just another thursday in a modern dictatorship. a private university with over 20K students gets shut down overnight by presidential decree, leaving students, faculty, and staff in massive uncertainty. take whatever lesson you will about bringing dictators to power

Wir sprengen Deutschlands wohl älteste Paywall! Im Blatt für Patent-, Muster- & Zeichenwesen erscheinen wichtige amtliche Mitteilungen, die kostenfrei zugänglich sein sollten – doch der Carl Heymanns Verlag verdient seit 125 Jahren daran. Wir setzen dem ein Ende. fragdenstaat.de/artikel/akti...

Grid-scale batteries are going in an absolutely wild pace. Every whingey objection to renewables you've ever heard is basically solved by batteries. This is happening whether any of the hopeless dipshits running the US want it or not.

Does engaging with the arts help to slow the aging process? According to this new paper from Fancourt et al the answer is yes! Alas, the paper is actually unsuitable for such claims. Let’s examine by discussing how you'd establish whether arts engagement actually caused future health! 1/18 🧵

One of our job market candidates at Tilburg University had an offer withdrawn very late by the institution's rector because Tilburg is not ranked in the top 200 in the QS ranking. All of this after they assured our candidate that the rector's approval would be a formality... This is frustrating...

Is unselfish behavior primarily driven by desire or by duty? Erik Mohlin and I don’t settle this question. However, by developing and testing a model of social duties, we allow the question to be addressed: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... (ungated version at my home page) 1/10

🏁 We’re hiring at the TUM Heilbronn Data Science Center (PhD & Postdoc). Focus: econometrics, innovation policy, and technology management—with a particular interest in the societal and managerial implications of #causalAI. Join a highly interdisciplinary, research-driven environment at TUM. 👇

The Economic Journal Editorial Board and Royal Economic Society would like to thank Sascha O. Becker and Steffen Huck as they complete their terms. Excellent editors and colleagues who provided an outstanding service to the Journal. @essobecker.bsky.social @steffenhuck.bsky.social #EconSky

As I tell my students: "Sight before you cite"

Birthright citizenship is a powerful tool for reducing youth crime, from Leander Andres, Stefan Bauernschuster, Gordon B. Dahl, Helmut Rainer, and Simone Schüller www.nber.org/papers/w35070

The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday, like the Polish election in 2023, is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world.

Eine Senkung des ⛽️ Preises für alle durch eine zeitlich befristete Aussetzung der Energiesteuer ist die schlechteste aller bisher diskutierten Optionen. Das ist eine Hilfe mit der Gießkanne, auch für Menschen, die den höheren Preis verkraften können. Es reduziert den Anreiz…

#Spritpreise & #Spritsteuern in historischer Zeitreihe: Rekordpreise – nominal, in Euro, real waren sie früher schon hoch & ganz früher deutlich höher. Die #Spritsteuern sind über die letzten 20 Jahre real deutlich gesunken, der Steueranteil entsprechend. Ein Thread🧵 (1/9) ⬇️

"All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again." open.substack.com/pub/ofthebra...

Two thoughtful essays about the impact of LLMs on graduate education: ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma... economics.mit.edu/sites/defaul... From personal experience I think the self-control problem mentioned in the first essay is very real.

Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into subsequent generations as the payoffs). It's a well written tribute. #econsky #academicsky #evolution marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/03/stev...

Universität Heidelberg Defends its Status as a University of Excellence – Rector Frauke Melchior: “A fantastic joint effort led to success” www.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsroom/...

Do your own research? My latest on Substack. open.substack.com/pub/trygveol...

not a pretty outlook on research and publishing in the time of AI

Answering the most popular question in a PhD methods course datacolada.org/133

Thanks for the initiative! The AWI Lab in Heidelberg will support this.

“Maybe, I would have been treated better if I had cited some of the editor in chief’s papers,” Bimonte, of the University of Siena, wrote in boldface in the email, which we have seen. Two days later, an unhappy editor at the journal quit, Retraction Watch has learned.

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fucking love this guy.

This is such a strong comment, published in 2022. It has 14 Google Scholar citations. The replicated paper has 65 citations in 2025 alone - and counting. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

I'm super excited for my new paper with Alex Tabarrok and Mark Whitmeyer. tl;dr: price controls cause chaos. That chaos causes misallocation. We develop new tools to measure that misallocation, which is 1-9 the size of the Harberger triangle www.economicforces.xyz/p/price-cont...

A few years ago, I was on a commission here in the Max Planck Society that tried to motivate the society to stop wasting millions of Euros on Microsoft licenses for bad calendar and email software. That and Elsevier subscriptions are just wasteful use of public funds imo. >

The Bundeskartellamt decided yesterday that Amazon cannot remove prices of third party sellers on their platform if these prices - check notes - are too high.

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520... Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

Statement from Bill Clinton

Platform competition (e.g. Rochet/Tirole, 2003, JEEA) Commitments for public goods provision (e.g. Bagnoli/Lipman, 1989, RES, Oechssler et al, 2022, JET) Ethical consumers (e.g. Hainmueller et al, 2015, REStat, Kaufmann et al, 2024, QJE) But I'm not aware of a study of their combination.

Der SVR Wirtschaft sucht für den neuen Standort Berlin eine Ökonomin oder einen Ökonomen mit einem großen Interesse an Wirtschaftspolitik - Schwerpunkt „Öffentliche Finanzen“. 👉 Reposts willkommen! Hier die Stellenausschreibung: www.sachverstaendigenrat-wirtschaft.de/karriere.html

Let us all stand with Chairman Powell.

Interesting perspective on gambling laws. And thanks mentioning our paper!

This is a video of federal immigration officers murdering a woman who was not attacking them. In Minneapolis, today. The United States Constitution protects all people in the United States, Conservative and Liberal. Its suspension will eventually harm all people, Conservative and Liberal.

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

Our dept is hiring an associate professor in microeconomics / competition theory. It is a wonderful department - do get in touch. The job ad is in German but we teach more and more in English, so we‘re flexible. www.hu-berlin.de/en/universit...

Nice job at Hochschule Heilbronn

Senator Kelly is correct. Plus a Public Service Announcement: KEY section of Department of Defense's Law of War Manual is 18.3.2.1. The VERY rule on the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders gives as its paradigmatic example of what is "clearly illegal: "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing. Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this? Background readings: Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

Recently did around 30 requests to ppl who'd published very similar papers to the one I needed reviews for. 3 declines, 25 no response. Please at least decline guys it slows stuff down so much otherwise.

So it's back to the lab! And we are ready in Grenoble since we did not dismantle them, we rather invested in better subject pool recruitment and management.

Heidelberg, Germany, from the castle, on a Friday evening.

🚨JOB OPENING🚨 JKU Linz is hiring an Assistant Professor in Microeconomics (non-tenure track, 6 years). The target date for applications is Nov 15, the hard deadline Nov 20. Please share within your network! Job ad and application (requires EJM login): econjobmarket.org/positions/11...

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

14 postdoc fellowships for 2yrs, in Freiburg, Tübingen or Konstanz

Here is a rock song "HC1 Heartbreak" (MP3 and Lyrics) econ.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/aisongs/hc1_... based on my research paper arxiv.org/abs/2411.14763 on robust standard errors and large scale methodological replications. Made with Suno and ChatGPT. AI amazes me again and again.

📣 New paper! "Delegate Pricing Decisions to an Algorithm? Experimental Evidence" with @normann.bsky.social, Nina Rulié, & @ostypa.bsky.social We study what happens when humans delegate to a collusive algorithm, and AI pricing adoption becomes a strategic choice! arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2510.27636

great idea. i would be glad to do the same for PhD students/postdocs working on behavioral/experimental economics. #econsky