Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

🚀 I made a tracker that shows when the Census Bureau adds or removes datasets from their APIs. Dashboard at www.hrecht.com/census-api-d... and follow @censusapitracker.bsky.social for major updates. I've been wanting to build this for years but now seemed an especially important time to keep track.

Academics responding to referee reports

TLDR: AI caused a lot more job posts, but no more jobs! While the intervention did save employers time, the welfare loss to jobseekers from time wasted on applications is 6x the size of the welfare gain to employers. Suggests widespread use of LLMs can harm market efficiency.

🚨 New paper alert, with @johnjhorton.bsky.social! Using an experiment run on a large online labor market, we provide evidence that providing employers access to an AI-written first draft of a job post harms the efficiency of the market. emmawiles.github.io/storage/jobo...

Is AI liberating human programmers—or programming them right out of their jobs? At @wired.com we kept hearing conflicting accounts, so we surveyed 730 coders and developers at every career stage about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job: www.wired.com/story/how-so...

Important paper on the home insurance market. Authors use novel data on 15 million insurance policies + document many new descriptive facts. For instance, "the average person’s homeowners insurance [costs] 17% of their monthly principal and interest payment." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The Deportation Data Project collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets. A public good provided by academics and lawyers at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia.

TIL "property tax revenues adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US." And this revenue smoothing is not symmetric: "municipalities are significantly more likely to reassess in up markets as opposed to down." H/t @nber.org WP by Chen & Cohen: www.nber.org/papers/w33238

🚨🚨 What happens when you take a bunch of human capital out of a local economy? Is brain drain a real thing? And what are the consequences? In a new paper, we shed light on this in the context of highly developed economies: Sweden and Norway. #Econsky

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

Grateful for small joys these days, like a little more sunlight every day. Fun little map I made last week 📊

NEW PAPER: "Examining the role of training data for supervised methods of automated record linkage: Lessons for best practice in economic history" with Jonas Helgertz and Joe Price now forthcoming (and nicely proofed) at Explorations in Economic History 🧵 authors.elsevier.com/c/1kiv03I~dW...

Hey #econsky! FYI: our @oiginstitute.bsky.social annual research conference is Nov 13-14, 2025! - Nov 13 is the main conference day ft. keynote by David Card - Nov 14 is a workshop day for early career researchers Learn more + submit here (deadline: 4/11): www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/co...

I just found out that @epi.org has updated and modernized its invaluable archive of State of Working America data and tabulations. Check it out! data.epi.org HT: @benzipperer.org

Happy to share that @annabindler.bsky.social & I will organize the 16th #TWEC Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime in Berlin. Save the date: 26-27 September 2025. CfP follows next month #econsky

Based on feedback from past participants, potential applicants, and mentors, the CeMENT workshop will now be held June 30 - July 2, 2025, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. To apply, go to: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co... Deadline to apply is March 15.

📣 Submit your crime paper by Feb 14. 🔸 4th Workshop on the Economics of Crime for Junior Scholars 🔸 29-30 May, 2025 🔸 Quattrone Center, UPenn 🔸 Keynote: @amandayagan.bsky.social 🔹 Send your paper to: [email protected] @emmarackstraw.bsky.social

2/ If you combine most Americans not reading much and a few reading a lot, you've got some Power Law nonsense developing! The 4% of adults who read 50 or more books did at least 28% of ~all the country's reading~ — more than the bottom 80% combined. The top 20% read 75% of all books.

At the end of the year, I ran a poll for @today.yougov.com asking people how many books they read in 2024. The answer is not many! The median American read ~2 books~ last year; 38% of Americans didn't read ANY. But... 1/

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

Students at Brown have used the Google Maps API to create a live tracker for traffic flows under congestion pricing in NYC. It includes a real-time diff-in-diff type comparison between NYC, Boston, and Chicago: www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com

As I am now handling papers at AEJ:Policy again, I want to encourage authors of papers that identify partial equilibrium effects to consider (in a rigorous manner) how they relate to policy effects or general equilibrium effects.

Me (today) revisiting some old code written by me (years ago) @xkcd.com

Updated my blog for the first time since 2023. It had been so long that I needed to read one of my old blog posts to even remember *how* to update it! Thank you, 2018-self for the RStudio + {blogdown} workflow refresher: thelittledataset.com/2018/08/26/l... #rstats #blogdown

Excited to share results from a 4-year first-ever RCT across US jails. We (Crystal Yang & I) find that death rates are much higher in jails than officially reported & health care accreditation improves staff coordination, quality & save lives. www.nber.org/papers/w33357

Medicaid fights crime. 📈📉 www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?r...

I was incredibly honored to be awarded the CSWEP Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. When I accepted the award, I talked about the importance of mentoring. The lessons I pass on are kind of obvious. But they are important, so I am going to share them yet again. (A🧵)

Apply for the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute's Visiting Scholar Program--a great opportunity (!) to interact with outstanding scholars who care about Inequality. Deadline January 17, 2025. www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/vi...

Recent WSJ article on "ghost jobs" features a sankey plot showing one person's job search process in 2024. (H/t Serena Dao) www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

✨ Reminder: the deadline is Friday, January 17 to apply for OIGI's Visiting Scholars program ✨ More info + apply here: www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/vi...

Now that I seem to have gotten new followers interested in my editor takes, If you're asked to do a referee report and you're not sure if you have enough time, just quickly reply to the editor that you don't have time. Do not let the request languish. Ghosting a request is the worst option.

✨ NEW in @jlaborecon.bsky.social: "The Impact of the Retirement Slowdown on the U.S. Youth Labor Market" by Paul Mohnen ✨ In recent decades, labor supply of older Americans has increased while labor mkt outcomes of younger Americans have deteriorated... how much does the former explain the latter?

Iceberg inspiring me to work on my job market paper

In case you want a lot more personal views in your feed from people who absolutely do not speak on behalf on their employer haha

Strategic selection into when to start kindergarten increases average achievement... but "widens racial + income achievement gaps, partly b/c only higher-income parents select on children’s gains from waiting." Paper by Michael Ricks [ft. v. cool compliers-related diagrams]: tinyurl.com/529zayaj

"The Mortgage Piggy Bank" 🏡 🐖 🏦 Bernstein and Koudijs (2024) estimate effx of mortgage amortization on wealth accumulation They find +1 euro of amortization leads to nearly +1 euro of wealth. 2/3 from ⬇️ expenditures, 1/3 from ⬆️ labor supply QJE: tinyurl.com/3v2wk4bb Ungated: tinyurl.com/3e8rmuf4

Hi #econsky, the Nebraska Labor Summit will take place Friday, March 28, 2025 at the University of Nebraska, with keynotes by Marika Cabral and Jesse Rothstein. It's a super fun, junior-centric research conference. Deadline is this Sunday, December 1. Submit your papers here: tinyurl.com/2rb8xyxw

I made a starter pack of government economists. go.bsky.app/K7fAcMi

Had a great seminar visit at @unlincoln.bsky.social! Also featured an excellent stop at the art museum on campus. S/o to @dtannenbaum.bsky.social for the lil tour! Some faves from the campus + Sheldon museum:

To celebrate my moving to BlueSky I am giving away LaTeX goodies. Always wanted to have a clean, nice-looking, readable, complete and supporting visual track changes reply to referees? Look no more: the template you're looking for is here: github.com/paolocrosett... Happy BlueSkying to everyone.

* Please Share * We are hiring a full-time two-year RA! (or pre-doc?). Very excited about this position because you could be paired to work with many awesome economists at Batten (Ben Castleman, Andrew Simon, Derek Wu, Tim Layton) and myself! More info down here 👇 jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...

It's a treat to have a paper highlighted in the NBER Digest! Couples' choices about when to relocate offer a lens into how they value each person's career success. In both Sweden and Germany, they seem to prioritize men's careers, even when the woman has similar earning potential. bit.ly/MTO-T

We still have a relatively poor understanding of the relationship between evidence and policy. Program evaluation in particular is often motivated by a desire to make policy better. But how effective is program evaluation itself?Michelle Rao's JMP tackles this question. www.michellerao.com/research

Poem by Joseph Fasano

Hey #EconSky! The Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute @ the Minneapolis Fed has a VISITING SCHOLARS program. Visits feature many seminars, opportunities to talk econ, and trails for biking/skiing (depending on the season)! Learn more + apply here: www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/vi...

The Race and Stratification Working Group at NBER will have its annual meeting on Friday, April 4, 2025! Dania Francis, Vicki Bogan, Ellora Derenoncourt and I are organizing the program. Submit your paper before the December 19, 2024 deadline! conference.nber.org/confsubmit/b...

This is one of the best papers on discrimination in recent years. Read it, read it again. More and more evidence that introducing subjectivity at almost any stage increases discrimination.

#APPAM2024 goal achieved: rode the giant ferris wheel 🎡