New research by Pierre Azoulay, Danielle Li, Bhaven Sampat and me. Earlier this year, the President’s budget proposed a 40% cut to the budget of the NIH. This motivated us to ask: what if the NIH had been 40% smaller?

It looks like he didn't share it on Bluesky, so I will. @afinetheorem.bsky.social has written an excellent review article covering 7 recent books on the economics of AI that serves as an excellent overview of this topic. Highly recommended! kevinbryanecon.com/BryanAIBookR...

📢 Conference announcement! Paolo Surico and I are excited to be organizing this @cepr.org conference on Public Policies for Innovation. If you work in the #Economics of #Innovation and #InnovationPolicy, please submit + spread the word. Non-presenting attendees also invited.

Deadline in two days!

Very happy to see two of my papers cited in the recent CMA report on "Investment and competition over the business lifecycle." The report provides an excellent overview of the literature. Thanks to @jschneebacher.bsky.social and coauthors for preparing it!

One week left to submit a paper!

Common Ownership & Employee Earnings updated & improved Consider a pair of companies that sell into the same product market. If pair shares common owners, the owners have incentive for pair to soften competition. Same with local labor market competition papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Call for papers for our economics workshop: cma-partnership.webspace.durham.ac.uk/2025/08/29/2... Please submit before 25th September if you work on: - UK productivity slowdown - Aggregate market power - Business dynamism - Industrial policy - Supply chains - Determinants of innovation and R&D

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ Slattery & Nober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

How does competition influence investment? The CMA has just published our new Microeconomics Unit lit review (joint work with my fantastic colleagues Amanda Ereyi and @joelkariel.bsky.social). 1/2

How does competition influence investment? The CMA has just published our new Microeconomics Unit lit review (joint work with my fantastic colleagues Amanda Ereyi and @joelkariel.bsky.social). 1/2

📢 Call for papers! Join the 4th CMA- @durham-university.bsky.social workshop on productivity, business dynamism & market power. 📍 Durham University 📅 20–21 Nov 2025 🗓️ Submit by 25 Sept: tinyurl.com/ybsmsvdv

📢Nina Roussille and I are hiring a full-time predoctoral researcher to work with us at MIT on labor economics research projects. IMPORTANT: this vacancy is open right now, so we are particularly interested in people who could start soon. Link to apply: careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

The call for papers for the annual CMA-Durham workshop on market power, dynamism and productivity is out! This year we are particularly interested in submissions on industrial policy, market power in supply chains, and the economics of start-ups and scale-ups. Submit by 25 September.

Today, I am excited to release a paper that has been five years in the making, titled “Endogenous Firm Ownership in General Equilibrium.” I think it is the best thing I have done. www.nber.org/papers/w34187

Some news: I will be spending this entire 2025-26 academic year located in Paris, visiting the local universities and participating in the research community here. If you work in Paris or are just passing though in the next year, please reach out, I'd be happy to meet up! PhD students especially!

I went to this fantastic conference last year and had a blast. I highly encourage everyone to submit their work!

The call for papers for the annual CMA-Durham workshop on market power, dynamism and productivity is out! This year we are particularly interested in submissions on industrial policy, market power in supply chains, and the economics of start-ups and scale-ups. Submit by 25 September.

Using 16 million resumes to measure public firms' corporate structures finds that more hierarchical firms are more profitable and stable, with higher costs and lower patent quality, from Michael Ewens and Xavier Giroud https://www.nber.org/papers/w34162

Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... 1/3

“Let me make what appears to have become a radical argument: Simple economics is surprisingly good at making real-world predictions.” trying to break the mold with a defense of economics www.wsj.com/opinion/you-...

You may be wondering WTF is a "Babbage Firm" www.nber.org/papers/w34145 A thread

I highly recommend the JEP Symposium on housing markets. Lots of great papers on regional difference and aggregate prices; low-end spillovers of building at high-end; why people don’t understand housing supply & demand; construction costs; evidence from other countries. www.aeaweb.org/issues/814

It's well-established that UK firms engaged in international trade are more productive, but why? New analysis from @christinavpalmou.bsky.social and Kyle Jones (ONS) offers new evidence: tinyurl.com/5c9mazpa

How do manufacturers and retailers share the surplus they create? @amackay.bsky.social and coauthors with some interesting new evidence, and a model to rationalise it. 1/2

What does consulting do? Lots of strongly held views, very limited data to answer the question. In new ‪‪NBER paper, Gert Bijnens, @schoefer.bsky.social and I shed light on this question using the first economy-wide data on consulting relationships (based on VAT-based B2B data). More info👇

Our paper "Learning When to Quit" is finally in print. A journey it was. The project/paper is almost as old as my kids combined.. #EconSky

Call for papers, 4th UK Workshop on Digital Economics, London 28 November 2025: competitionpolicy.ac.uk/events/4th-w... This is always a great event

Very cool and topical call for papers at Management Science: “Business and Its Interrelationship with Democratic Resilience, Geopolitics, and Society in a Time of Change.” October 1, 2025 deadline for 5-page detailed paper proposals. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10....

NEW: In new research, Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch develop a model to understand how wage-fixing cartels operate and show how to gauge the harm they cause to workers. www.promarket.org/2025/07/21/h...

🚨 New Paper Alert! 🚨 I'm excited to share my latest research, “Building Capacity in the Public Administration” (with @annagumpert.bsky.social ). We examine a key tool for building administrative capacity: seconding officials from high-capacity to low-capacity public administrations.

The Economics of Bicycles for the Mind. Working paper with @joshgans.bsky.social and Ajay Agrawal. A bicycle amplifies human locomotion. Computers & AI amplify human intelligence. We model cognitive tools, showing when they affect productivity, inequality, & teams. www.nber.org/papers/w34034

🚨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...

🤫Trade secrets are a widely used but understudied form of intellectual property. Our forthcoming Management Science paper investigates trade secret use at the project level & provides evidence that firms respond to trade secret legal protection by increasing use of secrets. lnkd.in/dJVScxJxhttp...

🚨New Working Paper🚨 "Common Ownership Around the World"📈🌍 We analyze common ownership in 49 countries from 2005 to 2019 and show that it is widespread and rising globally.

Post-buyout employment and wage dynamics are consistent with professional investors providing incentives to increase productivity and monitor the companies in which they invest, from Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon Phillips, Francisca Rebelo, Benjamin Sampson https://www.nber.org/papers/w33942

My colleague Nan Li and I contributed a chapter on services trade. We ask: is there evidence that geopolitical alignments are reshaping bilateral trade in services? (In IMF parlance: is there “geoeconomic fragmentation” in services?)

📢 We're hiring! Join ESCoE @kingsbschool.bsky.social @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Find out more and apply: escoe.ac.uk/opportunitie... #Hiring #Research

Reminder that today is the deadline for submissions to the always excellent FTC Microeconomics conference: www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

Join the CMA's econometrics team and work with my super-smart colleagues @alcrawfs.bsky.social and @ivan-olszak.bsky.social on demand estimation, merger simulations and event studies in CMA merger cases and market studies. Ideal for recent quant MSc graduates or PhD students.

Great to see MHCLG have highlighted our local authority housebuilding data in their Housing Supply statistical release today. We digitised government records back to 1946 to analyse patterns of housebuilding by private and public sector. See the data👇 buff.ly/jWeuINx

Interesting metascience experiment: a pop-up journal! Read @mattsclancy.bsky.social's thread for details and how to apply.

AI + social media = polarization machine 🧠📱 Recommender systems trap users in echo chambers and ad-based platforms profit from partisan division. www.nber.org/papers/w33892

I worked in government statistics for some years, including a spell in ONS, and there are a few things to say here.

How does market power in supply chains affect prices, quantities and consumer outcomes? Flavio Toxvaerd, Mike Walker and I summarise lessons from our recent @ukri.org-CMA workshop. 1/2

How does market power in supply chains affect prices, quantities and consumer outcomes? Flavio Toxvaerd, Mike Walker and I summarise lessons from our recent @ukri.org-CMA workshop. 1/2

Interesting article from ESCoE Research Associate @jschneebacher.bsky.social alongside Flavio Toxvaerd and Mike Walker. Catch up on the ESCoE webinar on this topic: tinyurl.com/bdcrk98b

We are hiring a #postdoc in international economics and/or economic policy at @dice.hhu.de to start in October.

NEW on the Economics Observatory – What are the consequences of market power in supply chains? By @jschneebacher.bsky.social‬, Flavio Toxvaerd, & Mike Walker buff.ly/BpNEE6W

JUST PUBLISHED – What are the consequences of market power in supply chains? By @jschneebacher.bsky.social‬, Flavio Toxvaerd, & Mike Walker