While the U.S. bans some brands of EVs and adds protectionist tariffs, BYD documents 12 min charging at -22C for ~1000km range for city driving. Which legacy US automakers can compete on a level field? What about the free market? 🧪💡🔌☀️💨💧🔋 insideevs.com/news/797182/...

It’s official - along with my partner in crime @blakeshaffer.bsky.social I am co- leading the new Electricity Centre at the University of Calgary 🔌⚡️⚡️🔋 m.youtube.com/watch?v=91tn...

Trump fired the BLS chief for allegedly rigging jobs numbers. Cool new paper finds the act of firing her (and the uncertainty it created) likely cost the economy more than the entire annual BLS budget.

Air pollution and internal migration in the US from 2005–2019, from Michael Keller, Christopher R. Knittel, Benjamin Krebs, and Simon Luechinger www.nber.org/papers/w35317

CDOT lost the best of our team yesterday. We're heartbroken. In memory of Riley O'Neil, please refer to these bike racks as "Riley Racks". He led Chicago's bike parking program for several years. Our hearts are broken, but we want to make sure his legacy lives on 💙🚲 Please spread the word

not sure if everyone can access this, but I just learned about some dramatic changes to SSRN from Steve Bainbridge's Substack. This is really bad; SSRN has been how I keep up with scholarship in my field from a variety of researchers www.stephenbainbridge.com/p/the-social...

This is one of the most insane things I’ve seen from this regime. Please read this excellent summary and comment in the federal registry. 🧪🌊

Remember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...

I guess I'm happy the semester is over and I do not have to tell env'l policy students learning about states helping fill the climate policy gaps left by the federal government about this joke. I don't know man, between this and the OMB grants stuff, where are the grown ups? What are we even doing?

I've been talking about this with some folks over the past few months and am happy to see @severinborenstein.bsky.social write it up so well. For many places, the status quo is subsidized insurance: taxes ⬇️ when price ⬆️, but not the reverse. energyathaas.wordpress.com/2026/05/18/n...

I have two new papers up in this week's NBER working papers (www.nber.org/papers/w35204 and www.nber.org/papers/w35219). Here's a couple of things I learned in pulling these papers together.

Apropos of some debate on Piketty-Saez-Zucman versus Auten-Splinter brewing again on the other site, let me post my lecture notes that does a deep dive into this, looking at both pre- and post-tax income inequality. Link: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4k5gj...

🚨 New paper 🚨 tinyurl.com/6sw833b5 It draws a simple analogy: - Many gov't subsidies are inframarginal (eg EVs, solar) - Some firms use product bundles to capture consumer surplus from (inframarginal) buyers - Could bundled subsidies improve the cost-effectiveness of subsidy programs? A 🧵:

it's true

My friend is teaching to his Economics Ph.D. students and explaining why they should be interested in topics that are not in their subfield. The friend asked for statements about why learning from other fields is good. Here was my answer: " Five things:

They have! Published version: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

The “big beautiful bill” greatly expanded SNAP work requirements for parents In my paper with @jasonbcook.bsky.social, forthcoming at JPUBE, we ask what similar, existing requirements do SNAP work requirements for parents deny vulnerable parents SNAP benefits and do not increase their employment

This is the kind of economic illiteracy that has public thinking that energy production ➡️ energy independence. No one cares who you buy from when the price of the tradable good is set by global supply and demand. This article is a perfect exercise in miseducation. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

timely

good night, sewers. good night, streams. good night, operations and maintenance teams. good night, settling tanks. good night, stream banks. good night, engineers, scientists, crews, managers, inspectors, analysts too. a good night for us means serving with care. good night, sewers, everywhere.

Excited to share a new @nber.org paper w/Blonz/Hossain/Mulder/Weill where we show credit scores impact homeowners insurance premiums as much as disaster risk. Here’s what happened in WA when they banned credit scoring:

📢 Call for papers! We are organizing the 6th Early Career Workshop in Quantitative Political Economy on 14-15 May 2026 at King’s College London! Keynote: Shanker Satyanath (NYU) No fee, travel grants might become available! Submit at: tinyurl.com/qpe2026

a modicum of good news

My favorite paper of 2019 has just been conditionally accepted at AER (lmao) The Voting Rights Act rapidly increased Black wages in the South via public employment & redistribution static1.squarespace.com/static/59dc0...

The collapse of the US National Science Foundation

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

devastating news

Postdoc posting: Economics of education at Tufts with my colleague Elizabeth Setren. main.hercjobs.org/jobs/2203818...

In today’s NZ Herald

Today in the worlds least surprising news www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

fwiw, famously, many cap and trade systems feature a phased/gradual introduction to ease this kind of adjustment...

coming soon to @chicagocityscape.com: this chart showing new construction homes permitted per ward per year the * asterisk indicates that the ward saw fewer than 100 homes in the 8-year period shown

If you’re not using Claude Code, now’s the time to jump in!

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Woah this NYC isometric map (looks just like Simcity 2000) is blowing my mind! cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/

Hey JMCs, I know the waiting can be stressful. Good news: @billingsecon.bsky.social, @schnepel.bsky.social, & I are hiring a postdoc on our project funded by Arnold VentureS 📢 Apply here: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDetail…#EconSkyky 📈📉

they don't make AER titles like they used to

Investigating whether economic hardship undermines preferences for honesty in Kenya, from Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, and Edward Miguel www.nber.org/papers/w34695

every day the Financial Times asks me questions i am frankly unqualified to answer

Big, big news! This is probably the coolest of the many jobs I have shared here! 🚨COME BE MY DEPUTY🚨 🚨JOIN THE BEST TEAM WORKING IN CLIMATE POLICY AND POLITICS!🚨 This. Will. Go. Fast.

Everyone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:

"Big 3 Not So Big"

Q: There’s a regression with three coefficients: b1, b2, b3 A theory says b1 > b2 > b3 What statistical test should I perform to test this joint prediction? The point estimates are such that b3 > b1 > b2, if that matters

The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/c...

Finished teaching a new course on energy markets and the clean energy transition last month. Was a blast and have lots of thoughts for next year. One takeaway is the value of going beyond academic journals/textbooks and incorporating media articles, podcasts, and video. Here's a few we covered... 🧵

Working in open science or meta-research? Present at the BITSS Annual Meeting in Berkeley! One of the leading conferences in this space.

I'm super skeptical of the result/magnitude here: • gradual change doesn't match traffic responses, which were sharp • confidence intervals are tiny (PM has high variance!) • This is not a standard DiD • Cook et al. use synthetic control + more monitors and find no change [1/3]

In today's JMP blog, @krajah123.bsky.social conducts experiments in India to show how spousal jealousy affects female labor force participation: women are more likely to take up work in women-only office & greater impacts for those with more jealous husbands blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

Years ago I would tell my first year econometrics class that there were doing ways of doing statistical inference, Bayesian and frequentist, also known as right and wrong. A student asked if that would be on the exam.