New (well, finally published) paper out at AJPS on "Bureaucrat Assignments as Instruments of Political Control": doi.org/10.1111/ajps... . We estimate Indian land officials' preferences over geographical posts and test a "matching market" model of how politicians use assignments to extract rents 1/3

New (well, finally published) paper out at AJPS on "Bureaucrat Assignments as Instruments of Political Control": doi.org/10.1111/ajps... . We estimate Indian land officials' preferences over geographical posts and test a "matching market" model of how politicians use assignments to extract rents 1/3

architecturally speaking, the biblioteca vasconcelos in Mexico City has to be one of the top-5 libraries in the world..

worth reading..!

Pretty cool! (In anticipation of inevitable complaint that “we knew this” it’s good to bring data and research design to important ideas)

A pretty good guide to the future, I suspect

I take from this that US public opinion is generally incredibly pro-war

Take a look at these fantastic photographs of Indian life by Raghu Rai. He has died aged 83 www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Cool day of book discussions happening at MPSA, if you're looking for something to attend on Friday:

The special issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social “Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies”, co-edited by myself and Isabela Mares, was just published. The issue includes 8 articles, many of which set new research agendas. A🧵w/overview 1/10 journals.sagepub.com/toc/CPS/curr...

Reminds me of this paper: www.jstor.org/stable/21183...

I came prepared to be annoyed but it’s not an unreasonable report: president.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

NASA’s Artemis II Reveals the Basin in Full For the very first time, the mysterious Orientale Basin has been fully photographed. Thanks to Artemis II, humanity now sees the Moon in unprecedented detail, reminding us of the endless wonders beyond Earth. 🛰️

many things about us politics that made no sense to me made a little more sense after reading this essay: patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-g...

A really impressive field experiment

This would have been useful to for anyone who imagined that a bombing campaign would result the spontaneous collapse of the Iranian regime to read

Reminded today that the term "developing democracy" is a weird vestige of modernization theory -- it elides level of economic development and democracy, but as the US demonstrates, you can be rich and have a very dysfunctional democracy. Very important to keep the two things conceptually separate

I’d say I do find bluesky less useful than (the old) twitter — I used to get tons of working papers and research on that feed but for some reason that’s not the case for me here despite mostly following academics. Not sure if it’s the algorithm or something else….

Interesting aspects of having a campus on a natural reserve

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Interesting argument…( although the title is bothering me — worse than war: the costs of [concept that includes war] )

Everyone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:

nobel peace prize never fails

does seem like an empirical regularity

claude code is fucking insane i know literally NOTHING about Hegel. ZERO. and it just built me a complete system of German idealism

very cool

Social science has been solved: Write 1600 lines of instructions to Claude Code to generate a publishable paper based exclusively on silicon samples. Econ Nobel Prize here I come.

unbearable stupidity

There is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution. In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789) 👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc.... 👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/6

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

had a chance to visit the Indian agricultural research institute (IARI) fields yesterday — where many of the crops grown in India are/were developed, including the varieties responsible for the green revolution

India’s rural employment guarantee program, one of the world’s biggest safety nets — and possibly the most studied program in the history of development economics? — is at serious risk of being repealed: indianexpress.com/article/indi...

📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣 This does NOT happen everyday. THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n

Fascinating. Linking two other important works on US regional culture: books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&... (Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America) and onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... (Frontier culture: The roots and persistence of “rugged individualism” in the United States)

Excited to post the latest version of my JMP: The female labor supply constraints of spousal jealousy bit.ly/4nn9apn I use two field experiments to study the role of spousal jealousy in constraining married women’s employment. More below 👇:

I agree with this — survey experiments represent a different intellectual lineage from usage of natural experiments to overcome real-world endogeneity (credibility revolution). That said, I think collective confusion that randomization=credible has given survey experiments too much epistemic status

> Between 1995 and 2021 (our sample period), there were a total of 47 individuals who have been a congressional leader; 20 of whom made stock trades both before and after ascension to leadership.

This is about to radicalize me against the credibility revolution

Go home prediction markets: you’re drunk Political prediction markets moved billions in 2024, but new evidence shows they weren’t very accurate or efficient PredictIt beat chance 93% of the time Kalshi? 78% Polymarket? 67% Big price divergences, weak/negative correlations, & rampant arbitrage

the case for slower, better/more careful research papers in poli sci gets another data point in its favor

incredible that we can turn correcting coding errors into litigation about the process in which we are allowed to transmit this information

Important public good (replications are much needed to help keep the whole enterprise honest but under-supplied)

💡 How does moving to opportunity reshape political behavior? 🗞️ In our new BJPolS paper, @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that residential relocations that increase access to opportunity foster political integration and shift political preferences to the left. 👉 tinyurl.com/46utjj65

Many have asked for the LLM Survey paper. The release was bungled a bit by PNAS, but it is live now: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ireland winning goal and end of match with Irish commentary

Happy to learn I received the Michael Wallerstein prize in political economy for this article on the political consequences of technological change in agriculture in the US: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...