New in JCRE: The Common Problem of Bad Controls in Tests of the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis. A Comment on Ayres et al. (PNAS, 2023) and related literature by Paul Clist @paulclist.bsky.social jcr-econ.org/the-common-p...

Dice games are a popular way of measuring lying and cheating. There's a neat theory, called Justified Dishonesty, where people that observe counterfactuals 'swap' rolls, as they can cheat but feel honest. We explore that idea here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

This is really good news for thousands of students - ERASMUS is a fantastic programme that UK students should have kept all along. ERASMUS provides opportunities that without funding many students could never afford. It can only be a net positive.

Free the Best Buys! www.cgdev.org/blog/fcdos-b...

Simulating from and checking a model in Stan: It’s so easy in Stan Playground–it just runs on your browser! statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/15/s...

Experimental economics now has a substantial track record #econsky #academicsky marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/12/nott...

Wired: two article proofs to check, received on the same afternoon Tried: In the week before Christmas, whilst packing up my office with a cold

"If growth was actually your priority, you would not be doing this." (Me, stating the obvious) www.ft.com/content/2b60...

cool confounding and adjustment example by @jofrhwld.bsky.social below. To estimate A –direct–> Y, must adjust for B (and C or D). If you adjust for C, it partly opens collider D, so non-causal path D <– B –> Y is opened. Easy to forget about descendants partly opening parents. Sneaky colliders.

More nonsense from Scientific Reports www.nature.com/articles/s41... This article may be many things, but scientific it ain’t

Preregistrations without Code do not Prevent P-Hacking: You can increase your chances for a significant finding in the absence of real effects even with correlations and t test despite having preregistered your hypothesis (e.g., simply changing arguments in the functions). doi.org/10.31222/osf...

🚨 New working paper! How well do people predict the results of studies? @sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

ICYMI: New paper for causal effects with panel data, subsuming other approaches. We generate realistic synthetic data based on commonly studied datasets, showing our method substantially outperforms others and providing insight about what in the data-generating process corresponds to gains.

I appreciate the WSJ following up on this story, which is already in danger of being one of many forgotten scandals in elite academia.

Brexit reduced the UK’s GDP by between 6% and 8%. That is MASSIVE. #ProjectFear #wetoldyouso www.nber.org/papers/w3445...

well said expatriarch.substack.com/p/usaid-is-u...

Some good news/ Home Office evaluation of the Refugee Transitions Outcomes Fund - pilot schemes to help employment, housing and integration for newly recognised refugees. Substantially improved employment outcomes & had positive fiscal impacts. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Amazing story in The Times. Reform UK failed to pay VAT to HMRC on its sales (tickets, merchandise). About £400k in all. Not tax avoidance. Not tax evasion. They just didn't realise when you sell stuff you have to charge VAT.

You've got to love studies like these: New carbon tax paper out in @aeajournals.bsky.social: Macroeconomics. The headline: "I find that carbon taxes reduce emissions as expected but also impair macroeconomic activity." What to make of this, a quick 🧵

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

We are thrilled to welcome Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee as the new Lemann Foundation Professors to our department, beginning in the summer of 2026.

WOW, terrific news for @econ.uzh.ch and the wider European community 🤩🤩🤩 Congrats!

🆕 Where to find development economics resources I've updated my list of all the various sources of newsletters, articles, podcasts & videos relevant to development economics that I've come across in my three years at @voxdev.bsky.social: voxdev.org/topic/where-...

Foreign Policy has a new issue on "The End of Development." Lots of pieces worth reading - I'll put my thoughts in this thread as I read through. (Re the title, worth noting that development has always been about more than ODA + SDGs. That broader development is far from dead)

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Back to teaching or studying economics at university this September? @voxdev.bsky.social has tons of useful resources for university economics courses - I have included some examples in this thread. 1/n

“This is my local community. I’m worried about my children.” That’s what a woman told GB News at the anti-migrant protest at the Barbican in London. Problem is, she said the same thing at a protest in Epping days earlier. 🤦 ❌ hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/05/o...

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

Loving the new Handbook of Culture & Economic Behavior (Benjamin Enke, Paola Giuliano, @nathannunn.bsky.social, Leonard Wantchekon)--fantastic work! Grateful to the editors & authors for the insightful, well-structured chapters. As a cultural/political economy fan, I've found it enriching&inspiring!

Seeing too many diff-in-diff reviews and and summary articles but not sure where to start? We propose a new way to synthesize this growing literature using a Review in Reviews approach.

Researcher assumptions shape not just how experiments run—but what questions we ask. Outlining best practices for designing context-aware lab experiments in non-Western settings, from Sara Lowes and @nathannunn.bsky.social https://www.nber.org/papers/w33981

In my latest blog post, I discuss the intuition behind the "bad control" problem, which unfortunately still appears to be quite common in econ papers. #EconSky deryugina.com/the-intuitio...

Child mortality in Malawi has fallen by more than 80% since 1990

Why is public support for foreign aid so much lower in the UK than France/Germany/USA? (real not rhetorical question)

#EconSky Does anybody have DHS data for Bangladesh? Or is there a webpage where somebody managed to save previously available DHS data? Thank you for your help!

For all the millions of word that have been written about how LLMs work, this is the only thing about them that most of us need to know.

The current fad for putting AI in everything reminds me of the 19th-century fad for adding electricity to everything, without thinking about why. Electric girdles! Electric garters! Electric hairpins! Electric tea cups!

🚀 New dataset & working paper out! I’m thrilled to share “The Extended Ethnographic Atlas” --> an open, massively expanded version of Murdock’s classic Ethnographic Atlas (EA). What’s new?

Very excited to welcome ‪‪@justsand.bsky.social to Open Phil as the inaugural leader of our new program devoted to accelerating economic growth in developing countries, where he'll allocate over $30m over the next 3 years www.openphilanthropy.org/research/in...

I think the current state of social science research is pretty bad and I wrote something for @asteriskmag.bsky.social about it. asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca...

Some personal/professional news... After 14 (!) years, this was my last week at @cgdev.org Posted a longer thread on the other site, and will share more later on what's next. For now, just want to say thank you.

This is an absolutely disastrous framing to adopt. “Immigration beings great gains but it needs to be controlled to maximise benefits” was/is right there on the table. Instead they have opted to lead with the strongest possible “Nigel Farage is right, don’t vote for him” headline.

“First, about half the time I reanalyze a study, I find that there are important bugs in the code, or that adding more data makes the mathematical finding go away, or that there’s a compelling alternative explanation for the results.” davidroodman.com/blog/2025/05...

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

I created a shiny web tool to play around with OL/TWFE so you can teach how this stuff can get so screwy. You can mess with temporal and cohort heterogeneity, treatment timing, whether you have any controls, etc. Share your worst plots! #econsky cannoncloud.shinyapps.io/TWFE_OLS_Pla...

🚨 New in Nature Human Behavior! 🚨 Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change. Both graphs in this image reflect equivalent climate change trends over time, yet people consistently perceive climate change as having a greater impact in the right plot than the left. 👇1/n