Sinner’s win today was so impressive. Hard to imagine how anyone could have done more than Zverev: check out the stats. Rallying consistently, with 135mph serves on the lines, 115mph second serves when needed, and 85mph forehands. Not enough.

I learned today that conventional nuclear reactors may need to be shut down in heat waves because of the consequences of heated water emissions and inefficiency when external temp is high. A major problem, no? www.lefigaro.fr/societes/un-...

Brilliant analysis. “Moving from polarization to radicalization shifts the remedy from compromise, encouraging civility, and bridging divides to confronting antidemocratic actors, safeguarding targeted groups, and defending institutional integrity.” (I’d toss “populism” onto the trash pile too.)

Excellent post. The “reflective” vs “formative” distinction is one I’ve tried to make in the past but not nearly as eloquently. And the fact that Anderson’s ICW index can dampen power by upweighting noise is an important problem that should be better understood.

Lovely time catching up with friends and colleagues at the inaugural @epssnet.bsky.social meeting in Belfast. Came away with some paper ideas as well. Now on to the Univ. of Kent DERECK Development, Conflict and the Political Economy of Development workshop. research.kent.ac.uk/development-...

Why What Works in One Place Doesn’t Always Work Elsewhere. @melodyyhuang.bsky.social hosts a conference on external validity: bit.ly/4xK8aAO @cdsamii.bsky.social @awilke.bsky.social

We had lots of fun doing egap.org/learning-days/ again this year with 25 students from across the continent All training material is open access: egap.github.io/learningdays... FR / EN slides, exercises. Huge thanks to Brice Bado for hosting; @vinarceneaux.bsky.social for leading & the whole team:

Morocco looking sharp again this time around

Again like in game 3, Knicks can’t figure out how to get through Spurs high press. They get stuck scrambling between half court and three point line almost every possession.

When the methods paper to review is from a Word doc…

I am so very sorry to hear this about a beloved colleague, Raul. I had the opportunity to work with him over the past 15 years through the @egap.bsky.social network, where always brought a critical mindset and reminded us about the human side of our task as social scientists.

Fonseca - Novak was epic!!!

Participated in “Perspectives on External Validity” workshop yesterday, organized by @melodyyhuang.bsky.social at @ispsyale.bsky.social isps.yale.edu/events/2026/...

We had an insightful afternoon reflecting on what EGAP-style interventions have taught us, and where we go from here in the current development landscape!

Just wrapped up another year of Quant 2, my PhD-level causal inference course. Lots of updates to the literature this year, did an "estimator tournament" as part of an assignment on DID estimators, and included regular in-class pen and paper exercises. Materials here: cyrussamii.com?page_id=4190

I've been enjoying the Paper2Audio LLM-assisted text-to-speech app for listening to papers, book chapters, etc. A nice feature is that it constructs verbal summaries of tables, figures, and equations. www.paper2audio.com

🚨Replication alert🚨 I'm pleased to announce that my replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted as a comment at AER. I find ten issues in the paper. My comment focuses on two major problems; in the appendix, I document eight (relatively) minor problems. 1/

Useful rundown of issues in the “science of scaling” interventions, from Rasul. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Had no idea that the best data science podcast is back 😀 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...

Good analysis of the institutional conundrum facing the Iranian leadership after Khamenei’s death: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/k...

If you are looking for a way to do something meaningful amidst the current events, I’ll suggest again for you to just sit and watch “It Was Just an Accident.”

Update to my Quant 2 course: I used to do an Angrist and Pischke style discussion of regression models and treatment effects. Dumped that (or actually made it a recitation/review), brought in double machine learning instead. cyrussamii.com?page_id=4190

“Affective polarization” is a lot of syllables when the word “hate” is right there.

For anyone looking for postdocs for their students, over the next few months LSE “fellow” positions will start being listed. Research + teaching but 2-3 year runway. The new Global School of Sustainability has 5 new ones posted now! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Excited to see this out. The paper was a huge lift. If you’d be surprised that citizen empowerment *increases* the share that pay taxes in a place like Kinshasa, check out the details in Soeren’s thread.

Folks, some news. No, not that kind of news – what do you think this is, LinkedIn? It's this: 1. The applied causal graphs workshop deadline is 28th Feb. so get your abstracts in and hang out with us in Potsdam this May. Form and description is below 2. @dagophile.bsky.social is giving a keynote 🥳

Really, instead of Gauss-Markov, students should be taught the finite-sample, uniform-risk optimal sieve expansion depth under Holder smoothness. That would actually be useful.

What Will It Take to Rebuild the Government in Post-Maduro Venezuela? I wrote about three interrelated governance challenges: 1) a fragmented security apparatus, 2) the strong presence organized criminal groups, and 3) the vulnerability of the oil sector. 👇 www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what...

Finally got to watch “It Was An Accident.” A lot of the psychology of the situation in Iran is right there, very well portrayed. The movie makes you feel both hopeful and utterly defeated.

Just returned from a Community and Local Development (CLD) Forum cohosted in Kigali by the World Bank social development team and Spark Microgrants. The focus was on the CLD evidence agenda, building on this recent position paper: openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub...

Agreed re diminished value of job market papers. Presumably this shifts attention to quality of in-person presentation (demonstrated at conferences, workshops) and demonstrated ability to teach/convey deep insights.

REMINDER: Our West Africa Hub is hosting a Learning Days workshop at CERAP this June 🌍 We welcome applicants from Africa-based researchers & evaluation professionals from university, government, & civil society orgs. Apply by: Feb 27, 2026 Learn more: buff.ly/9l0bdig

My talk on "Inference for group interaction experiments" from the Foundations of Causal Inference workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute is available via their Youtube channel: youtu.be/3hh-bM8YNSc?...

JOIN us for this year’s Rebecca Morton conference on experimental political science at NYU! March 6-7. We have a great line up of papers and posters! Program (scroll down) here: wp.nyu.edu/cesspolitica... Register (no fee) here: nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Striking new work on how gangs shape economic development in El Salvador, Melnikov et al. in Econometrica Stunted development in gang-controlled territory driven by labor mobility limits: harder to commute/work outside territory, smaller labor mkt, less specialization —> doi.org/10.3982/ECTA...

Now in print at JEEA: results from a negotiation training RCT for community leaders in rural Liberia. The goal was to address experience/knowledge asymmetries between community leaders and commercial interests in negotiating mining, logging, land lease, and other resource use contracts.

How to explain the “credibility revolution” in a few minutes? "I" "made" a short video that tries to show why clever (natural) experiments and research design beat pure statistical adjustment for causal claims. I am genuinely curious what methods people think: youtu.be/Fv14ktwA31Q?...

Survey experiments' popularity in political science is getting attention. What is good and bad about them? How can one maximize their benefits and mitigate their downsides? Greg Huber and I wrote up our thoughts: Paywalled: doi.org/10.1016/bs.h... Free: m-graham.com/papers/Huber...

So I guess we are back to matching? (Although, by the references cited, the authors appear to be unaware of the connection?) arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21977

A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168

This is an impressive project. My reaction to what it shows though is that survey experiments have gotten out of hand in polisci. I will blog more on this, but I do not think survey experiments are emblematic of the credibility revolution. Some are already interpreting as such, which is a problem.

RIP David Malone. Diplomat extraordinaire & probing academic, David headed the UN adjacent @ipinst.bsky.social where I had my first real job. He taught me so much—how to think & write clearly, how to organize productive discussions. A towering intellect who will be missed. unu.edu/news/memoria...

Reporting the treated group mean along with DID estimates of the ATT cyrussamii.com?p=4151

New paper in first view @thejop.bsky.social w/ Burde, Middleton, and Rahnama We show the promise of a community governance strategy to sustain schools in remote Afghan communities after NGO withdrawal. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...

Congrats to UZH. One can read in terms of Hirschman’s Exit/Voice/Loyalty framework: the pull of sentimentality toward MIT is weak when there is abundant work to be done on global poverty and the broader home environment is so bleak.

👀 (given the remarkable robustness of BART as a static prediction method)

Currently in FirstView: “Generalizing Trimming Bounds for Endogeneously Missing Outcome Data Using Random Forests." @cdsamii.bsky.social, Ye Wang, @jlzhou.bsky.social‬ present a partial identification approach that avoids strong assumptions. This is illustrated using a simulation and replication.

Agreed — nice round up of very well informed perspectives. I found Raleigh’s analysis especially convincing but all perspectives were thought provoking.