does not beat around the bush 🤯
From the latest CSWEP news: "Focus on Tenured Women Leaving Academia"
- Why Are Women Leaving?
- Gendered Devaluation and Retention
+ more ...
My brave, eminently reputable + cautious former CFPB colleague speaks out.
I worked on the payday rule and I support Jon Lanning. RT your support. This fight is essential to the integrity of government economists. You should care.💪🏽📊🤓
#SupportJonLanning
Don't miss the NBER Household Finance meeting Dec 10 @ 10am ET!
I'm co-organizing with
@JoeVavra
+ Steve Zeldes. Everyone can livestream. Brand new papers on inequality + lifecycle finances + everything you must know on credit bureau + industry data 👀👀
What I really need is a podcast that reads me the papers I'm supposed to be discussing / refereeing, so I can do referee reports while jogging / sleeping.
So excited to join the JP Morgan Chase Institute as a fellow, working on housing markets with the amazing Makada Henry-Nickie (
@mhnickie
)
The Institute has my highest regard as the gold standard for producing rigorous academic + policy research in service of the public good😀💝
OMG I've wanted for a long time to write a research paper about the economics of trailer parks. It finally came to me to call the paper "Same Trailer, Different Park."
This has to happen now - who's in? 😆😆🤠🤠
If you're a finance professor, please check out the panel on diversity in our profession from the NBER meeting this week with Paola Sapienza + Pietro Veronesi + Victoria Ivashina 👀👀
Program:
Stream (start at 7:15):
🎉NEW PAPER ALERT🎉
Bankruptcy and the COVID-19 Crisis with Jeyul Yang +
@profiverson
+
@ray_kluender
TLDR: Household and SME bankruptcies 📉📉 since mid-March, reversing the historical relationship between bankruptcy and unemployment in the time series +cross section
Thread:
As long as I'm still here, I will never stop fighting for women, parents, and pregnancy accommodation in academia.
We have such a long way to go. Stay strong y'all! 💝💪🏼
Tenure track wasn't made for people to have children, much less for anything to happen to you on the way. We need structural change + individual change from top to bottom.
I never want anyone else to be chewed up + dehumanized by the system the way I have been. 💝💪🏽
Building on the success of this tweet (twitter is weird), I think there's a missing market for dataset-specific conferences
If I organized a virtual conference for peeps working on, say credit bureau data, who would be down? (+ intro for those who *want* to work with said data)
💵NEW-ish Paper Alert! 💵
The Effects of Disclosure and Enforcement on Payday Lending in Texas - with Kathleen Burke
TLDR: Disclosures work, enforcement matters. Come for the paper summary, stay for the disquisition on payday lending! 🧵👇🏽🤓
Paper:
Super excited to share my latest NBER WP "To Pay or Autopay? Fintech Innovation and Credit Card Payments"!
I study a fintech servicer that employs cashflow underwriting, a cool new technology that combines deposit + credit data for risk prediction. 💡🧵
I once worked for the federal government, and since then I've been morbidly fascinated by the organizational economics of bureaucracy. (Ok fine I'm also watching Loki).
Idle musings: 👩🏻💻
Behaviorally motivated disclosures and city-level supply restrictions significantly reduce payday lending in Texas — and enforcement matters, from
@jialanw
and Kathleen Burke
🚨Urgent request to household finance researchers🚨
The CFPB has proposed "open banking" rules under Section 1033. The current proposal would ban much of our research agenda using anonymized bank + credit card transaction data
Please consider signing our comment letter 👇🏽👇🏽 1/4
Please consider signing if you're an academic researcher who is concerned about this issue.
Deadline to sign: December 29th, 2023 at 5 pm et
Comment, form to sign, and proposed rule:
2/2
Spending time coding up consumer overdraft fees from anonymized bank account data lately.
You can just watch people run out of money right before payday and get hit over and over at $25, $35 a pop in a cascade of pain. We can do better than this, y'all.
😐🤔💸💸
Emotional homecoming to present "To Pay or Autopay" at the CFPB conference 🥰
4 years at the Bureau in the 2010s implementing Dodd Frank, 8 years in academia getting tenure amidst personal tragedy. Nice to know you can still come home 💝
Link to my talk:
Check out my presentation tomorrow 1/6 at 10:15am CST at the
#ASSA2023
! 👀👀
My paper: To Pay or Autopay? Fintech Innovation and Credit Card Payments
Session: The Fintech Industry, chaired by Caleb Stroup with four other great papers
,
The tenure process is kind of like being pregnant .. a shameful secret you keep until you announce and are universally celebrated or something bad happens and we never speak of it again. 🤰🏻❓❔
Similarly lengthy too, and perhaps both may make you want to barf 😅🥴🤷🏻♀️
#tenurejokes
Happy Chinese New Year 恭喜发财! 🧧
May your noodles be long 🍜, may your rice be glutinous 🍡, and may your mandarins be orange🍊.
Assorted recipes below 👇🏽👇🏽
Here's a summary of what I've learned about racism in economics in the last week.
TLDR: we're an absolute dumpster fire travesty. History is shifting rapidly and we cannot afford to let science progress one funeral at a time anymore 🗑️🔥
What did I miss?
#BlackEconomistsMatter
Raise your hand if you're the target audience for this new show on Netflix: Sandra Oh plays a beleaguered department chair at a northeastern university. 🙋🏻♀️👀
I'll wait while you binge the whole thing while pretending to prep lectures. 🪑🎓
🔥🔥 Young Firms, Old Capital:
@ProfSongMa
+ Murfin + Pratt
Age of physical capital shapes investment decisions by young and old firms. Capital reallocation is geographically localized.
#SFSCavalcade
#SoInteresting
👀👀 📈📉
Why isn't Joan Robinson, the inventor of monopsony, more famous?🤔
It's so dismaying how many times women and minorities who were giants in their field are willfully forgotten by history. 😒
Also apparently Marshall was a gross misogynist. 😩
Hey y'all, I need your help! Please RT + consider giving 🙏🏽💝
I started a new scholarship to honor my middle school teacher, Dr. Lloyd Hervey
@PhilanderSmith
, an HBCU in Little Rock, AR. Thread below 👇🏽
To give, visit this link + select the Hervey fund:
I learned from
@Renee_B_Adams
that "queen bee syndrome" is the academic term for when women undermine the success of other women.
Perhaps when there's room for more of us, we can support each other + stop pulling the ladder up behind us 💝💝
#RepresentationMatters
#WomenInFinance
Two tenured
#WomenInFinance
fighting the good (and difficult, and lonely, and exhausting, and distracting, and demoralizing) fight for equality in our profession. Nevertheless, she persisted. 💪🏼💝
With the awesome
@Renee_B_Adams
!
@drlisadcook
@stef_alba
@JHWeissmann
A silent ocean of APs rationally never start these agendas because we know we would never get tenure, could never find coauthors, would be alone out there in space. Those that did it anyway and hit the wall are not here to tell their stories. There's a hidden graveyard out there.
An under-reported aspect of the COVID-19 crisis is the huge effect of foreclosure moratoria. See below from Equifax + MBA. This also suggests that we'll be in big trouble without massive mortgage mods.😐
Someone most be working on this? Does anyone know of papers? 🙏🏽🙏🏽
@gk_ben
@AEAInformation
Here's my presentation on open issues and new frontiers in credit bureau data at
#ASSA2023
for those not in New Orleans.
We'll post more materials + updates on our guide to credit bureau data in the near future!
Have you been wondering what's been going on with payday loans during the pandemic? (you're a nerd 🤓)
Loan volumes are down, repayment up, consistent with salutory effects of government support throughout consumer financial markets.
Check out this nice summary quoting me 😉
Payday lending levels dropped during 2020 and early 2021 because of a combination of federal government relief and, well, people not having paydays. So what happens now that a lot of that government support goes away? Here's my look at that question:
So excited for this to come to fruition 😀
Part of my yearslong agenda to promote careful measurement, public goods creation, and the status of data work in economics + finance.
Huge credit goes to my all-star coauthor team for laying down the wisdom - I've learned so much! 🤩
We have a new
@nberpubs
paper on credit reporting data, with practical guidance on using these data.
This paper is commissioned for JEL. Any feedback in the next week is especially helpful!
Paper
Online Appendix for data users
Your professor might be an elder millennial if ...
She continues posting the Snoop Dogg syllabus cameo even after being told numerous times it is not as entertaining as she thinks.
As long as I have a teaching license I will die on this hill! 🤺🌄
🏮 Brand new paper alert🏮
How Much Do Small Businesses Rely on Personal Credit? (with Julia Fonseca)
Job candidates: Apply to UIUC for a chance to access the Gies Consumer and SME Credit Panel (GCCP) Julia and I created for this + future papers! 👇🏽👇🏽
🏮Important DONATE TODAY🏮 (I'm gonna un-quietly stop using police light emoji now, this lantern works)
I'll match up to $500 donated TODAY to the Sadie Collective to support black women in econ. I'm also happy to mentor any economists of color who'd have me.
RT+send receipts!
Raise your hand if you're still using your ugly-ish grad school CV template🙋🏻♀️. To my eternal despair, I mis-spelled "Massachusetts" on mine for a decade and no one noticed.
If anyone has a svelte + sexy CV template please feel free to share 💝🙏🏽
The
#NBERSI2021
starts today!
No Sonesta buffet but lots of livestreams so everyone can join 👇🏽👇🏽
Check out the corporate finance program today and tomorrow 👇🏽👇🏽
I left academia for four years and came back. I've been on the job market several times, and have done better every time.
Don't let them tell you you can't come back.
There's a deeper labor market story here about the decline in administrative assistants. I personally would rather be paid less and have more help with admin work.
At the end of a teaching semester, are there any finance professors left who can still remember which one is Blackrock and which one is Blackstone?🤔🤣🥴
#TenureTrackLife
#ProfLife
If anyone wants to work with me on a set of policy proposals we can send around for traction on this issue, feel free to reach out 🙂
Tenure rollbacks are not a panacea. Teaching relief is spotty + I don't even think we have systematic data on it. 👇🏽👇🏽
I got few leads, so here's a crowdsourced spreadsheet documenting maternity teaching relief policies for finance and economics tenure-track faculty.
My ♥️ goes out to all pregnant women right now. Please RT and fill out the info for your university!🙏🏾🙏🏾
Wow 3/3 at the AEA next year 😲🎉!
Stay tuned for brand new work on unemployment insurance fraud, intra-household credit spillovers, and role of attorneys + bankruptcy racial disparities with
@paulgp
+
@danascoot
For those who didn't get in, I feel you. It's pretty random 🤷🏻♀️💝
I'm not sure if everyone realizes this, but the notorious Chicago combative seminar style DIRECTLY leads to women and under-represented minorities quitting economics. We have turned a blind eye for too long because we are survivorship-biased sample.
my views, not pronouncements by the JPE and most certainly not the
@UChicago
or my department: a bastion of free speech, where we disagree all the time and where surely a considerable number of my colleagues passionately disagree with things I said. I said what I said because
PSA to academics talking to the media:
News outlets may sometimes leave out authors, and *may* (I have no evidence on this) be biased toward mentioning big-name affiliations in print.
I now explicitly ask journalists to cite all authors equally. And they do! 📰✔️
Twenty two years later, we all have tenure 😁. So proud to have been a part of this team + the Adami lab.
My passion for policy was the stronger force, but I'll always be a scientist at heart 💝🤓🦠📈🖖
@CharlesOfria
@ChristophAdami
@ClausWilke
@RELenski
Hey y'all, noob question.
This year I'm implementing my first RDD, where origination date (similar to birth date) is the running variable.
What's the state of the art? Hints, pro tips, canonical papers I should follow? 🤓 (hints on what I can do to save democracy also accepted)
Scott Baker + Constantine Yannelis asked me to help them put out this call for papers on Taxes and Government Lending @ the Journal of Corporate Finance! 👀👀
Deadline: 12/15
@paulgp
@florianederer
And let me just add that I think I speak for at least 50% of the live audience in being deeply moved and impressed by Florian's performance.
So many of us were viscerally affected and near tears at seeing the statements our colleagues make on the site. Powerful + masterful.
Sorry y'all, but I think the best we can hope for is 2021 being only equally bad as 2020. The pain is already baked in.
What we're fighting for now is 2022-25.
We lose a lot of talent in this field not to lack of hard work or brilliant ideas, but to a challenging culture and lack of support for people facing difficult circumstances + who feel like they're on their own.
We need to do better. 💪🏽💡
Super excited about the NBER Household Finance program on 12/10! 📢
Disclaimer: can you remember a time when I wasn't super excited at a household finance conference? I'm *that person* on Zoom😃😁 See you there.
#NBERSI
Household Finance recap
Emergent theme: Unless we actively counteract it, many retail financial markets seem to tend toward inequality ☹️. The poor subsidize the rich 💸.
Program:
Stream now before it's gone:
Meta-🧵:
A working group of finance and law scholars, including me+
@profiverson
+
@katewaldock
+
@ProfSongMa
have just sent a letter to Congress urging SME bankruptcy reform to help them cope with the crisis 👇🏾👇🏾. Let's hope they act today to save small businesses.
I hope small businesses can survive this crisis without being forced into bankruptcy. But, inevitably, some will file, and they'll need extra time to reestablish themselves.
Today a group of bankruptcy profs led by
@BrookGotberg
sent a letter to Congress:
👀👀 Provocative thoughts from Tariq Fancy, former BlackRock chief investment officer of sustainable investing:
"ESG funds have little impact on emissions + greenwash the economic system. The entire system doesn’t work. It doesn’t pay to be responsible"
True story:
As a teenager in Arkansas with no exposure to any Ivy League universities, I refused to apply to any Ivy League universities because I thought they were "snobby."
That still explains 100% of who I am today 😂😂
College decision letters start arriving this month
Soon I will be commemorating the 39th anniversary
of my rejection
by MIT and Swarthmore
Not that I hold a grudge
What guts me the most is talking to so many rookies (men, women, LGBTQ) recently who are being harmed by hurtful comments made in-person and online.
We are STILL crushing the spirit + kindness out of young people the same way I was and I am so ashamed and disappointed. 😞😭
There's also a deeper story about convexity in professional occupations that Claudia Goldin has told so well.
If you're a professional who asks to do 1/2 your job for 1/2 the pay to smooth life shocks, you will be mocked like you have three heads. 👾👽
LOL - congratulations household finance, we are a field (in the conference submission form)!
Who's planning to go to the big finance conferences this summer?
Shocked + gutted that my colleague Tim Johnson passed away suddenly this weekend
What a dedicated colleague + teacher. Our cohort religiously followed his empirical asset pricing course when he taught at MIT.
I respected him + he was always kind. Rest in peace Tim 💝💝
It breaks my heart to share that our beloved friend and highly respected
@giesbusiness
colleague, Tim Johnson, passed away unexpectedly on 12/31.
He was the perfect colleague. An amazing researcher & teacher. An even greater friend. Always kind and wise.
We miss you, Tim.
To everyone who is earning their PhD this spring:
It's been a really tough year / 5 / 6 / 10 years. I feel you. Congratulations and welcome to the priesthood.
🥳🥳🎉🎉👩🏻🎓👩🏼🎓👨🏽🎓👩🏿🎓🧙🏼♂️🧙🏿
I have four papers on the program at the
#ASSA2022
. One kindergartener, one pandemic toddler, and two newborns - they're so cute! 🐣🐣📰📰
First one starts NOW, Jan 7 @ 12:15 ET. How Much Do Small Businesses Rely on Personal Credit? with Julia Fonseca