I don't say this often, but if you follow me, I'm asking you to read this: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Startling conclusion here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/dogs-4 #smbc

New in the JPE: RCT evidence that exercise (via a free gym card) improves academic performance www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... #EconSky

Showing people in Japan empirical evidence on the negative effects of emergency clauses in the Constitution changes their opinion quite markedly against adding emergency clauses. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #econsky

Not even 9am. So far on Radio 6, the news bulletins have featured a mother saying her daughters aren't safe because of asylum seekers, a Tory politician lambasting Labour for crossing numbers & Badenoch encouraging councils to lodge legal challenges against hotels. An endless stream of hateful bile.

Ultimate dad joke last week. We were in a safari/zoo type of place and it was difficult to see the bears, as they were sleeping far away. Without missing a beat I said you could barely (get it) see them. I don't care, it made my son smile :).

Been listening to the same three Nick Cave albums for weeks now so think that's Spotify wrapped sorted...

"How the Institute for Replication is making social science more robust and reliable:" www.openphilanthropy.org/research/how...

Actually WWII was a hallucination that just got way out of control. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/good-7 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/c/ZachWeiner... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

Listening to a 3h+ podcast on the dysfunction in Britain's government probably doesn't sound that appealing but this interview with Ian Dunt is really engaging and very interesting. My beliefs keep shifting in the direction that Britain is royally screwed though. 80000hours.org/podcast/epis...

when i was a young boy (sorry MCR pilled) law students at melb uni would tear out important pages in library books for high stakes assignments to hinder other students. now as an academic ive seen people obviously insert needless obstacles into their replication files. it's even more sad.

This paper uses the biographies of historical figures to estimate historical GDP per capita of countries and regions: econpapers.repec.org/paper/arxpap... #econsky

This paper looks at a policy change in Egypt that decreased completed years of schooling, finding no adverse effects on health or labour market outcomes from the reduction in education: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #EconSky

If a country has a series of consecutive failing prime ministers, it's perhaps time to look beyond the individual qualities of each of them to find the root cause.

"While not discounting the advantages that a well-functioning state can provide for economic progress, we draw attention to an alternate mechanism: the presence of private institutions and practices that may contribute to both state formation and ec. dev." link.springer.com/article/10.1... #econsky

"reduced tariffs on input goods sign. decrease the distortionary effect of political connections, as trade reduces firms' dependence on politicians for sourcing inputs. [...] new margin for gains from trade through reduced politically driven misallocation" www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=... #econsky

🧵1/4 🚨 We have finalized our DID textbook! You’ve run out of excuses for sketchy pre-trends and mysterious TWFE coefficients. 📘 Credible Answers to Hard Questions: Differences-in-Differences for Natural Experiments By Chaisemartin & D’Haultfœuille. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I'm late to this excellent piece by @ryancbriggs.net on the extent to which we can trust results from social science research: asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca... #econsky

Gifts and inheritances are highly unequal but don't seem that important a source of income flows (except if you have very wealthy parents): academic.oup.com/jeea/article... #econsky

From the Bundesliga: "...evidence of systematically higher bet volume for two referees relative to matches officiated by all other referees, indirect evidence that corruption, in the form of match fixing, occurred." 😮 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... #econsky

"I estimate a panel FEs model and show that the number of slaving voyages is pos. associated with European city growth from 1600 to 1850 ... for the UK, this effect is distinct from that of general overseas trade, which also increased during this period." nowpublishers.com/article/Deta... #econsky

I am once again pitching my romantic comedy: - two academics start dating - discover they are each other's terrible reviewer - hijinks ensue Working title: Love is Double-Blind

1. BREAKING via the Financial Times British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has put his cabinet on alert for a possible US attack on Iran, just 24 hours after insisting Donald Trump had given no indication he was about to “get involved in this conflict”.

Destroys me every single time www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfEk...

The UK Home Office, always capable of an even more absurd decision than the previous one

I have a new hero. This owl stole a child's hobby horse and flies around with it!

This Levitt interview with neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan on overdiagnosing and psychosomatic illness is really interesting freakonomics.com/podcast/were...

this is like drake and kendrick lamar but they're both drake

A good friend of mine still drives without GPS. Drove to Sheffield city centre, rang me from there for directions and asked a few more people along the way, and miraculously showed up at my house a little while later. Still don’t really understand how he made it here, but I was kind of envious.

Three albums I've listened to a lot recently and are worth checking out (all three very different, so something for everyone): Wouter Dewit: a place I need to be CASISDEAD: Famous last words Christine and the Queens: Paranoia, Angels, True Love

This is so creepy it just defies belief

I've been wanting to tell my widowhood story publicly for years, but I know I don't have the kind of grief story people want to hear. No community rallied, no family healed, no strength discovered. I wrote about the gap between grief narratives and reality. www.dataandpolitics.net/why-i-find-i...

I expanded a little bit on the memory challenges of being a widow and wrote a newsletter post. www.dataandpolitics.net/widowhood-as...

It isn't possible to design a school system where everyone leaves with the skills needed for the workplace because *they're all going to do different jobs*. Workplace training needs to be done by employers.

"Our findings indicate that foreign aid significantly increases the likelihood of conflict onset within treated grid cells, with effects that emerge immediately upon aid allocation and persist for at least five years" uol.de/f/2/dept/wir... #econsky

I recently saw a presentation of this paper and was struck by how it flips our understanding of the very negative impact of COVID on female LFP. In the longer term, the switch to remote work drew married women into this firm. We need more evidence from other contexts, but a very intriguing result.

We did not want to start the week like this, but here we are. Yet again our chair’s inbox is filled with messages from replicators who have opened “replication” folders only to find names, Social Insurance Numbers, mental-health diagnoses and incomes of study participants. 🧵

No words for this.

What would public choose on social care workers coming to Britain? Increase the numbers: 44% (18% a lot, 26% a little) Maintain current levels: 27% Reduce the numbers: 22% (11% reduce a lot, 11% a little) Focaldata for British Future (2nd - 6th May 2025) www.britishfuture.org/white-paper-...

🚨 New staggered DiD paper for PPML Want to estimate multiplicative DiD with PPML under staggered treatment? My new paper explores key issues and solutions: www.taxobservatory.eu/publication/... #EconBluesky #Econometrics 🧶 1/

Quite the quote.

As I meet people from aid agencies around the world this week I will be making the case for a radical simplification in how we do aid: fewer countries, fewer projects, radically simpler programs. It was key takeaway from my time in govt. Read why. www.cgdev.org/blog/radical...

Critics like to say the government should audit foreign aid. Guess what it already did. There are 10x more evaluations per £ of aid spend then there are of the rest of government spending. www.cgdev.org/blog/uk-aid-...

Watched the restored version of The Blair Witch Project and boy does it hold up.

The core trilma here remains the same - the govt needs to accept one of three things: high student migration, higher domestic student fees (or higher taxes to fund universities) or university bankruptcies. Those are the only options, given where we are. Pick one.

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

This seems important: "[African, I think] borrower governments hide [Chinese] loans to avoid violating World Bank debt sustainability thresholds." Less so while under IMF scrutiny. Reveals important unintended consequences of IFI interventions. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #EconSky

Quit freaking out. Remember that in 10,000 B.C., when America had ZERO international trade, a family could afford a house like this on a single income.