Smart judge

Reminders: "Concentration camps" aren't the same as "extermination camps." Both were/are horrific. Most Nazi camps were *outside Germany*, away from the eyes of German citizens. Those trains? Were to, uh, deport the category of people whose lives were deemed unimportant. Never again is now.

Conservative writer for @nationalreview.bsky.social has zero affection for Rumeysa Öztürk but slams her arrest and detention. Let’s uplift conservatives when they oppose outrageous Trump actions.

BREAKING: A court overturned Ohio's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. This is a critical victory for trans rights.

I picked up a side-hustle to write bi-monthly newsletters on how economic trends/event impact health and the health care industry. The newsletter is part of health affairs Insider, offering access to reports on health care, newsletters, and virtual events. 1/5

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move. “If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too."

💯 This op-ed by ed research leaders made that essential point quite forcefully: "Abruptly ending near-complete projects does not drive efficiency. Instead, it ensures that the public sees no benefit from the investments already made, converting what was productive spending into waste."

I just can't get that excited about using AI to produce lit reviews. I am VERY excited about AI eventually being able to fill out travel reimbursement paperwork for me.

The farce that this is to protect Jews is beyond offensive and insulting. Cancelling grants, threatening deportation of students based on their speech does not make me feel either safe or supported as a Jew. No admin in my life has made me feel *less* safe. Disgusting. www.ed.gov/about/news/p...

Clearly maintaining the White House dress code is very important

Richmond, Virginia!

Federal law & decades of government practice provide Americans strong guarantees of confidentiality & security for their govt data. With POTUS's blessing & federal pardon power behind them, individuals appear to be violating our rights, corrupting systems meant to operate for our benefit.

Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn't realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there prami.ibero.mx/informes-y-i...

Yeah, and if you didn't figure this out after the Colombia gambit, get with the program!

Just had to explain to a reporter that yes, I did start working on a paper six years before it was finally published....

Too much bad news this week, please enjoy some good news (HT @dougparr.bsky.social ) www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Given how complicated our immigration system is (which is by design) it might not be obvious that this woman was going through legal channels to try to migrate to the US Claiming asylum is a completely legal way to migrate to the US, but it's not easy & is subject to whims of the president

this part is the most remarkable to me - as a % of total ACA-related coverage, the share of people with marketplace coverage is now just *more than* the share of people with coverage through Medicaid expansion

Paul Bloom on Tyler Cowen's podcast is fantastic conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/pau...

Went to the amazing Museo de las Americas in Denver this afternoon. I was particularly struck by these items that were left behind in the desert by people trying to come to the US

Using an analysis of over 8,000 economics PhDs and their advisors to find what determines economics PhD student research success, from Joshua Angrist and Marc Diederichs https://www.nber.org/papers/w33281

I have a new WP out today with Jason Baron, Joe Doyle, and Natalia Emanuel, on discrimination in foster care placement www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l6nft... This time we study the whole united states, and look at heterogeneity over time and space A few key takeaways 👇

Exciting to see so many faces/voices from the old Econ Twitter who I haven't heard from in awhile. I feel like some of the old/intense intellectual discourse is really starting to be reborn: :) .

Teaching Econ 101 just got harder. Landlords of identical rental units pass through idiosyncratic cost increases (due to property tax variation) to renters thereby violating the law of one price.

I wrote about how workers are faring for Brookings end of year round up TLDR the picture is mixed and depends on which workers you look at & what metrics you use We must take a nuanced view of worker well-being to understand this going forward bit.ly/483PEG8

WE MUST TELL EVERY TRUTH. Trigger warning. This is about the extensive sexual assaults that happened by Hamas on Oct 7th. There are many horrific graphic details. This matters. As do Palestinian lives. Lots of things are true at once. archive.is/202311292108...

I have a PhD and consider myself a fairly sophisticated user of technology, but I have failed after multiple attempts to access the academic readiness results that my kids' school district has allegedly placed online. There's got to be a better way.

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? The top 1% of people with the highest medical spending in the U.S. represent more than one-fifth (21%) of all medical spending nationally. The 50% of folks with the lowest medical spending only make up 3% of total spending. #healthpolicy

I am excited to share a paper I have forthcoming in the Journal of Econometric Methods (w/ Joe Cummins, Brock Smith, and Doug Miller).  We document a systematic bias that arises when using the synthetic control with few pre-periods: due to matching to the error term.  1/n

"Pierogi" is plural, damn it. You cannot have "one pierogi"

So, just to recap ... After taking fifteen votes to become Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was forced out of that position by the hard-right fringe of his own caucus. /1 www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

U.S. consumer prices rose 0.4 percent in September, and were up 3.7 percent from a year ago. "Core" prices, excluding food and fuel, were up 0.3 percent month-over-month and 4.1 percent year-over-year. Data: www.bls.gov/news.release... Full coverage: www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10...

An excellent Stanford statement from the estimable Richard Saller. news.stanford.edu/report/2023/...

That’s exactly it. This place is rapidly becoming better at providing the kind of interesting, challenging input on which any serious attempt at making sense of the world needs to rely.

I should probably have a first post...so here's what I'm working on today Revising/updating my working paper with @matthewakraft.bsky.social on the rise and fall of teaching profession: www.edworkingpapers.com/ai22-679 New teacher licenses still down (by ~100k relative to 2006) in Title II data

During pandemic, there has been a big lift in the number of employed Americans missing an entire week of work for own health problem, child care problem, or family obligation. Ticked up in last two months. Watch into winter, especially with pandemic federal child care support now ending.

So, as someone new to this site, I want to draw people's attention to a report I released last year, which I consider the best work I have ever done in my career: research.upjohn.org/up_technical...

I have a paper on higher ed expansion, structural transformation, and firm productivity in Vietnam that I'm looking for seminar feedback. Does anyone have a spot in their seminar/brown bag that I can sign up for?

SSI provides cash payments to over a million families who have children w disabilities. Do these substantial payments—which make up ~half of total income for recipients—improve kids’ outcomes? We use a cutoff in SSI eligibility for infants based on birthweight to investigate.

"We use pre-Bartik joining bluesky share x national growth in Bartik user to construct a Bartik-Bartik IV."

Hearing: "Government shut downs loom" in the headlines, makes me feel like I am living ground hog day.

New from Niskanen Center's Will Raderman. Visualizes 3 key issues with UI to help anyone quickly learn about the system's flaws & useful reforms. 📈📉 uiworkerbenefit.niskanencenter.org

F=150 can't save you from Referee #2's belief that no instrument satisies the exclusion retriction. Nothing is exogenous, not even their own distrust of IV. All is a chaotic web of path dependencies that return us to the primordial ooze, from which endogeneity was born, to which we all shall return

Figured I would also share new work from Dan O’Flaherty, @rajivsethi.bsky.social, and myself on harmful discrimination in criminal justice—recently published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...