Presentations at the AEA

I presented at this year’s AEA in a session on automation. Apart from the papers in that session, I also enjoyed the following:

• “Lifecycle of Inventors”
• Susan Athey presented “Online Intermediaries and the Consumption of Polarized and Inaccurate News During the 2016 Presidential Election” in this session. They tried to estimate what the political leanings of media were that people consumed during the 2016 Presidential Election. They document that most of the media is left of center. But the strongest result is that they show a lack of reliable right-wing media. She explained that if they hadn’t coded Fox News as at least moderately accurate, then there would be no such right-wing media outlet.
• “Automation and the Workforce”
• John Horton’s “Labor Market Equilibration: Evidence from Uber” (pdf).
• “Trade and Innovation”
• “Shopping in Macroeconomics” (best session title!)
• “Credit Booms, Aggregate Demand, and Financial Crises”, included a new paper by Matthew Baron, Emil Verner and Wei Xiong. They painstakingly digitized historical bank equity returns to create a new financial crisis indicator for 47 countries since 1800.