🚨 New paper: “The Bodily Scars of Legal Violence: Local immigration enforcement, state immigrant policy, & health inequality” 🚨 Forthcoming in @sfjournal.bsky.social w @ngraetz.bsky.social @atheendar.bsky.social & Robin Ortiz academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

Curious about using census microdata in your research? 📊 Join us for a webinar on IPUMS International, the world’s leading repository of harmonized census data. 🗓️ 12 Nov 2025 | 🕒 15:15–16:30 UK | 💻 Zoom Register: forms.gle/oqTDNU4Zpn2s... Hosted by the LSE Historical Economic Demography Group.

Excited to post a new working paper with @instrumenthull.bsky.social and Michal Kolesár: arxiv.org/abs/2511.03572 Will post a thread on it soon, but if you're interested in judge/examiner designs, I think you'll find this guide very helpful!

Update: today, 16.8 million people should have *full* SNAP benefits for November. They don't. Most states don't issue SNAP all at once. Some distribute SNAP up to the 28th day. This masks the scale of the problem: 42 million worrying about hunger in the richest country on earth. 🛟 🥗 🩺📊 #econsky

1/ New paper w/ @rourkeobrien.bsky.social, @clowenstein.bsky.social, and Elizabeth Bair showing how the Voting Rights Act had starkly different effects on #mortality by race and age -- and the potential importance of #status #threat in explaining these findings. www.nber.org/papers/w34421

Concentrations: Live! 18”x16” #painting #art 🎨

wild set of results from @atheendar.bsky.social

The 1975 Voting Rights Act extension lowered mortality for most nonwhite groups but raised it for white adults and older nonwhite men, patterns consistent with status threat, from Atheendar Venkataramani, Rourke O'Brien, Elizabeth F. Bair, and Christopher A. Lowenstein www.nber.org/papers/w34421

1/ New paper w/ @rourkeobrien.bsky.social, @clowenstein.bsky.social, and Elizabeth Bair showing how the Voting Rights Act had starkly different effects on #mortality by race and age -- and the potential importance of #status #threat in explaining these findings. www.nber.org/papers/w34421

Timely (grim) new NBER working paper: Households screened out of SNAP "suffer tangible downstream economic consequences. Specifically, we find that process-related denials increase debt and delinquencies, and decrease credit scores." www.nber.org/papers/w34434

I've learned so much working with George. He is so creative and committed to improving the economic security of patients of all ages. Awesome to see this

Just out in the New York Times: My op-ed on the limits of data-privacy and the need for democratic control in the age of AI. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/o... @nytimes.com @nytopinion.nytimes.com

I'm writing a book on this and why I think it's happening. Here are some forces at play that may explain our poor performance with life expectancy since the 1980s.

There is no way to understand what is happening around SNAP without talking about the deep and pervasive stigma against being poor in America.

Surveying the evidence on intergenerational mobility studies that use alternative measures with a focus on health, consumption and life satisfaction, from Jonathan Davis, Nathan Deutscher, and @bhashmazumder.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w34407

The people who need SNAP assistance come from varying circumstances. I spoke with a woman in rural Idaho who needed food stamps after her partner died by suicide when she was 11 weeks pregnant. And some have pregnancies complicated by gestational diabetes — which requires a strict diet to control.

Working with sociologists @courtneyboen.bsky.social and @rourkeobrien.bsky.social has been a game-changer for me. I feel like someday I might be able to really understand social science in a broad sense.

Herbert Simon on the internet and attention, 1996

Hard agree. People only are interested in the take-down. Even when those are published no one really reads the reply.

Hi! Since others are talking about my book, thought I'd share a little about it. The book is a love letter to women everywhere wondering why their time just isn't adding up. It turns out, it's not you! We are getting massively squeezed by structural changes! 🧵 www.amazon.com/Having-All-T...

"We conducted a host of sensitivity analyses and found our model was robust to a variety of assumptions and alternative specifications." Translation: "I released my imposter syndrome from its mental prison, dialed up my anxiety to max and imagined the ways I could be made to look like a fraud"

Examining the causal effects of cellphone bans in Florida on student test scores, suspensions, and absences, from David N. Figlio and Umut Özek www.nber.org/papers/w34388

Qualitative evidence of the impact of #malaria eradication in the U.S. on worker productivity, from a 1916 study: www.jstor.org/stable/45733...

This 1962 classic on #health as #human capital by Selma Mushkin in the JPE -- preceding the Grossman JPE paper by 10 years -- is a criminally underrated classic: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

I wrote a little thing about my research for the LSE Business Review. (I did not pick the title or image 🙃) blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessrevi...

Super interesting study. We found the exact opposite in the US setting: read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a... But there was substantial heterogeneity. These results from China underscore the fact that automation can be net good for health depending on how it affects labor markets.

Wow. This is the paper I have been waiting for. Mobile apps are brain rot, with meaningfully bad economic consequences for those who overuse them.

I'm posting this as a pre-committment device to complete this by the end of the year. 15 years in the making (with the second R&R 5 years in the making - we have no expectations).

Penn declines to sign the compact. Way to go!

Really proud of our team, disseminating findings on (1) the IGNITE study of concentrated investment in low-income neighborhoods (which is nearing completion) + (2) work on the drivers of life expectancy trends in the US (w/ @wrigleyfield.bsky.social @rourkeobrien.bsky.social @astokespop.bsky.social)

A North Carolina police alternatives program diverts nonviolent 911 calls to civilians, reducing criminalization and increasing community engagement, with evidence of fiscal sustainability, from Bocar A. Ba, Patton Chen, Tony Cheng, Martha C. Eies, and Justin E. Holz www.nber.org/papers/w34344

In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial conducted in Uganda, the use of permethrin-treated baby wraps significantly reduced the incidence of clinical malaria among young children. Full trial results and Research Summary: nej.md/4msFwwX #MedSky #PedSky #IDSky

This is a remarkable portrait of how one can dive into life despite physical fragility, or because of it.

Through segregation, violence, redlining, and sundown towns, Black families traveled. How did they know where to go? What places were safe? What places were welcoming? Search the data on this important part of American history: greenbookproject.osu.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

I hope people find this generative. There are a lot of policy effects that are larger and quicker than what we would expect (based on what the policy actually does). www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

A new NBER working paper by @jscottclayton.bsky.social and colleagues shows that about two-thirds of the unexplained gap in post-college earnings by family income may be due to challenges in finding that first job. Family connections and resources matter.

What is the sports equivalent of this? Ohtani to the Dodgers? Did MIT get draft picks?

I've made a research career out of pointing out problems. Sometimes this research tells us something new about society (and thats good). Sometimes not (and that's mostly useless). I've offered few solutions. I like maybe 1 out of 4 papers I've written. What is the point of all this work?

New podcast episode where I talk about what's going on with mortality in the US A wide-ranging discussion of what happened before the pandemic & what's happened since then; racial disparities and how to get our heads around their scope; why things might be going so badly for Millennials & Gen Zers

Is there a tool to assess risk of bias that economists commonly use or like? Most tools I've seen seem to be built around medical studies (whether experimental or quasi-experimental). Some elements seem relevant but many others less so.

(1) banger (2) i wish non-economists would realise just how much time each economics paper takes to write (because of our norms about how thorough each paper has to be)

I did a five month experiment where I signed off all social media. I felt smarter + less angry and distracted.

This @pennldi.bsky.social post discusses recent Op-Ed: ldi.upenn.edu/our-work/res... ↪️ Public Policies, Social Narratives, and Population Health in @NEJM.org doi.org/10.1056/NEJM... by PARC Research Associate Atheendar Venkataramani @atheendar.bsky.social Read more below:

Today's Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the discoverers of regulatory T-cells. How could this discovery about our immune systems change the world? Here is one possible way: leading to treatments for terrible neurological diseases. (1/3)

Why do people think this website is good? No one is engaging. There is little discussion. It's just all of us saying stuff in parallel.

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

"Full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergartenaged children in this time frame."

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, helped define the field of translational bioinformatics and inspired countless colleagues and trainees. He will be remembered for his brilliant mind, infectious optimism, generous mentorship.

Missing data means AI will be as dumb as we are? Interesting paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.12388

Good history helps us avoid nostalgia. The great article “Economic History and the Historians” (2020) by Anne McCants reminds me why nostalgia can get us in trouble. Two of her examples are very relevant to today: vaccinations and the popular narrative of some economic “good old days.”