Delighted to share our revised paper (w/ @juliaturner.bsky.social & @jacobbastian.bsky.social ) showing that Universal Pre-K has broad effects on local labor markets — effects well beyond only mothers. Larger effects for full-day programs. nber.org/papers/w33767 #EconSky #EarlyChildhood #ECE

This suggests very low breakeven www.federalreserve.gov/econres/note...

Fascinating paper just out in @jlaborecon.bsky.social by Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan, and @dougwebberecon.bsky.social. Part of the economic value of college comes not from human capital or signaling but from a third thing: professional networks. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Speaking of public spending on children, here's a great set of scholars with what looks like an important new paper They find that Universal Pre-K increases labor force participation and earnings, which then increases tax revenue such that it more than pays for itself (under reasonable assumptions)

Delighted to share our revised paper (w/ @juliaturner.bsky.social & @jacobbastian.bsky.social ) showing that Universal Pre-K has broad effects on local labor markets — effects well beyond only mothers. Larger effects for full-day programs. nber.org/papers/w33767 #EconSky #EarlyChildhood #ECE

Fairness is not some mysterious moral force binding our actions. It is a social solution to a pervasive problem: once cooperation creates gains, who gets what? www.optimallyirrational.com/p/what-is-fa...

My sense is that the AI-generated analyses are not good yet. But here’s a more positive spin on your observation: we need a lot more basic, solid policy evals, which may well be of the TWFE variety. We want them to be good, but they don’t have to be top-Econ-journal caliber to be useful. /1

Please please accept or decline requests to review papers immediately upon seeing the request. It's simple. Most people don't have a good reason for being slow (though I realize a few might). It's crazy how many people are slow. They slow down the whole process for no good reason.

Coming up with a post-hoc theory section when your results are weird:

Econ needs more feel good stuff. It's nice to get messages like this. Even better would be more "best paper" awards, about which the field is very stingy (relative to other fields).

Education policy doesn’t always require sweeping reforms. Getting the basics right—retaining strong teachers, adopting high-quality curricula, and ensuring students have sufficient time in school—can go a long way.

EV technology in China is truly amazing. Charging in 5 minutes rivals a gas station and seems like a game changer. youtu.be/TE1ny9h_SEg?...

😂

For researchers working with the IPEDS dataset (nces.ed.gov/ipeds/), which can be kind of a bear to work with, especially over time, I've constructed some code to harmonize the data into a single DuckDB database github.com/paulgp/ipeds...

🚨New research looks at early impacts of MA’s free community college policies. Early evidence suggests expanded access & a reshaping of who shows up on campus. Full brief ➡️ bit.ly/wepcmassreco... @joshua-goodman.com, @doughesm.bsky.social, Morgan Fleming, Yunee H. Yoon @buwheelock.bsky.social

Great new paper in The Review of Economic Studies using randomized incentives to detect non-response bias, using administrative data to provide ground truth for comparison. While incentives increased participation, they didn't reliably reduce NR bias academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

One of my favorite recent papers also investigates this relationship (using a policy experiment). By Edward Okeke. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Tariffs are not a "political topic", they are economic policy. For goodness sake!!!

I saw this picture and wondered if there was a cat in there.

it's not shrinkflation.... more like skimpflation.

X's algorithm is in fact doing what you think it's doing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Thrilled to share our new @nber.org WP. Research and policy often assume teacher effectiveness is essentially fixed. We revisit this question by studying what happens when high-performing teachers are incentivized to transfer to struggling schools. 🧵 nber.org/papers/w34845

A working paper by @kirabojackson.bsky.social and colleagues finds that Universal Pre-K can deliver substantial economic benefits. In nine states and cities, UPK programs increased employment—especially among women—and raised earnings. #WorkingPaperWednesday spr.ly/63325hPxlJ

1000% reductions in price, 15% GDP growth - what comes first? The man with the nuclear codes is less numerate than a high school sophomore.

The Enlightenment and modernity have, Brink Lindsey argues, led to mass society and mass affluence. But their overrun has also created a world where individuals are buffeted by strange alien and alienating systems—market, bureaucratic, ideological, algorithmic—that barely register them as... 1/

Breaking Bad!

Pretty extraordinary to think about how much cardiovascular researchers figured out, and how that turned into public health campaigns, medicines, surgeries, and emergency care that changed millions of people's lives. ourworldindata.org/cardiovascul...

Very interesting research paper that shows that using AI with programming can significantly reduce mastery over topics. Perhaps unsurprising, but the lack of significant speed gains in this exercise are remarkable www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

The February 2026 issue of AEJ: Economic Policy (18, 1) is now available online at aeaweb.org/issues/834.

Meanwhile the U.S. government just shed **10,000*** STEM PhDs from the federal workforce in a single year. www.science.org/content/arti...

Anyone seeking to block the energy transition now has to reckon with the brute economics of the thing: renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. The only way to slow transition is by fighting the gravity of economics

The @nber.org Summer Institute call for papers is now live: www.nber.org/calls-papers... [Note that typical meeting dates have been pushed back by a week due to Boston hosting FIFA World Cup events ending on July 9.]

Posted a very early stage draft with rock star collaborators. Key question: when we actually roll out AI tools, how do people use them? Do they just defer completely? Does it improve productivity and ability? We look in the medical setting of pulmonary embolisms paulgp.com/papers/Radio...

"But résumé studies only measure callbacks. They don’t tell us who actually gets hired." These authors of this brand new preprint wanted to know whether discrimination measured in résumé studies shows up in real hiring. So they linked a large résumé audit experiment to actual employment data.

At 10 percent, you can expect credit rationing. lower income folk will be hurt by this.

This is crazy! This is the opposite of trying to find the social optimum.

ughh... I can't even explain how much we used to avoid something like this ever happening.

Breaking News: A judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from freezing $10 billion for child care and social services in five Democratic-led states.

Huh! Seems like we now have a new break even number way lower than we had in the past. Reduced immigration? Thoughts?

Darren Michael won a $500,0000 settlement for wrongful termination by Austin Peay State University after he shared a story that included a quote about gun violence by Charlie Kirk after his assassination his murder. Senator Maria Blackburn instigated the dismissal. clarksvillenow.com/local/apsu-t...

We @wheelockpolicybu.bsky.social are hiring a director for our Policy-Aligned Research Agenda Buildling Lab (PARABL), to help education system leaders build research roadmaps to effect change in a particular area. More info here: wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/u...

Forthcoming in AEJ: Economic Policy: "The Value of School Social Climate Information: Evidence from Chicago Housing Transactions" by Rene A. Crespin. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

That's a straight up Biden policy

why not the APGAR score?

So Instacart showed different people different prices for eggs. Shocking? Before the outrage, ignore the Twitter press release. Look at what they actually found. Understand the facts and the economic theory to make sense of it www.economicforces.xyz/p/instacarts...

College costs are soaring! www.brookings.edu/articles/wha...

I have done this a few times... In our profession we got so much rejection and even R&Rs may focus on the negatives. Telling someone you like their paper is refreshing for the person and you too!

We’re counting down our top stories of 2025! Stay tuned as we recap the stories that stood out this year. #10: @kirabojackson.bsky.social shared the lessons he learned during his time on the White House CEA, like how research shapes policy over time. spr.ly/63324CBPRq