this was good, actually www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

Striking new work on how gangs shape economic development in El Salvador, Melnikov et al. in Econometrica Stunted development in gang-controlled territory driven by labor mobility limits: harder to commute/work outside territory, smaller labor mkt, less specialization —> doi.org/10.3982/ECTA...

📢 #CallforPapers: Public Finance Conference on Future-Oriented Public Policy 🗓️ 11.-12. Mai 2026 am #ZEW Mannheim 💬 Keynotes: Alessia Russo (Universität Padua) und Roel Beetsma (Universität Amsterdam) Einreichungen bis 15. Februar 2026 Weitere Infos: zew.de/VA4814/?twt=1

“Given a significant number of [US commercial ships] are beneficially owned by Danish operators, and are integral to the US Maritime Security Program it may appear that Denmark possesses a rather potent “rare earth” of its own” Danish weaponized interdependence, anyone?

What’s the quote for temporarily embarrassed billionaires

📢 It’s Time to Tax Billionaires! Panel discussion + book presentation with @gabrielzucman.bsky.social With: @steuergerecht.bsky.social, @spd.de, @fesonline.bsky.social, @taxobservatory.bsky.social, among others 📅 27 Jan 2026, 17:30–19:00 📍FES, Berlin 👉 shorturl.at/NIMfS

Under President Trump, the EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses. It’s counter to the agency’s mission statement, which says has a core responsibility to protect human health and the environment. nyti.ms/3Loch27

Things are so bleak right now, so I really appreciate @corinnelow.com letting me know I’m the subject of a legitimate SAT question. (A life goal I didn’t know I had!) Sometimes you need things just make you smile just because. And I needed that.

We are looking for a project manager for our new Global Economic Transformation initiative at Harvard. Please spread the word. Details here. careers.harvard.edu/job/project-...

New year, new op-ed from me and Vincent Reina on the need for aggressive multifaceted action to address the housing affordability crisis: It’s not simply a zoning story! thehill.com/opinion/fina...

I think this is a point from @economeager.bsky.social post that we may read but not take to heart, especially wrt ASSA. Lots of stories of bad behavior on a large scale, but we all rarely exercise what we have to make the profession a better place every day

I think the appearance of a “6-7” joke in an #ASSA2026 session on time-use data might be the final nail in the meme’s coffin.

I wrote about the endless temptation successful people feel to justify and feel justified in a clearly toxic system. Happy new year. open.substack.com/pub/rottenan...

These are 10 of my favourite #UrbanEconomics & #SpatialEconomics articles published in academic journals in 2025, continuing with a tradition started in 2018 (order is alphabetical by first author, no ranking implied):

I did not plan it this way, but I have a book on the dollar coming out on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and the whole theme of the book is that the dollar is not in fact 250 years old www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502...

*Grittiness, jawn, batteries, and Elgses need not apply

More seriously, as most readers here know I helped draft the CA billionaire tax initiative text and you just can't get out of it by setting up a couple of LLCs in Florida. We have thought about how to block these fake paper moves for 4 years.

There are 9?! Carols and Lessons?!? -The boys, when I said I was turning on a Christmas Eve program this morning

And you can even meet my niece, who will be getting her first exposure to economics research

C'est offert à Noël à chaque membre de ma famille et de ma belle famille. Et de ma fille de 11 ans. Rien a foutre.

Self-promotion is weird, but here we are: My coauthors and I have a new, very changed draft of our working paper: Latency and the Look-Ahead Bias in Trade and Quote Data papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In our new working paper on tax holidays, @danielhemel.bsky.social and I say that "refund" policies like this one are so obviously stupid that we couldn't find many real-world examples. Guess we'll have to revise that paragraph!

NYC considering reviving SROs — a great idea that restores the missing lowest rung on the housing ladder; a new bill would allow ~100 sq ft rooms w/ shared facilities, replacing a stock that’s fallen to 30–40k today from 100k+ in the early 1900s www.6sqft.com/new-bill-wou...

You can still find property level climate risk scores on Redfin Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

There are those in the development sector that try to romanticize rural life, but most people really are happier living around lots of other people voxdev.org/topic/migrat...

📢 Don't miss our joint Paris Tax Workshop on December 5th! 🎤 İrem Güçeri ( @blavatnikschool.bsky.social ) & Sébastien Laffitte (THEMA & EUTO) 🕛 12:00–15:00 CET 📍 @pse.bsky.social & zoom 🌐 Language: English Registration: www.taxobservatory.eu/event/paris-...

I appreciate the WSJ following up on this story, which is already in danger of being one of many forgotten scandals in elite academia.

The next online installment of ESTIMATE: The Reduced Form is coming on Dec 11-12. I've continued to unify and expand regression-based methods to apply to exit, non-binary treatments, DDD, discrete outcomes, and more. All proceeds to the MSU economics PhD program. econ.msu.edu/academics/es...

Keys & Mulder build dataset to study homeowners insurance using over 74 million premiums from 2014–2024 inferred from mortgage escrow payments. Premium increases are capitalized into home values, reducing home price growth by over $40,000 in the most exposed zip codes. www.nber.org/papers/w32579

CSWEP strongly condemns Larry Summers’ behavior as revealed in the email correspondence with the late Jeffrey Epstein. While abuse of power in the economics profession is not new, rarely has the intent behind such abuse been so clearly stated.

Pour one out for my colleague Ted, who just finished a multiyear overhaul of our Event Study application with new features and a fully Python backend who now…has to add a new feature

Fascinating read about Russian bankers snapping up real estate in the US and then frantically trying to figure out how to avoid seizures in the wake of sanctions.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that how Harvard and the economics profession respond to Larry Summers will determine who makes up the next generation of economists. #econsky #news #harvard

A senior academic using mentoring as leverage to obtain sex is a contemptible abuser of power.

I hope you're all ready for some running this December! #ECON5k @inaganguli.bsky.social @dbergstresser.bsky.social @sandrahgoff.bsky.social @yanarodgers.bsky.social

This is super cool use of historical data to answer a current question.

"WRITE THAT DOWN" -political economy grad students

New from me: The corporate tax cuts from this year's law are running into a roadblock -- the 2022 corporate minimum tax. Companies (Meta, Qualcomm) are disclosing billions of dollars in tax breaks they can't use. And there's pressure on Treasury to ease the rules. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

The tension for sales people between Clearly Cishet Man Alone in a Cosmetics Shop and Customer Wearing Headphones is quite the social awkwardness generator

Hi all, please spread the word and we hope everyone can make good use of this new data drop: cmfdata.org The full surviving establishment-level Census of Manufactures manuscripts and digitized data from 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880!

New OA article @europe-asia.bsky.social: The Incumbency Advantage and the Enabler Effect: How Londongrad Beat the UK AML Regime Drawing on £2bn of property data, we show that not a single incumbent kleptocrat (0/72!) lost their UK assets. with @jheathershaw.bsky.social T. Mayne & S. Tokubayev

these charts show the relationship between zip code-level average income and individual probability of voting for democrats in different regions of the country. one of my favorite group fo charts, lots of stories to unearth

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Architect here. If any other states want to fill coffers that the feds have emptied, and want to build a fairer tax system that asks billionaires to finally pay more like a fair share, my DMs are open!

@taxobservatory.bsky.social 's lunch seminars are now hybrid, so even if you don't live in Paris (I mean...) you can keep up with tax research from the comfort of your own wherever

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.

Posted a short blog post with updated data (and public repo with data) of current state of Econ job market: paulgp.com/2025/10/08/j...