And of course @akorinek.bsky.social's excellent JEL paper www.aeaweb.org/content/file...

🤖💡 Are LLMs really developing social behaviors—or just reproducing familiar patterns from training? In our new paper, @pettertornberg.com and I take a closer look at recent claims of emergent conventions in AI and offer a different perspective... 🧵

Paper: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Curious how accurate multimodal LLMs are at digitizing diversely formatted historical tables? ➡️ pretty accurate! ➡️ helps a lot with harmonization ➡️ far cheaper than manual digitization ➡️ but iterative, disciplined prompt training is important! Check out our new WP - arxiv.org/abs/2505.11599

Meanwhile at the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence yesterday, we had a writing retreat to prepare new collections for the UVA Teaching Hub. Expect to see several new collections posted this week! First up is one with my favorite resources on in-class polling: teaching.virginia.edu/collections/...

Original paper (paywalled): www.nature.com/articles/s41... Response paper (open): www.nature.com/articles/s41... Response to response (paywalled): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ The rise in larger firms' share of private sector US employment over the past 3 decades has come mostly at the expense of small ones (5-49 employees).

A new study with almost 300 Chinese student subjects replicated the main findings of our Management Science paper (Ederer & Manso 2013) that short-term pay-for-performance and lack of tolerance for early failure inhibit innovation. So happy to see this experiment still making waves!

Ohh I had this idea. Guess it didn't work.

Study in Nature: “Across 30 out of 32 evaluation axes from the specialist physician perspective & 25 out of 26 evaluation axes from the patient-actor perspective, AMIE [Google Medical LLM] was rated superior to PCPs [primary care docs] while being non-inferior on the rest.” (& AIME is an older LLM)

"ChatGPT as Economics Tutor: Capabilities and Limitations" econpapers.repec.org/paper/briuob...

New preprint from @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @mattwilkens.bsky.social, and myself tests different ways of simulating the past with LLMs. We don't fully answer the title question here—just show that simple strategies based on prompting and fine-tuning are insufficient. +

Paper on the economics of AI competition shows new AI models are adopted very rapidly but are not always substitutes for each other (better models in the same family often substitute, but others expand the pie). Also, people use a mix of models. andreyfradkin.com/assets/deman...

Congratulations @s-stantcheva.bsky.social !!! Wonderful choice!

🚨 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...

There is a bunch I disagree with here, but it makes an argument for why AI adoption may be less rapid and less immediately world-changing (& dangerous) than people expect. Well worth reading, as it is a useful base case where AI is just another technology. knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

Large scale job displacements due to AI are likely to occur more slowly than a lot of people talking about AI and work might suspect. Translators were paid more and in more demand a year after GPT-4 than they were the year it launched. Change is likely to come, but the timing is hard to predict.

How Tariffs Affect Trade Deficits... ... a new paper with amazing trade economist Arnaud Costinot. Many politicians and the general public expect tariffs to reduce imports lower imports and thus work to close a trade deficit. Economists typically say "not so fast"... 🧵1/n

What is a recent #EconSky economics paper that has a core result that is 1. Important 2. Surprising (sign or size) 3. Decently simple Self nominations r welcome.

Retaliation hurts! Check out our new paper to see how costly it can be for the U.S. economy.

@manuelacollis.bsky.social @clemvaneff.bsky.social this is such great work!

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵: 𝗠𝗜𝗟𝗔 (𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆-𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁) We introduce MILA—a new AI-driven solution for analyzing central bank communication. MILA operates on individual sentences by using the macro and in-document context. 1/n

Trump's tariff announcement rattle global markets. But if we zoom out and look at trade more generally it is a continuation of frictions in international trade that have started since at least 2016. Much focus has been on trade in goods, when actually trade in services has...

It's high time to have another look at interesting papers like this one! "The cost of a global tariff war: A sufficient statistics approach" by Ahmad Lashkaripour. Article in the J of Int Econ: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Working paper: alashkar.pages.iu.edu/Tariff_War_L...

💥 New Working Paper 💥 While #EconSky is talking about tariffs today, @anselmkuesters.bsky.social and I investigate another "t"-term that is controversial in economics: Technological Unemployment 📄: ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid... #futureofwork #econhist (1/n)

Google Gemini 2.5 is the first public AI model to definitively beat the performance of human PhDs with access to Google on hard multiple choice problems inside their field of expertise (around 81%). All AI tests are flawed, but GPQA Diamond has been a pretty good one. & conducted independently.

Careful research by @johnlist.bsky.social and colleagues: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Muito bom o texto do Pedro Franco para o substack do @noahpinion.blogsky.venki.dev !! Eu não conhecia o autor. Pedro é doutor pela LSE e hoje professor no Japão www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-brazil...

Robot adoption has skyrocketed in China in the last decade. Today's article finds that this has led to a decline in employment & wages, while also influencing workers’ training & retirement decisions ⤵️

🌟NEW on the Economics Observatory Read @charlie-meyrick and Hannah Cantekin on ECO Fashion Week 👇

Readvertising here: Episode 9: Raffaella Sadun on Communication in Organisations #EconSky Listen here at: www.thevisiblehand.uk/episodes/epi...

Happy to share that my paper, "The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001-2022," has been conditionally accepted at the American Political Science Review (@apsrjournal.bsky.social)! Updated draft here: bit.ly/3DU4Vj7 #polisky #lawsky #econsky #academicsky

There’s at least a dozen dissertations to be written from this paper by Anthropic alone, which gives us some insight into how AIs “think” and reveal a lot of complexity and unexpected abilities, including generalization and planning. transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu...

Researchers benefit from coordinating on a place to post and discuss their latest research. It looks like Bluesky is becoming that place. #econsky

If you’re a Boston-area grad student interested in behavioral economics meets computer science, come to this workshop on April 4. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Here's the link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

‘In The Skill Code, Beane argues that acquiring mastery in any profession requires challenge, complexity and connection. But he warns that “novices are becoming increasingly optional and distant participants in an expert’s daily tasks”. He cites a number of new technologies, not just AI.’

Completely agreed, anyone interested in using AI in decision-making can learn a ton from this excellent reading list. I particularly like the papers on "AI & medical decision-making", an area for which "evidence-based" decisions have been the rage for over 3 decades..

Great webinar featuring Alessandro Acquisti on "The Economics of Privacy at a Crossroads." Alessandro has such a wide view of the privacy literature: both its history and inside & outside of economics. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecc9...

Interesting new paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09907 improves on both rdrobust and rdhonest! Quite compelling... 1/n

Healthcare jobs have grown 2x faster than the overall labor market since 1980 Healthcare overtook retail to become largest industry by employment in 2009 New working paper w/ @gottliebecon.bsky.social, @kevinrinz.bsky.social and @victoriaudalova.bsky.social on the rise of healthcare jobs

Doença de custos de Baumol+ envelhecimento

The data so far on AI-as-a-tutor shows just letting students use AI chatbots can undermine education because the AI gives the illusion of learning But AIs properly prompted to act like tutors, especially with instructor support, seem to be able to boost learning a lot through customized instruction

I regret to announce that the meme Turing Test has been passed LLMs produce funnier memes than the average human, as judged by humans. Humans working with AI get no boost (a finding that is coming up often in AI-creativity work) The best human memers still beat AI, however. arxiv.org/abs/2501.11433

🚨HRSA's Area Health Resources Files webpage is now down. Fortunately, I built an archive of data 2000-2023 for a previous project, which can be accessed without restriction here: data.mendeley.com/datasets/dwf...

@assumenormality.bsky.social has been kind enough to build and post an archive of AHRF data, which are a treasure trove of county level information on socio-economic-demographic characteristics, health care resources, health measures, … See below for the link.