New working paper with Shunyao Yan Polarizing news content is great at capturing attention. But does it help publishers where it matters most: subscriptions? #mediaecon #polarization #subscriptions #digitalmarketing

NEW from me. My cover story in today's @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social steps back and provides a basic primer on why soaring federal debt matters for the economy and the federal budget. 🧵 thedispatch.com/article/debt...

Our research on the value of cookies & Privacy Sandbox for online publishers with Zhengrong Gu, & @sjkobayashi.bsky.social is now published in PNAS 🎉🎉. Check out this thread for an overview 👇

"The legalization of mobile sports gambling in America was a policy mistake and that the evidence is now clear enough to say so."

"52 tenured professors — about a fifth of the school’s active, full-time faculty — raised questions about Garrett’s management of the school." lamaterial.com/p/usc-s-fame...

I wouldn't have guessed, but this is a must read.

How it feels being on this app today

🤘🤘

As online betting has grown in popularity, a new report from the New York Federal Reserve builds on the troubling link between legal sports wagering and financial health. n.pr/4tqWJuL

And one final chart shows that so far AI tools haven’t led to an explosion of submissions to several of the top 5 economics journals.

found something rather baffling when researching my column this week… I wanted to see if there was any evidence that AI tools were helping economists to make their research more readable. So I analysed the text of NBER working paper abstracts…

How adopting an automated review monitoring system allows restaurants to translate consumer feedback into operational quality improvements, from Guangyu Cao, Shenghao He, and Ginger Zhe Jin www.nber.org/papers/w34934

The prediction markets have a very different view of nearterm gasoline prices than the futures market. I haven't done the full calculation with options prices, but it looks like there is probably an arbitrage opportunity. www.natesilver.net/p/gas-prices... www.wsj.com/market-data/...

Excellent article on branding and design, told through the history of the Swiss/luxury watch industry: paulgraham.com/brandage.html

Some good coverage of my working paper on housing filtering in The Atlantic today. The paper itself, The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower, is available here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This is your annual reminder that if you aren't listening to the world's greatest radio station WWOZ on this Mardi Gras day, you are doing it wrong. www.wwoz.org/listen/player/

Trump administration drops its appeal of court order blocking $1.2-billion UCLA settlement

Very cool how productive everyone is getting with new AI tools, I think, as I listen to Brownsville Girl for the fourth time in a row.

Has financial literacy been declining or are smartphones changing the way we answer surveys? I was on Marketplace yesterday to talk about how smartphones are making it more challenging to gauge knowledge on surveys. Longer thread coming soon! Check out our full study here: lnkd.in/guiqHmKW

As States Permitted Online Sports Gambling, Citizens’ Personal Financial Health Suffered anderson-review.ucla.edu/as-states-pe...

Tour de force on just exactly what has gone on at Texas A&M for so many years from Chris Hooks in @texasmonthly.bsky.social: www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic...

Honestly, tons of academics who I greatly respect don't realy understand AI including - what it does, how it's evolving, how it's affecting research. That's bad.

This year's Empirical Management Conference is at Stanford, May 27-29! Send us your best papers! Details and submission form here: worldmanagementsurvey.org/emc2026/ JOIN US!! It's fun, I promise! @raffasadun.bsky.social @johnvanreenen.bsky.social @renatalemos.bsky.social @nickbloom.bsky.social

Despite the negative framing in this article, this sounds like a very promising set of moves by the EU Commission on reforming some harmful and failed digital regulations.

Our train conductor just broke in over the PA system to announce this news live, in four languages. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Star ratings are hard to ignore. Even when we’re looking for quality, our brains steer us toward cheaper stuff online. Christopher Mims explains why.

Interesting reporting from @bencasselman.bsky.social, suggests Instacart is performing (or allowing) quite extensive personalized price discrimination.

Acts done out of love, Nietzsche once said, stand beyond good and evil. If this is what art amounts to, we should be grateful to Alice Munro for reminding us to be properly frightened of it. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

In honor of #GivingTuesday, my wife & I are matching donations (up to $20K) to the ASFOP Teega Wende Orphanage in 🇧🇫Burkina Faso🇧🇫, which supports over 200 orphans and we have supported for over a decade. 1/2

I don't know if Texas deserves to be in the playoffs, but I do know what all the other playoff teams are hoping for.

Some news: I will be spending this entire 2025-26 academic year located in Paris, visiting the local universities and participating in the research community here. If you work in Paris or are just passing though in the next year, please reach out, I'd be happy to meet up! PhD students especially!

This is an interesting set of academic research papers about the increasingly key debate of when AI should be used to label data (an expensive task we use humans for) Yang et al show that AI answers are quite different than human, but Briggs finds it may be because AI is better than human RAs!

I think Southwest Airlines should revert its website to what they had in 1995

Yes it is.

An absolutely unreal performance from Shohei Ohtani to complete the Dodgers' NLCS sweep 🧹

Attention IO job market candidates: Sometimes speakers in the CMA's external economics seminar series have to cancel at relatively short notice. We would love for these slots to go to JMCs to present their job market paper. Drop me a message if you are interested or share with those who might be.

❗❗❗🚨🚨🚨 Next @cepr.org IO Virtual Gathering is taking place on NOVEMBER 7 at 2pm CET. 1st hr is dedicated to JM presentations by IO candidates graduating from Eur / UK schools. If interested, please submit a draft of your JMP & CV at: t.co/aUTPTWSten by OCTOBER 26! 🚨🚨🚨 ❗❗❗ #econjobmarket

This paper shows that you can predict actual purchase intent (90% accuracy) by asking an off-the-shelf LLM to impersonate a customer with a demographic profile, giving it a product image & having it give its impressions, which another AI rates. No fine-tuning or training & beats classic ML methods.

On one hand: don't anthropomorphize AI. On the other: LLMs exhibit signs of gambling addiction. The more autonomy they were given, the more risks the LLMs took. They exhibit gambler's fallacy, loss-chasing, illusion of control... A cautionary note for using LLMs for investing without guardrails.

ENO UNIVERSE playlist! A retrospective of Brian Eno’s body of work from 1972-1995 including his solo rock and ambient records and his collaborations with Bowie,Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Fripp, etc! All links and annotated tracklisting in the newsletter issue fluxblog.substack.com/p/fluxblog-5...

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

Wild chart: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/u...

The videos from the NBER Economics of Transformative AI conference are well worth your time. www.nber.org/conferences/...

It looks like he didn't share it on Bluesky, so I will. @afinetheorem.bsky.social has written an excellent review article covering 7 recent books on the economics of AI that serves as an excellent overview of this topic. Highly recommended! kevinbryanecon.com/BryanAIBookR...

I can confirm that the cuisine in France is on another level

🚨*New research*🚨 Together with Tai Lam, Nicolas Padilla, and Anja Lambrecht: we study the impact of LLMs on user behavior across the web. We use a large and detailed panel of user-level online browsing from 2022 – 2023 and study how consumers' behavior changes after they adopt AI tools.

saw this tweet and checked my calculator history and I'm losing it

The GOAT