Two papers pin the introduction of smallpox on British colonists and suggest that Australia held far more people than previously believed. Learn more: https://scim.ag/3R2lLmf

3/ Within the same province, holding geography, rail access, and gov spending constant, vaccination falls the closer a district sits to Lucknow, about 9 to 11 fewer infant vaccinations per 1,000 a year in the 1880s. It's sharpest in the Awadh core, the region collectively punished after the revolt.

7/ Here's the paper. Comment welcome! noeldjohnson.github.io/assets/paper...

6/ The wider point: you don't need a medical scandal (e.g. Tuskegee, or, colonial sleeping-sickness campaigns) to seed vaccine hesitancy. A purely political act of state violence did it here, more than a generation later. With a shadow that lasted about as long as the people who remembered it.

5/ And it's the violence, not colonial cities in general. The same test on proximity to Delhi, Calcutta, or Bombay shows nothing like it. Only Lucknow is positive and peaks in the 1880s.

4/ Why "half-life"? The effect peaks in the 1880s and is gone by the 1910s, tracking the cohort that was 10–25 in 1857 as they moved through their child-rearing years. A memory of state violence, decaying at roughly the speed of one human generation.

2/ @malikaltaf.bsky.social and I digitized a district-level panel of infant smallpox vaccination (1870–1919) from colonial sanitary reports and measured each district's least-cost travel distance to Lucknow, the epicenter of British retribution.

🧵1/ The half-life of a grudge. Britain crushed the 1857 revolt in northern India with mass reprisals centered on Lucknow. For decades after, districts closer to that violence vaccinated their children less against smallpox and the effect faded as the generation that lived through 1857 died off.

When @willafriedman says "come join," listen 🌍 She's helping lead career development at IDEA... a global, open community for development economists at every stage. idea.devecon.org

Very much looking forward to the discussion... Please join if interested in the interplay of religious beliefs, broadly defined, and economic development...

Episode 3 of the podcast documentary series The Billionaire Age (CBC IDEAS) has just aired. I also contributed to this episode—have a listen!👇 app.magellan.ai/listen_links...

Recently accepted by #QJE: “Praying for Rain,” by Espín-Sánchez, Gil-Guirado and Ryan: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

I really hate Claude at this point with a passion. I spend way more time these days trying to figure out usable, but extremely dense, intractable code from Claude outputs than back when we just built everything from scratch.

I see The Economist thinks that only men work, and that there is national unemployment data for Britain in the 18th and early 19th century (this doesn’t exist) Will do a proper thread on how misleading this is soon, but for now a link will suffice: academic.oup.com/past/article...

Glad to share my online review of Patrick Boucheron's new book on the Black Death. @laviedesidees.bsky.social The lesson of the Pandemic booksandideas.net/The-lesson-o...

Really pleased to see our global stunting data up on our world in data. We hope it helps people contextualise child stunting in a much longer historical lens. Thanks to Hannah and Tuna for visualising and explaining the data so well! The link to the original paper is here: doi.org/10.1136/bmjg...

In my read, there are at least 6 major outcomes tested (Figs 6-7) including discpline, attendance, well-being, test scores... Most of these show statistically unclear ("null") results (attendance, bullying...) or mixed (test scores). Some are negative (disciplinary incidents)

My take on the cell phone ban study (tom-dee.github.io/files/w35132...): I think the subjective well-being increase would be worth it, but we need to treat it as preliminary rather than definitive given how many outcomes and periods are tested

Little known fact - in 1989 Baltic states organized the largest single protest in European history 2M people formed human chain of 675km to protest Soviet occupation My PhD piece takes the first causal (IV) look at the legacies along the Baltic Chain: drive.google.com/file/d/1I2xY...

I love the institutions & development literature. Been teaching it to my LSE students since AJR's original colonial origins paper. But what do we make of Dell and Olken's Java findings? How do we integrate the macro with the micro? This article is our attempt.

A new shelter price series constructed using the Historical Housing Prices Project rental index, from Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, and Rowena Gray www.nber.org/papers/w35124

Working paper with Patrick Crawford now out

After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel

IPUMS Spatial Published Award goes to Itzchak Tzachi Raz for "Soil Heterogeneity, Social Learning, and the Formation of Close-Knit Communities" (doi.org/10.1086/735506).

Examining the effect of expanding interstate highways on industrial growth across the United States. In the March issue, by Dustin Frye, @dustindfrye zurl.co/ZgW5K

Forthcoming article "Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from the English Poor Law" by @jnchapman-econ.bsky.social @eeanews.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jeea... Teaching materials available: www.eeassoc.org/teaching-mat...

🧵 What caused the 1837–38 rebellions in Canada? Was it nationalism? Poverty? Institutions? We (@vincentgeloso.bsky.social and I) argue: it was the newspapers. And the result flips how we think about rebellions [cross-post from his Twitter/X]

Check out the April 2026 issue (24,2) of @jeeanews.bsky.social Journal of @eeanews.bsky.social Teaching materials available: www.eeassoc.org/teaching-mat... academic.oup.com/jeea/issue

A grim subject for most, but a pleasure for me to chat with the excellent @soumayakeynes.ft.com on the Economics Show of @financialtimes.com about three centuries of economic warfare and sanctions www.ft.com/content/2404...

In the past few weeks, I’ve shown Claude Code to (economist) friends & colleagues and, as a byproduct, created a presentation around using Claude Code for Economic Research. I‘ve now turned that presentation into a more in-depth blog post that you can find here: perikl.is/posts/2026/c...

Check out our new paper in SPPS.

#econsky TOMORROW (25 Mar): Behavioral & Experimental Economics Workshop! Join us at 11am GMT/ 10pm AEDT and listen to Francesco (Bocconi), @nanakojoainooson.bsky.social (UCapeCoast), Juan (TilburgU) & Feng (HongKongPolyU). Zoom link: www.monash.edu/business/imp...

I'm very excited that you all can now read about Itinerant Rule in the Holy Roman Empire from 919-1519 in the @ajpseditor.bsky.social! Thank you @claranw.bsky.social, @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social and Jørgen Møller for a great collaboration! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Happy to see our paper "The Church as Arbiter" with @cboix.bsky.social now available online at @thejop.bsky.social. Here 👇 A Thread

ACES is pleased to accept applications for its 2026 ACES Summer School in Political Economy, August 12-14 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Details and application instructions available here: conta.cc/4l2ox5I Application deadline April 15.

#Centralisation spreads responsibility thin; #autonomy concentrates it. In the European Journal of Political Economy, Ferraresi, Herrmann, Loiacono, Rizzo & Secomandi find that where town halls keep and manage most #tax the result is higher #income. doi.org/10.1016/j.ej...

New post: “The printing press, identity, and the formation of diaspora in early modernity - my review of Sebouh Aslanian's book” open.substack.com/pub/proseont...

New submission format at SBE: “Replications as Registered Reports” link.springer.com/journal/1118... You can get "in-principle acceptance" before data collection even begins; final paper gets published regardless the results, if the study is conducted rigorously. #EconSky

Prof. Noel Johnson (GMU) on our co-authored work on the 1857 Rebellion and vaccine hesitancy in colonial India. #EconSky

Did a podcast on my research with @malikaltaf.bsky.social on the 1857 Rebellion, British massacres, and smallpox vaccine hesitancy in Colonial India. open.spotify.com/episode/6Qfw...

📢CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS | Virtual Economic History Workshop for early-career researchers The workshop turns 3 in January! 🎉🎉🎉 Presenters have come from 15 universities in 3 countries (list below) Sign up to present: forms.gle/vt21XRe4KA4J... Join the mailing list: forms.gle/tVWH2TPYaRuD... 1/

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in The Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis,” by Almelhem, Iyigun, Kennedy, and Rubin (@jaredcrubin): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...

Just want to mention two articles of mine since we are talking about the hilariously-named "Credibility Revolution." 1. "Randomized Controlled History?" It explores design-based inference approaches to history and finds them mostly problematic. (www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...)

The world's time zones visualized on a spinnable, interactive globe. Try out the code - it'll default to your current time zone and show you times around the world! #30DayMapChallenge Day 27: Boundaries Code: gist.github.com/walkerke/c4a...

Now forthcoming at Quarterly Journal of Economics Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis Available at: digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_... (See thread below for an overview)

#Stata #geoboundary has been bumped to v1.22 to include #WorldBank 's latest official boundary data that now provides upto ADM2 level shapefiles. Installations+code+more info on GitHub: github.com/asjadnaqvi/s... Up soon SSC!

More than a decade of effort went into this magnificent dataset. What an incredible public good. People need to know how hard it is to do rigorous empirical work in political science.