Sharing our recently published short policy article in EconPol Forum. We discuss how platform design and social incentives interact to amplify divisive content, and how a minority of users and inauthentic activity (like bots) can distort perceptions of opinion: www.ifo.de/en/econpol/p...

"Social Media and Political Polarization in Canada: Perspectives from Political Science, Economics and Psychology" live blog /1

📢 New publication! 📢 Does political violence backfire in mature democracies? In this article, @kkrakows.bsky.social (@kingscollegelondon.bsky.social) and @juansemorales.bsky.social (Wilfrid Laurier University) examine how the January 6 US Capitol Attack affected public support for US politicians.

🚨🚨🚨Announcing a special issue on “Political Violence in Democracies” published by @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social and edited by @andrearuggeri.bsky.social, U Daxecker, and me. In this very long 🧵, I will introduce the special issue with its 14 articles. doi.org/10.1177/0022...

New article in Economía/LACEA: Legal Reforms, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from Mexico. Gustavo J. Bobonis, Roberto Castro and Juan S. Morales study the relationship between divorce laws, CCT programs, and IPV in rural Mexico. economia.lse.ac.uk/en/articles/...

The Laurier Economics Department’s faculty at are always doing great work, so it's been lovely to see so many getting recognized for their accomplishments in the last few weeks. The announcements are already out there, but it's worth collecting them all in one place. students.wlu.ca/programs/laz...

Congratulations @nikolaimcook.bsky.social, recipient of the 2024 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Economic Science! ontariosuniversities.ca/university-i...

If you're attending the 2025 @canadianeconoassoc.bsky.social Meeting this weekend in Montreal, keep an eye out for one of the 13 Laurier econ faculty that'll be there!

This paper was the first project I ever started working on and the last chapter of my dissertation. It took long but it's finally published! 🎉 We study how divorce laws and conditional cash transfers interact as determinants of intimate partner violence in Mexico: economia.lse.ac.uk/articles/502...

At the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, we made a decision few weeks back to hold applications for grad study open for people in the US. www.wlu.ca/academics/fa...

21 May CeDEx will host 2 seminars: 1st will be @juansemorales.bsky.social of @wilfridlaurieruni.bsky.social 1-2pm A40 Sir Clive Granger Building. 2nd (joint with @uniofnottingham.bsky.social Sch of Econ Senior Academic Seminar Series) Ernst Fehr of @econ.uzh.ch 3-4.30pm in A40 tinyurl.com/2aptkyjm

Possibly the dumbest of the many dumb plagiarism claims nationalpost.com/news/mark-ca...

Canada is in an amazing position to attract as much world class international talent as it is willing to accomodate.

Friction is often proposed as a way to stem the spread of misinformation. This 2024 study suggests that it *does* decrease reshares of misinfo, but there's a big downside; it may reduce reshares of high-factual information even more. academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

Dean Karlan's job at USAID was LITERALLY to improve the efficiency of its programs. DOGE is clearly not actually after cutting fraud and waste. And its actions will clearly make the US weaker while also making the world a worse place. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

No words. This is absolutely horrendous news

If Canadian universities had a bit of vision, they would be launching a Manhattan project to poach every US-based top researcher. And the federal government would be drastically expanding tri-council funding and creating an expedited review process for those holding NSF and similar grants.

The WLU econ dept is excited to be hosting Economic Outlook 2025, which will focus on immigration in Canada. We have two exciting speakers: Pedro Antunes from the Conference Board of Canada and Jennifer Hunt from Rutgers University. Register now to save your seats! www.eventbrite.ca/e/economic-o...

A mapping of how Bluesky is becoming the new Scientific Twitter mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

You can now list your Bluesky account in your RePEc profile, like you already could for Mastodon and Twitter. Log in at the RePEc Author Service, click on "contacts", enter it and save. It will be listed on your profile at IDEAS after the next nightly refresh. authors.repec.org #econsky #RePEc

as an experiment, I posted the same post to twitter and bluesky. here is the time series of engagements (sum of comments, reposts, likes) from the two platforms. Note that I have 39K followers on twitter and 7K here, so engagement per follower here is more than 10 times higher here on bluesky.

Just the fate of the free world hinging on Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, that's all

Our new column in VoxEU on how Twitter’s user interface changes before the 2020 elections had some unintended effects on news sharing (with @ershovd.bsky.social): cepr.org/voxeu/column...

I am at APSA with papers today at noon (presented by my co-author Krzysztof Krakowski) and tomorrow at 8am. #APSA2024 Reach out!

Our paper (with @ershovd.bsky.social) on Twitter's 2020 user interface nudge and news sharing has been accepted at EJ! 🎉 academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

If you feel like being inspired tomorrow 😅 secureca.imodules.com/s/1681/givin...

Headlining. With Josh Angrist opening for us 😉

This has been so much fun! Never too late to donate to the food bank fund drive www.thefoodbank.ca/fundraising/...

Because the best way to support your local food bank is to give them cash - the Econ Department at WLU is running its annual Fund Drive for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region👇 foodbank.donorsupport.co/-/NCHUFPZJ?m...

Very cool to see how the California power grid dealt with the solar eclipse today! Covered the gap in solar power with batteries, imports, and natural gas.

Has anyone ever pulled off anything as spectacular as this? Well done, and congrats!

What many people don't know: recent decades have seen incredible reductions in poverty. The poverty rate has *never before* been this low in human history. What new data is now revealing: after the setback from Covid, poverty reduction now continues! #econsky t.co/RJEfQE7PRm

social network taxonomy

Social scientist colleagues - more invite code donations welcome! Please send in text format via email or by DM at @brendannyhan at the old place. I've redistributed ~150+ thanks to many generous donations but I'm currently down to 4 codes.