🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share. Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*. I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind. github.com/bretthollenb...

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Demand for LLMs: Descriptive Evidence on Substitution, Market Expansion, and Multi-Homing A key question for the business of AI is the extent to which LLMs are differentiated from each other. I use data from OpenRouter to take a first look. andreyfradkin.com/assets/deman...

Congratulations to Frank Verboven (@frankverboven.bsky.social) for being appointed as AER coeditor, handling papers in empirical IO and related fields. His term starts on July 1. I’m delighted to have him on our team. @aeajournals.bsky.social #EconSky

A new episode of Justified Posteriors just dropped. We discuss the recent papers of Chad Jones about existential risk and AI safety investment. Check it out! open.substack.com/pub/empiricr...

Great point from @andreyfradkin.bsky.social: as a movement’s policies become more incoherent and harmful, the quality of “experts” who are willing to publicly defend it decreases precipitously.

It was fun engaging with the EconCS community!

In the latest episode of our podcast, Justified Posteriors, we discuss whether interest rates should rise in anticipation of AGI (as predicted by @basilhalperin.com). Our priors are quite different! Do check it out. empiricrafting.substack.com/p/if-the-rob...

Can report that Deepseek writes perfectly serviceable referee reports of empirical papers submitted to Management Science. Note, I will still write my own, but you should update accordingly and ask it to provide feedback on your paper prior to submission.

Perhaps the best David Lynch appearance was on Louie. "Get that belly moving son or you're out." www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlEJ...

It's a good time to mention that Seth Benzell and I have a podcast called Justified Posteriors discussing the economics of AI and other technologies. Our latest episode considers @timobres.bsky.social's paper on AI and Aggregate Growth. empiricrafting.substack.com/p/beyond-tas...

EC 2025 will be held at Stanford from July 7-12. Itai Ashlagi and I are the chairs. The abstract deadline is February 3, and the paper deadline is February 10. The scope is inclusive of many topics across CS, economics, and operations research. Submit your best work!

NBER Digital Economics and AI meeting at Stanford. Deadline December 16. www.nber.org/conferences/...

It's the best time ever to experiment with new coding tools. Coding with o1-preview is very effective for hard research tasks (structural modeling with pyTorch, functions for custom latex tables, computing Hessians). 4o/Claude do well on simpler data cleaning with just a little guidance.

Recently read Boom, the new Stripe book about bubbles. It wasn't a great book, but it did give a lens into what areas of academia influence discourse in Silicon Valley. Research in innovation is influential, but research in macro and finance is not. Any theories for why? press.stripe.com/boom

This is a nice paper! Explains why home exchange networks can exist in equilibrium.

Why doesn't Boston have any Michelin star restaurants, but Atlanta does? youtu.be/-ccVaNWow6E?...

Greg Lewis and I wrote a speculative substack post about what commerce will be like with AI shopping agents. We discuss vertical vs horizontal agents, the role of advertising, and how business should adapt. Feedback much appreciated! open.substack.com/pub/empiricr...

Economics research hot take. We're entering a golden era of structural estimation. Gen AI tools make it so easy to translate models into code and to optimize computation that the formerly painful parts of structural aren't so bad anymore.

Sup econsky. I recently started a blog, and have a new post about how we should be doing more sci-fi economics. open.substack.com/pub/empiricr...

You may try to bargain with statistical power, but statistical power does not bargain back.

Small way in which AI is making me more productive. I asked Google's Bard: "Find all of the uber and lyft receipts using gmail from my recent trips to chicago and toronto" and it successfully retrieved the correct emails. Very impressed.

Do any of you read pop econ books in addition to papers? Any thoughts on The Price of Time or on Debt: The First 5000 Years? 📉📈