Love the research process; hate the publication process

How rich is Elon? I'm closer in net worth to Larry Page than Larry Page is to Elon.

Look at how being diagnosed with cancer impacts people's involvement in crime!

angrily replying “duh” or “I’m not surprised” doesn’t make you look smart. It does the opposite.

Just think how exciting academia would be if there was a trade market/deadline: "I'll give you one deadwood and two future lines for your star Assistant Professor."

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Paper accepted! Woot!

🧵 New version of our paper (@bcegerod.bsky.social) is finally online: "How Many is Enough? Sample Size in Staggered Difference-in-Differences Designs" We show that even well-identified DiD studies are often underpowered; sample sizes needed are surprisingly large Paper: osf.io/preprints/os... 1/6

So much of classic political science research is woefully underpowered. I'm glad we're slowly coming to our senses.

Fire Ariely, Duke.

Are more research-productive faculty paid more than less research-productive faculty? Often, the answer is "no"! In Math, Psychology, and Economics, in roughly 61% of within-department pairings, the more research-productive faculty member earns less.

relatable

nothing like the smell of a fresh rejection in the morning. onward and upward!

This map shows where ICE is conducting the most "at large" arrests. Notice a pattern?

If someone paid you $4.75 every night you slept 7+ hours, would you sleep more? And--more importantly--would that increase in sleep change your behavior in other meaningful ways? This new paper ran an experiment to find out.

📣 Thrilled to announce our 5th Workshop on Field Experiments in Economics and Business, 7-8 Sept 2026, @tum.de, Campus Heilbronn. Keynotes: @peterbergman.bsky.social (University of Texas at Austin) & Esther Duflo (@mit.edu, University of Zurich) 🫶🏻 Submission deadline May 15, 2026 🚨 #EconSky

"How do class gaps compare to race and gender gaps? Strikingly, we find that the class gaps in tenure-track academia are as large as or larger than analogous race or gender gaps."

In academia, class background strongly shapes who advances and who stalls.

Demographic cues (eg, names, dialect) are widely used to study how LLM behavior may change depending on user demographics. Such cues are often assumed interchangeable. 🚨 We show they are not: different cues yield different model behavior for the same group and different conclusions on LLM bias. 🧵👇

Grade inflation in high schools harms students. GPAs rose by about a quarter of a letter grade over the past decade, even among students with similar test scores. This new working paper shows grade inflation lowers future test scores, high school graduation, college enrollment, and earnings.

working with good coauthors be like

You know what goes well with being snowed/iced in? Getting to that peer review you've been sitting on for 8 months.

Causal inference nuts: Radiolab has a great podcast this week about the pitfalls of using correlational evidence in policymaking. The empirical case is the self-esteem movement of the 1980s. Would be a good listen for those who teach causal inference.

Even in the AI era, learning to quickly "read" an academic article is an essential skill. When I started grad school, I thought I had to read every word, in order, for every article I "read". I don’t do that anymore. Here’s how I "read" most academic articles:

Calories don’t count during snow/ice storms.

The social sciences are the true hard sciences.

When political issues are heated, many people think staying neutral is the safest and most moral choice. But, is that how people truly see it? This new research by Ruttan, Adams, and DeCelles shows that’s not how others see political neutrality.

this hits

Americans are increasingly eating their meals alone.

PDF has become the fourth most popular religion

Everyone seems to be freaking out about AI "stealing jobs." My dudes: take a deep breath. Workers in highly AI-exposed occupations are often the most adaptable. They have transferable skills, savings, and dense labor markets.

good thing we're not cutting (or threatening to cut) research funding

The U.S. is losing its competitive advantage in scientific research. This new working paper uses 44 million publications and shows a massive global shift over the last 40 years:

My mom told me that she saw a video of Barron Trump singing online. She said he had the most beautiful voice she’s ever heard. AI has officially crossed the line.

The beauty of academia? Total freedom to pick which 7 days you work each week.

"But résumé studies only measure callbacks. They don’t tell us who actually gets hired." These authors of this brand new preprint wanted to know whether discrimination measured in résumé studies shows up in real hiring. So they linked a large résumé audit experiment to actual employment data.

If Microsoft word were a building…

why I have trust issues

Can you take someone's name and infer their race/ethnicity from it? Coding a person's race/ethnicity from their name is widespread in the social sciences. Doing so enables scholars to study discrimination, representation, and inequality when administrative records lack self-reported race/ethnicity

This isn't true.

Some people say that audit studies don't measure discrimination that causes real harm. These authors set out to answer this question: What are the actual welfare costs of housing discrimination? To answer this question, they combined two approaches. First, a large-scale field experiment.

These authors wanted to know whether people with physical disabilities face discrimination in hiring: even when they are equally qualified. So they ran an experiment.

Life hack for seminars where only "clarifying questions" are allowed during the talk: Start every question with "just as a clarification…" You may then ask any question. Bob's your uncle.

Can you guess what happened when South Africa unexpectedly banned alcohol sales nationwide for 5 weeks in 2020? … … … Injury-induced deaths, homicides, assaults, and reported rapes all fell sharply as a direct result. Alcohol sucks.

Two new preprints on the efx of GLP-1s just dropped. They use different samples, data, & designs. But they come to the same conclusion on one point: GLP-1s do not generate meaningful short- to medium-run reductions in non-GLP-1 medical spending, despite clear health benefits.

Dementia has a devastating impact on affected families' finances. Beginning about six years prior to clinically recognizable dementia, affected families net worth starts to crater. We should treat dementia risk not just as a medical issue, but as a predictable financial shock.

There are three magic words that guarantee an academic’s work is always the first of its kind. "To our knowledge"

Lot's of people are lauding tools like pangram for AI detection. However, in the limited testing I've done I've found it shockingly easy to make minor changes to AI output and trick it into thinking it's 100% human generated.