If you have transportation related papers and would like to join in organizing a session, DM/email me!

As an end of the year wrap up, I thought I'd look at my research in terms of "days between starting a project and acceptance"... here's the list: 1916 2771 1522 2009 1492 929 941 2616 I've decided this was stupid exercise lolol

📣 Call for papers 📣 15th European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association May 8 - 9, 2026 CREI, Barcelona Keynotes by Edward Glaeser and Monika Piazzesi. Please submit your paper by January 9. urbaneconomics.org/meetings/emu...

is quoting macbeth in an econ paper a good idea or a bad idea? i mean, it's october...

The program for our upcoming annual North American meeting is up: urbaneconomics.org/meetings/uea.... #UEA2025, hosted by Université du Québec à Montréal, features keynotes by Cecile Gaubert & Keith Head and 60+ paper sessions. To register, visit editorialexpress.com/conference/nauea2025/

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements This is a big deal

Dr. Erika McEntarfer has devoted her career to public service. She has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased. #econsky

welp there goes the credibility of US labor statistics... as soon as you fire the head of a stats agency for not producing stats that you like, you inject bias into how all future numbers are interpreted (and reported).

i love doing research, but... currently on a 13 strike rejection streak. it's sometimes not a very rewarding or validating profession.

I am looking for a research assistant to work with me on the development of U.S. housing markets. Experience with ArcGIS, Stata useful. We build datasets that allow us to understand housing affordability, the impacts of transit and zoning, and more: rb.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FRS/jo...

spent some time calling ☎️ PA state house / senate members over proposed ✂️ to SEPTA transit 🚅 funding, and I have to say, it was cool to speak to actual ppl in the those offices

The Philadelphia Fed's Grad Student mentoring program deadline is coming up: 6/20 ⏰ We prioritize nearby universities but have accepted applicants from all over the country. Apply! www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/...

Curious how accurate multimodal LLMs are at digitizing diversely formatted historical tables? ➡️ pretty accurate! ➡️ helps a lot with harmonization ➡️ far cheaper than manual digitization ➡️ but iterative, disciplined prompt training is important! Check out our new WP - arxiv.org/abs/2505.11599

Out in print -- "Lockdowns and Innovation: Evidence from the 1918 Flu Pandemic". My first experiment with a short paper! w/ the wonderful @jeffrlin.bsky.social @ruben-gaetani.bsky.social Enrico Berkes, & Olivier Deschênes direct.mit.edu/rest/article...

Well, NBER, in fact **I WILL BE** discouraged from submitting other papers for consideration at future meetings. 😎

refereeing can be hard: a journal rejects you 1, 5, times... and then asks for your objective opinion about another paper, especially when your own research has not always received objective review or careful editorship it's important to not perpetuate the jackassery, but it's not always easy

new achievement unlocked: rejection and referee request from the same journal w/in a 10 minute window ☑️

HAPPY SQUARE DAY 🟦

My NSF PRFB on the genetics of female polymorphism in hummingbirds was terminated yesterday. I don't have much to say, I'm just sad. We've discovered so much, and could have gone so much further. If anyone else is in the same boat, esp postdocs, please reach out, it would be good to connect.

fischerspooner fridays

##EconSky Our seminar speaker for tmr was coming from U Toronto. He was apparently detained (politely) for several hrs by US customs in CA. He was then cleared to travel to the US after his flight had left. Needless to say, no seminar tmr.

The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers https://go.nature.com/41OhAgK

www.chronicle.com/article/brea... All of us who use and value NCES data are distraught. No one more than @jdmatsudaira.bsky.social who understands the work being lost and implications better than anyone.

hearing from folks who are worried about their devices being inspected for critical speech at the border... this is some un-American BS, unacceptable

New dataset alert: daily average online sentiment by county These are averages of online sentiment from geo-located tweets between 2014 and 2022. I'm glad to make them available more broadly now. Let me know if they're helpful! www.patrickbaylis.com/posts/2025-0...

Here are some sources for relevant data saving / rescue efforts: - @datarescueproject.org www.datarescueproject.org - Data Lumos www.datalumos.org

a funny thing about using LLMs for surveying academic literature: the hallucinations are actually pretty good suggestions of what to work on and who to coauthor with...

Applications due 2/1 ⏰ for AEA Summer Economics Fellows at the Philly Fed and many other Reserve Banks and gov agencies, run by @aeacswep.bsky.social and @aeacsmgep.bsky.social. This is a great program! Please apply! www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co...

very cool paper, but also the first line of abstract "We provide the first evidence on how workers invest in human capital after losing ability" cannot possibly be true. editors would provide valuable service by being more circumspect of these claims prior to publication.

New 🚨 Research Brief on adjusting for undercounting of recent immigrants in the CPS (Bsky post!) 1⃣ I show that the CPS undercounts recent immigrants. For ex., the sample population of the 1994 cohort continues to rise until 1998 or even 2002. This shouldn't be... tinyurl.com/ms4pvk67

Inquirer op-ed arguing that SEPTA needs more in-house expertise and less reliance on consultants, evidenced by a rough past with payments systems www.inquirer.com/opinion/edit... This accords with general sentiment from @alonlevy.bsky.social re: construction costs... any notes?

Have people used Notebook LM for synthesizing academic or adjacent documents? I'm just looking for text output (i.e., synthesize referee reports), and wondering how it stacks up against other LLMs... My experience has been mixed, but I like the flexible document inclusion interface.

AEA hosts lectures synthesizing research frontiers at the ASSAs each year... and broadcasts them!!! So if you (like me) travelled for fun and miss the meetings, you can still watch: For me, 👀 the lectures from @guidoimbens.bsky.social and @rebeccadiamond.bsky.social www.aeaweb.org/conference/w...

I wonder if this could be a good use case for LLMs, to summarize the conversation between the authors, referees, and editor(s).

Academics from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to - not publish - have outstanding publication records - introduce more novel scientific concepts - less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards. www.nber.org/papers/w33289

New working paper on 1960s insurance policy and its effects on housing (dis-)investment and neighborhoods, with Ingrid Ellen, Dan Hartley, and Wei You. jlin.org/papers/EHLY-...

We had a great end of the semester with many exciting activities we will be posting about, including a seminar by @chrisseveren.bsky.social earlier this month. Thanks for visiting Chris!!

v cool paper -- political economy + infrastructure + history + Paraguay! (Paraguay has a wild and fascinating history and I love reading related scholarship)

publishing in this profession sucks sometimes

An oldy but goldy: friends don't let friends (with Windows computers) use "\". See aeadataeditor.github.io/posts/2021-0...

Just under two weeks till the submission deadline for our @urbaneconomics.bsky.social Berlin conference. Please submit your papers or session proposals. Details here: urbaneconomics.org/meetings/emu... #EconConf

OSMnx 2.0.0 has been released! 🎉 This has been a massive effort over the past year to streamline the package's API, re-think its internal organization, and optimize its code. Today OSMnx is faster, more memory efficient, and fully type-annotated for a better user experience. 🧵

Free section title idea: Misconceptual Framework

ok, i think ComponentArrays.jl is best for this... other methods struggle to serve up an optimize-compatible vector (i.e., the parameters are the terms being optimized): github.com/jonniedie/Co... #julialang there's also ParameterHandling.jl, but it seems to be less mature and have less support?

what's your preferred way of handling parameters in Julia #julialang?! (especially for econ models where the parameters the arguments for optimization) vectors, named tuples, structs, or ... ?

... the median age of an MTV viewer is 51?! wow

Reading a psych book: every claim is given a {5,4,3,2,1} rating as to confidence. This is a really cool approach for synthesizing existing literature. I wonder how our papers (especially introductions) would be different if we did something like this? (color coded??)

word of the day: LACUSTRINE 🌊

A reminder that more American child pedestrians (age 0-17) are killed by cars on Halloween than on any other day of the year. #CarsRuinCities www.vox.com/future-perfe...

All of you in Cambridge, MA and surroundings: this coming Friday (Nov 1) we will have another edition of the Cities & Development workshop! Great program as usual -- DM me if you are interested in attending... (Organized by Ed Glaeser, Gabriel Kreisler, @novosad.bsky.social, and yours truly.)