Yesterday, in a blatant show of nepotism, I highlighted some of the papers being presented by job marketeers from Berkeley, my PhD alma mater. I see no reason to stop there, and so highlight a few more.

Vikram Pathania has not one but two job market papers. In one (with Saurabh Bhargava), he examines the link between cell phone use and car accidents in the US using a clever natural experiment: the change in the cost of calling at 9 pm on weekdays. Do accidents rise between 8:55 and 9:05? According to the evidence–not at all.

We first document a jump in call volume of about 20-30% at pricing thresholds for two samples of callers. [But] we find no evidence for a relative rise in crashes after 9pm on weekdays from 2002-2005. The upper bound of our estimates rules out increases in all crashes larger than 1.0% and increases larger than 1.3% for fatal crashes.

Vikram’s second paper sticks out at a right angle from his previous one. It looks at the long run impact of birth-year droughts on the later height of women in India. His finding: droughts at birth increase heights of women among the poorest groups. The intuition: smaller and weaker female children are allowed to die.

Finally, Matias Cattaneo is a brilliant econometrician who I can tell will be inventing lots of fantastic tools for us applied econometricians to, well, apply. An example is his job market paper on estimating multi-valued treatment effects. Not every program or treatment is simply on or off, like taking a pill, or having a cell phone price switch automatically at 9pm. Others, like cigarettes smoked, medical dosage, or drought severity can take on a range of values. Mattias tells us how to estimate these effects more efficiently.