Paper of the week (POW) this week definitely goes to N. Gregory Mankiw for firing totally reasonable and called for shots at "modern monetary theory".

The paper can be found at this link and is also reproduced below.

"In the end, my study of MMT led me to find some common ground with its proponents without drawing all the radical inferences they do. I agree that the government can always print money to pay its bills. But that fact does not free the government from its intertemporal budget constraint. I agree that the economy normally operates with excess capacity, in the sense that the economy’s output often falls short of its optimum. But that conclusion does not mean that policymakers only rarely need to worry about inflationary pressures. I agree that, in a world of pervasive market power, government price setting might improve private price setting as a matter of economic theory. But that deduction does not imply that actual governments in actual economies can increase welfare by inserting themselves extensively in the price-setting process. "

Paper of the week (POW) this week goes to "Designing Difference in Difference Studies: Best Practices for Public Health Policy Research" by Coady Wing and coauthors published in the Annual Review of Public Health. 

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It contains a lot of useful reminders on best practices for empirical strategies that rely on difference-in-difference estimators.

Very helpful! Used it this morning in exploring some preliminary results. 

"Persistent Political Engagement: Social Interactions and the Dynamics of Protest Movements " by Leonardo Brusztyn and numerous coauthors came up while doing some research this week, and is certainly now the paper of the week (POW).

A copy of the abstract, the thrilling bits of which are in bold: 

"We test whether participation in one protest within a political movement increases subsequent protest attendance, and why. To identify an effect of protest participation, we randomly, indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into participation in an antiauthoritarian protest. To identify the effects of social interactions, we randomize the intensity of this treatment across major-cohort cells. We find that experimentally-induced protest participation is significantly associated with protest attendance one year later, though political beliefs and preferences are unaffected. Persistent political engagement is greatest among individuals in the cells with highest treatment intensity, suggesting that social interactions sustained persistent political engagement."

A working paper version that is publicly available through Google may be found below.