Ok it's been over a while since my last keyboard post. My current obsession is pocketable mech keyboards, which paired with my folding pixel phone, is how I spent much of my sabbatical working on two new books in coffee shops.

Rising mistrust in economists and what to do. Great story @amandaaronczyk.bsky.social @planetmoney.bsky.social, featuring interviews with @dianeswonk.bsky.social @nickbloom.bsky.social @hoben.bsky.social & me. #EconSky #NumbersDay www.npr.org/2025/08/01/1...

lol who did this

for those in my feed for the #mechanicalkeyboard content, my latest fave: split key corne that fits in my pockets. ordered last two pcbs/cases from aliexpress the day the China tariff fell... cause who knows when Chinese imports will be cut off again.

When home heating is less affordable, more people die each winter. That's what our analysis found for a period when LIHEAP was in place. Without LIHEAP, the effect would presumably much larger. Ungated copy of the study here: bit.ly/2JrJfxR

#TeachEcon This semester, I thought I’d share a bit about what I do in my microeconomics lectures. I’m not particularly active on LinkedIn, but I started posting about my teaching because I’m quite frustrated with how economics is often perceived at business schools. (1/n)

Are you interested in U.S. legislative history? Newly-available complete dataset on all persons serving as legislators in the 50 state houses between 1900 and 2016: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

New UCLA rapid attribution study: “Climate change may be linked to roughly a quarter of the extreme fuel moisture deficit when the fires began. The fires would still have been extreme without climate change, but probably somewhat smaller and less intense.” sustainablela.ucla.edu/2025lawildfi...

New randomized, controlled trial by the World Bank of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. Six weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions. And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind.

I'm looking for nonfiction books to read. Loved: - (Auto)buographies of Kandel, Oliver Sacks, Oppenheimer, Miles Davis, Feynman, Philip Glass - "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhoades Don't say "The Power Broker":) I'm on my umpteenth attempt. What are your favorites?

The world has passed “peak child”

Scientists developed the first climate models in the late 1960s (for which the Nobel Prize in physics was recently awarded!). How have these models held up against what happened in the real world after they were published? Surprisingly well, it turns out:

If you are an academic, it can be instructive to work on a paper with AI. Pretend you are working with a grad student & see what happens. Generally o1 is best for well-defined heavy intellectual tasks, Gemini for synthesizing lots of text, and Claude for writing & theorizing. This varies by field.

Who would have won the 'Simon-Ehrlich bet' over different decades — and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity? The new Our World in Data article by my colleague Hannah Ritchie. ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlic...

Why economists need to review the preregistration!* This is a hot mess; hard to believe it's in the QJE datacolada.org/122 * docs.google.com/document/d/1...

We need more research on social media effects on elites, activists, and other subgroups per our recent Nature review www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well this was intuitive...

Kenneth Arrow’s Last Theorem: Why do the most patient individuals dictate environmental policy in the long run? Let’s explore this fascinating result about efficiency and time preferences. 🧵 www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v009-1/...

No.

Ran Spiegler has a new book out that I found very entertaining. It's a collection of essays offering accessible introductions to modern classics of economic theory: global games, Bayesian persuasion, hold-up problem, competitive screening, ... And it's FREE! direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

I've recently been talking a bit about how difficult it is to carefully check even well-written mathematics. I want to try to explain something about this by telling the story of some errors in the literature that (in part) led to the two papers below. 1/n

I enjoyed this sophomoric ramble though. Probability is weird and I appreciate scientific American trying to make that weirdness accessible to a broad audience.

We don't download PDFs just "to ignore them forever". It's an irreplaceable ritual. A process represents the imbalance between our desire to know and physical and psychological constraints. It symbolizes constant inner battles & compromises for a future in which we read the papers that never comes.

You’ve downloaded hundreds of PDFs for research and now it’s finally time to ignore them forever

How do unions and collective bargaining work around the world? And how do they affect the wage structure? A new paper with Suresh Naidu and Benjamin Schoefer @schoefer.bsky.social out NBER WP today and prepared for the Handbook of Labor Economics. Thread below. 👇

It still boggles my mind that only 66 years separate these photos.

Challenging game of draw the time series on.ft.com/3DpQ8vZ

We've significantly updated our paper on modeling + measuring systemic discrimination! Check it out: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ab5yx... (cc @aleximas.bsky.social + @aislinnbohren.bsky.social!) A short 🧵 on what's new...

How policymakers and the US population update their beliefs on the use of science and the trust they have in government following a field experiment that demonstrated the ineffectiveness of a policy intervention, from Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List https://www.nber.org/papers/w33239

Great data journalism: people report “best times” is when they were 10-15 yo www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA" (http://www.alldayta.com), a product @joshgans.bsky.social and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x

I put this on twitter but figured I'd put it here too. I post a lot of AI stuff over there because it's my job and I have a lot of reach there, hopefully I can start doing more here. I read the OpenAI post and had a few observations, a thread. openai.com/index/elon-m...

Wanted: More posts in this genre. What's the one thing you wrote in 2024 that I should read?

Some tips for preparing for preliminary job market interviews!

The Maritime Approximation xkcd.com/3023

From our AEA cttee on the job market, here's the December update on the status of the job mkt for PhD economists of the 2024-25 cycle. A thread with graphs follows... #EconJobMarket #EconSky @aeainformation.bsky.social @aeacswep.bsky.social @joelistings.bsky.social 1/9

Real footage of a synthetic control model

Hey All, The amazing John List is on BlueSky. @johnlist.bsky.social #EconSky

This is an insane graph.

I have an op-ed in the NYT today about how to reduce crime. The key idea, based on decades of strong research evidence: focus on increasing the probability of getting caught, not the punishment. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

There are many great organizations to support, but one that's come on my radar recently is the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. They're non-partisan and non-profit. Send me a screenshot of your donation to them, and I'll match it! (up to $1000) www.crfb.org

Zero-sum thinking is a key mindset that shapes how we view the world. A little thread to highlight our work on its roots with @sahilchinoy.bsky.social, @nathannunn.bsky.social, Sandra Sequeira.🧵1/23 scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantc...

Totally agree with @shengwuli.bsky.social. The broader point is that I think we need to directly address the elephant in the room: the *huge* impact of context--i.e., seemingly irrelevant factors--on choice and beliefs. 🧵 on the behavioral economics of context, with some new data at the end.

I like Ryan’s paper and (obviously) I think complexity matters for behavior. But I think Florian’s updating too much from one experiment. I want to see replications and results from ‘nearby’ designs before saying the lottery anomalies have nothing to do with risk.

Some of the most important lottery anomalies from the behavioral risk literature (e.g., probability weighting and loss aversion) actually have nothing to do with risk. They also arise in perfectly deterministic settings. Lead article in the latest AER issue: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

This is the extensively updated paper on DOSE. Comments most welcome. @cfcamerer.bsky.social

I literally showed that child mortality video this in class today. Everyone seems only vaguely impressed until I describe how my first born almost died shortly after birth (www.ryancbriggs.net/blog/2015/10...). It’s wild to me how much we need stories to even start to grasp something numerical.

Few people even know about this; when people are asked in surveys how child mortality has changed the majority says it has stagnated or increased. If you consider that many don't know about humanity's biggest achievement, then it's not surprising that many are so pessimistic about our future.

Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions -- out today in the AER! www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/x4bc1...

Papers authored by Black, Hispanic or Asian economists receive 5.1% to 9.6% fewer citations than those by White scholars. The citation gap is largely driven by homophily in citation patterns and racial clusters in networks (i.e., cite authors from own racial group). www.nber.org/papers/w33150