Sometimes, you have to fire shots as a reviewer #EconSky 📈📉

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stats-3 #smbc

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

2025 Gorilla update 👋🦍: One student found the gorilla this time around (see details in thread below). BUT, I have an AI-related update that is too good not to share ... #EconSky 📉📈

I concur that it is super insightful! I expect much more work leveraging these kinds of approaches in the future, there is a lot of untapped potential by exploring text data (which was tedious in the past)

Updating my LEGO White House

As far as high-profile academics moving out of Trump's America goes, it doesn't get more high-profile than this. 🇺🇸 → 🇨🇭

Exiting moment for any economist: when your kids learn about money in school 😁 #econsky

Had the privilege to catch Refused on their goodbye tour yesterday. What a blast! It’s rare to see a band with such energy, style blending, and political and audience engagement 11/10 #RefusedAreReallyFckingDead

Just published 🌱: We dug into 16 million+ field records across Central Europe to find out what drives farmers’ crop rotation choices. Turns out past cropping, agronomic advice, and legume prices matter a lot and legumes are likely to play a much bigger role in the future👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.ag...

The only kind of gang activity we get to see around #Wegeningen

All is not well at Elsevier richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...

Great use case of ClaudeAI or ChatGPT: to transfer equations from a textbook to PowerPoint slides I just take a picture and ask for Latex code that can be plugged into the equation editor and converted into a perfect vector-based equation!

v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚 Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to! Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇

Greatly looking forward to the next AgEconMeet session with Marc Bellemare in two weeks

Today's ChatGPT use case: give it Stata code and have it draft a methodology section based on it. A straightforward yet somewhat time-consuming task to do manually. Bonus: if the writeup doesn't match what you THINK you did, it may be due to an error in your code that you didn't catch. #EconSky

Just received a physical copy of the dissertation of one of my own PhD students via the internal mail system … from the other side of the building 🤣 (one elevator ride away). Gotta love bureaucracy 👏

Final day of the #EAAE2025! Kicking it off with an organized session on analyzing farmers’ voices in the farmer protests. Great way to showcase the work we did in DE-FR-BE-NL in a great team led by Doris Läpple

Very cool keynote by prof Anna Dreber about the replicability crisis and potential solutions 🙏 #EAAE2025

We had a nice session this morning about “What the EAAE can do for early career agecons”! #EAAE2025

The BEC group is well represented at the #EAAE2025, with 20 participants 🕺

FADN >> FSDN session at #EAAE2025. Nice to see the future dataset I will be using a lot ☺️ I was in particular impressed with the DIB linked database which will cover all relevant farm practices linked to policy at the farm level to FSDN!

A special moment for me at #EAAE2025, with my former MSc thesis adviser Matty Demont (IRRI) delivering the first keynote of the day! Matty is the reason I ended up doing a PhD and staying in academia 🎓. The story on his gastronomic systems research was impressive 👏

What better way to kick off day 2 of the #EAAE2025 in Bonn than a session on “Climatic Crisis And Risk Management In Agriculture: A Behavioural Perspective” where I was kindly invited to be a discussant by session organizer Simone Cerroni 🎤

Hey #EAAE2025: Thursday is replication day. First, Anna Dreber's keynote on "Predicting Replication Outcomes" (11am) & our session👇(4pm) feat. ‪@robertfinger.bsky.social‬ @cedricchambru.bsky.social‬ @jensrommel.bsky.social‬ ‪@beta1hat.bsky.social‬ @mabuchner.bsky.social‬ ‪@i4replication.bsky.social‬

Great Opening Session of the 18th Congress of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE), hosted by the University of Bonn. With welcoming addresses and keynotes by Monica Hartmann, Jose Gill, and Elizabeth Robinson and others Details congress www.ilr1.uni-bonn.de/eaaecongress...

Need for less policy analysis, more political economy "with a dose of philosophy on the side"👍🏻

The upcoming two weeks are conference weeks. The next week starts with the #EAAE at Bonn. Where I present on the 26th, my research whether the identity identity of farmers' can affect participation in agri-enviornment contracts. 👨‍🌾👩‍🌾 1/2

Let the games begin. #EAAE2025

Looking forward to the start of the 18th Congress of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE), today in Bonn. 27 papers with AECP group (co)authorship will be presented at the congress. Join us! Details congress www.ilr1.uni-bonn.de/eaaecongress... Details group aecp.ethz.ch

Monika Hartmann delivering the Welcome Address of the #EAAE2025 Congress in Bonn. We are celebrating 50 years of the EAAE this edition 🎉 Looking forward to 4 fruitful days 👩‍🏫

Kicking off the #EAAE2025 Congress in Bonn with a session on causality. What better start than ‘metrics 🤓 if you are also attending make sure to say hi 👋

Arrived in Bonn yesterday for the XVIII EAEE Congress! The city welcomed me on a nice bike trip to Troisdorf to visit my former colleague Annika, and DB entertained me on the way back with ghost replacement busses and delays 😆

Officially job-seeking (certified by the Federal Employment Agency). So if anyone happens to know of any exciting jobs for an agricultural or applied micro economists... I'll be available soon. 💚😜 #EconSky #AgEcon #Job

Attending the “Gaming for Sustainability” conference today in Wageningen as I was intrigued by the combination of two major interests of mine: sustainable (food) systems 🌾 and gaming 🎮

AI summaries kill search traffic. This has been an obvious consequence of Google's AI summary strategy since its inception. Apparently the training data is so valuable that Google is willing to risk the neck of the goose that lays golden eggs. Screenshot: thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-9-blu...

I'm very honoured with the awarding of the 2025 Stevin prize for my research. And I'm particularly pleased that this prize goes to a philosopher, as it recognizes that we not only do blue sky research, but also analyses that can make a difference to the world. www.nwo.nl/en/prof-dr-i...

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

I enjoyed Carl Bergstrom's @carlbergstrom.com talk today @unswbabs.bsky.social on the current 'Peer review meltdown' phenomenon. Misery loves company, so I was glad to find out I'm not the only editor struggling to find reviewers. Carl et al. have narrow it down to a few factors including ->

lol, first time a co-author added a reference to Lundberg et al. (2021) before I had a chance to do so. Already an all-time classic. The opening of the abstract also remains an absolute banger. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We've updated the article with a new scrape. Note: 4 big journals were missed in the previous scrape. Updating reinforces the trends. The new scrape includes Special Issues. Discover Applied Sciences = 160 SIs open. >50% of Discover journals launched in 2024/25. Discover: >1200 SIs open. #NewMDPI

🎯 I scored 5/10 on #DiscoverOrMDPI — can you beat me? pagoba.shinyapps.io/publi_guess/, #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificPublishing #AcademicSky

One year timelapse for the guitar-shaped forest We see the fields evolving between bare earth, vegetation and bare earth again while the forest remains green [...]

So exciting to see our commentary out! With a super team of Yean-Uk Kim of @zalf.bsky.social, @alexruane.bsky.social of @agmip.bsky.social and @robertfinger.bsky.social, we outline needed advances for more robust risk assessments of cropping systems. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

A lot of it is due to @dingdingpeng.the100.ci in my feed, who always initiates great discussions. 👍

A re-analysis of Ciacci's (2024) "Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: Evidence from Sweden" Journal of Population Economics reveals major issues. A year ago, reproducers Adema, Folke, and Rickne found coding errors driving the paper's key results. Let's unpack this in a 🧵

Watched the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin this week and thoroughly enjoyed it 🤘 Beautiful narrative of the band itself on how they shaped their musical direction and wrote the first two albums. Contained a lot of live footage I had not seen (in full) before 🎸 11/10 👊

Herve Dakpo (INRAE) presenting ongoing work on trade-offs between technical inefficiency and pesticide damage control for Bordeaux wine growers 🍷 cool empirical work linking efficiency analysis and damage abatement models