The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

Das KOF Konjunkturbarometer steigt aktuell um 0.9 Punkte auf 104.2 Pkte. Die Indikatoren der Konsumnachfrage und der Auslandsnachfrage legen zu. Die des Verarbeitenden Gewerbes stecken dagegen zurück. Die positiven Aussichten für die Schweizer Konjunktur festigen sich. kof.ethz.ch/news-und-ver...

Pretty clear message from Friedrich Merz on his China trip: curb overcapacity - or expect more EU protection in key sectors. Unlikely to shift Beijing’s policy. But clarity about the problem is good diplomacy - and a useful signal to fellow EU member states too. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/w...

The scaling gap is real: The EU has only 20% of the scale-ups found in the US and hosts just 110 unicorns vs 687 in the States. A major culprit is legal fragmentation. Founders still navigate 27 different labor, insolvency, and tax laws – adding massive costs and complexity. 2/

Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, @phinifa.bsky.social, & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya show that switching users from a chronological to an algorithmic feed on X significantly shifted political opinions in a pro-Republican direction. cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

EU demands Russia withdraw troops from Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Transnistria, pull nukes from Belarus, pay reparations, and hold free elections — all as conditions for a Ukraine deal. "We pay back to Russian maximalist demands on Ukraine." 🔗 euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/19/e...

Alles, was man hintergründig zum China-Besuch des Kanzlers wissen muss, haben @tbenner.bsky.social und zwei Kollegen sehr konzentriert in ihrem Essay zum „China-Schock“ für die @internationalepolitik.de aufgeschrieben, dringende Empfehlung.

New report outlining how we used text embeddings to categorize >30 million products of the ECB's daily price dataset in a cost-efficient manner. The goal is to turn billions of prices into snapshots of current inflation: www.bis.org/publ/othp109...

How did #Ukraine economy survive the RUS onslaught? maybe a miracle but there are also fundamental factors : 1) defend skies, shipping lanes 2) fiscal stimulus ↑ 3) vital int'l aid 4) play econ cards well 5) adaptability of private sector #UkrainianView #EconSky (w/ @tderyugina.bsky.social )

The EU as a safe haven, who would have thought www.politico.eu/article/icel...

Important paper on X algorithm effect on political views. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An outstanding expert on international trade clarifies the key point: Tariffs as an instrument of arbitrary power have been dismantled.

Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...

If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.

This is exactly right. The Onion quietly left Twitter a month ago and... our weekly subscribers went up. It's because we're doing well here, on Instagram and on YouTube. As a business, being on Twitter is somewhere between useless or detrimental, unless you're selling boner pills.

In the absence of AI access, higher-education participants outperform lower-education participants by 0.548 standard deviations; with AI access, this gap falls to 0.139 standard deviations, from Cruces, Fernández Meijide, Galiani, Gálvez, and Lombardi www.nber.org/papers/w34851

In der kommenden Nacht, um 04.00 Uhr am Morgen, gehen im historischen Herzen von #Basel die Lichter aus und der Morgenstraich begrüsst mit Trommeln, Piccolos und vielfarbig leuchtenden Laternen freudig die #Fasnacht 2026 🧡

Ein paar Beobachtungen aus dem @wifo.bsky.social zur SCOTUS-Entscheidung zu den IEPAA-Zöllen im Interview mit Nils Heisterhagen ThePioneer www.thepioneer.de/originals/ot...

Hey #econsky we know of any economists that wrote on the commons as a potential positive (aside from ostrom, her books r on my list already) from economic lens

Working fron home is polluting, study finds: Additional residential emissions > commuting emmissions

I built an alternative to all the big players that can run fully local, where people own their data. I get hate. I picked OpenAI because they gave me better answers about encryption, responsibility and safety concerns for what I want to build next. I get hate.

European Union is planning to force EV manufacturers benefiting from state support to ensure that at least 70% of the components in their cars are made in the EU, as it seeks to protect the bloc’s industries from intense Chinese competition. by @alicemhancock.bsky.social & Kana Inagaki

Friends, I have created a Starter Pack of economics journals (and working paper series) active on Bluesky. Hope this is useful for academic, policy, and industry economists alike. #Econsky Please let me know if there are any that I missed!

Curling is on in my living room and I don’t know how I got to this place

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

The other day my friend David Yanagizawa-Drott posted on the other website an astonishing demonstration of Claude producing an entire professional-looking paper essentially by itself. The cost of producing (certain kinds of) research has dropped dramatically. 2/

Only 3 days left to submit your paper to the Annual Macro Meeting of the VfS (May 7-8 at Heidelberg University)! CFP: macroeconomics.committee.socialpolitik.de/sites/defaul...

Trump says he raised tariffs on Switzerland because “I didn't really like the way the Prime Minister talked to us.”

Das Schweizer Referendum des Jahres

The EV debate in one picture: Even the smallest, most efficient gas car has a higher life-cycle footprint than the largest BEV. Size matters. Power matters. Powertrain matters more. This figure comes from this great paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

LLMs tripled new book releases since 2022. Average quality fell: most new entries are slop BUT books 100-1,000 per category are actually better than before, & pre-LLM authors got more productive. And since people only read the good books, it is net positive for readers. www.nber.org/papers/w34777

✓ More accurate cancer detection ✓ Prevent cancer ✓ No increase in false positives ✓ Reduced workload ✓ Identify high-risk for heart disease Proof from the largest randomized trial of medical AI + related studies. But will the practice of medicine change? erictopol.substack.com/p/why-all-ma...

Easy A’s, lower pay: Grade inflation’s hidden damage hechingerreport.org/proof-points... "A new study...finds that lenient grading, or grade inflation, is actually harming students, leading not only to worse academic outcomes but also reducing their employment prospects and future earnings."

Schön, dass wieder jemand von #srf den Weg zu Bluesky gefunden hat! @sebastianramspeck.bsky.social

🚨📰New WP 🚨📰 How does social housing design affect neighborhoods decades later? We study London gangs to show that postwar urban planning—specifically high-rise public housing construction—had lasting effects on gang formation @cep-lse.bsky.social

The authors "estimate that by 2025, the Brexit process had reduced UK GDP per capita by 6 to 8 percent, investment by 12 to 18 percent, employment by 3 to 4 percent, and productivity by 3 to 4 percent. These effects grew gradually over time." www.nber.org/202602/diges... What a total disaster... 🇪🇺🇬🇧

Piet Mondrian, Dutch abstract painter, co-founder of De Stijl, who sought 'the pure reflection of life', died #OTD 1944; his distinctive works composed of verticals, horizontals & primary colours influenced 20th Century design. Tate | Rijksmuseum

🌍 Tariffs are making headlines again. Switzerland quietly went the other way – eliminating all industrial tariffs in 2024. Our new study for the Swiss Ministry of Economics shows how consumers benefit. A thread 🧵

Big weeks for EU trade – MERCOSUR signed but in a limbo, India concluded, deepening with Mexico waiting to be signed, more in the pipeline. It’s also a good moment to look at the bigger picture: More trade agreements are worth doing in a power-based world, but they’re no game changer for EU growth.🧵

Some recent European monetary history in today’s post. open.substack.com/pub/swissmac...

Planning your summer conference schedule? I've updated my conference list for 2026, with deadlines, dates, locations, and links. You can also download calendar entries. Focus is on general conferences, IO, and theory. Let me know if I've missed something. Link: www.igorletina.com/conferences....

recorded a Windows 95 full disk defrag to soothe your timeline.

Thoughts from a newbie using Claude Code for the first time. I don’t always use GitHub for my projects, but with Claude Code it feels like a must. Having a tool read and write files without version control is just too scary.

📢now forthcoming in ECMA! The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from US Academia Class is rarely a focus of research or DEI in elite US occupations. Evidence suggests it should be: we find a large class gap in at least one occupation - tenure-track academia...🧵

Today's blog post: why Generative AI won't make colleges obsolete and may in fact RAISE the demand for higher education. deryugina.com/why-generati...

Europe and India are making history today. We have concluded the mother of all deals. We have created a free trade zone of two billion people, with both sides set to benefit. This is only the beginning. We will grow our strategic relationship to be even stronger.

Fact-based, impartial information is a textbook case of a public good. For this reason, I was happy to co-sign a petition by >600 Swiss academics opposing a popular initiative that would halve the budget of our public broadcater #SRG #SSR. 👇 www.la-science-pour-le-service-public.ch

📢 Call for papers: CESifo Area Conference on Economics of Education co-organized w/ Eric Hanushek (Stanford) 🏛️ 11-12 Sept 2026, Munich 🧑‍🏫 Keynote: John List (Chicago) @johnlist.bsky.social 👉 www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/ev... ⏰ Deadline: 11 May 2026 🖼️ Past programs: sites.google.com/view/woessma...