(Some of) my @miamiecon.bsky.social colleagues who made the decision to leave a tough one 🥹 And who got a whole bunch of current and former students to write me farewell notes and bound them in a book 😭 @peternka.bsky.social: colleague-turned-friend of the year! 🫶

The answer is no. There is no way that smartphones are responsible for a 40% decline in worldwide fertility rate. This is what the graph looks like from 1970 to the present (from @ourworldindata.org).

How people treat a departing colleague says so much about them. This is really lovely.

(Some of) my @miamiecon.bsky.social colleagues who made the decision to leave a tough one 🥹 And who got a whole bunch of current and former students to write me farewell notes and bound them in a book 😭 @peternka.bsky.social: colleague-turned-friend of the year! 🫶

🔊Important paper: Using a natural experiment design, these authors show that narrowly missing tenure sets back women's careers more than men's. But when a woman earns tenure, it increases the number of women faculty and students in her department in the future. docs.iza.org/dp18477.pdf @iza.org

2023 data for annual STICKER price at U.S. Colleges. Upper-bound on cost paid by students (because it does not consider aid and grants)

These are the sorts of end-of-semester posts that give me such hope about the current generation of young adults and the good they will do in their communities

I absolutely love this updated @chronicle.com feature on who a college thinks its peer institutions are. It's always good for a chuckle (and a sense of status competition). www.chronicle.com/article/who-...

New data shows that compared to 2024, there are double-digit increases in FAFSA applications across the board, both for high schools with low and high-income students, white students as well as students of color, in rural and urban locations.

Our annual award recognizing the best PhD dissertation on employment-related issues is still taking submissions! All academic disciplines are welcome, as long as it has a major employment and policy focus. The deadline is July 20th. Learn more: www.upjohn.org/dissertation... #econsky

The government is knowingly advertising fraudulent healthcare.

Home from a lovely two days at the 2026 Liberal Arts College Public & Labor (LAC-PaL) conference! Fantastic paper presentations & conversations across the board, plus a great keynote by @betseystevenson.bsky.social last night. Thanks to Oberlin, especially Maggie Brehm & Evan Kresch, for hosting!

Home from a lovely two days at the 2026 Liberal Arts College Public & Labor (LAC-PaL) conference! Fantastic paper presentations & conversations across the board, plus a great keynote by @betseystevenson.bsky.social last night. Thanks to Oberlin, especially Maggie Brehm & Evan Kresch, for hosting!

Be sure to stop by (or go online) to downboundbooks.bsky.social this Mother's Day 💐📚 Stop by in-person—or simply go online—and grab your TBRs while supporting abortion access in Ohio! Thank you as always to our friends at Downbound for their continued support of folks who need abortion care ❤️‍🔥

On Tuesday the Ohio House will be holding a hearing for HB698 which tries to more aggressively enforce SB1. Among its provisions is an open-ended requirement for anyone who ever did "DEI" at a university to file annual reports about how their current job differs. Info: famiami.org/2026/02/hb-6...

I don't disagree with this but the changing conditions of our work expectations means that my year of slowing down has led to extra teaching next year (though only from 2-2 to 3-2).

The Universities of Wisconsin got $25 million in the state budget to give pay raises to faculty in "high-demand" fields, plus a $2 million earmark to Madison for conservative thought. State funding models tied to demand are fairly common. Trying to raises is new. captimes.com/news/educati...

If only we had evidence on the effects of abortion bans of migration for policymakers to consider… Oh wait, we do! www.nber.org/papers/w33328

Did it ever occur to them that maybe banning abortion makes women less likely to want to live there?

Less than 800 NSF grants awarded over the first half of the fiscal year for the entire country. Previous years were already over 2-3k awards by now. It is not particularly overdramatic to say we are seeing the death of federally funded science research in the United States.

This. Leading a good, productive seminar is way harder than stand-and-deliver lecturing

Marissa & team are doing great work studying the econ pipeline in the context where most students are first exposed to it: regional public universites! Happy to see it getting attention at #SOLE2026 and, of course, always happy to see fellow @msuecon.bsky.social PhDs doing great work 💚

I'm beyond honored that this work was recognized with the best poster award at the SOLE awards tonight. There were so many amazing posters being presented that having our research even in the conversation let alone winning is a dream.

Love employment research and policy? We do too! @upjohninstitute.bsky.social is hiring a full-time research analyst. Our current RAs' degrees range from BA to PhD, so give the opening a look. #econ_ra #EconSky #sociology #policysky

This is very relevant to discussions about the presumed causes for a decline in public trust in higher education seemingly taken for granted in recent reports. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We are still interviewing for research assistants at the Philly Fed for this cycle. It’s a great opportunity for students who want to get more experience with research and there are lots of development opportunities rb.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FRS/jo...

We had a great time celebrating our senior award winners last night - congratulations to all, and thank you to our advisory board for sponsoring the reception! (And no, we didn't ask people to coordinate colors! The invisible hand at work.)

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Congratulations to rockstar health economist @vickybarone.bsky.social on her appointment to the @nber.org! Also, so happy to see education economists extraordinaire @rajdarolia.bsky.social & Javaeria Qureshi named research associates. Well deserved all around: www.nber.org/news/nber-ap...

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

This is obviously batshit on so many levels, but something particularly dystopian about the “you must skip that chapter of history” part.

Looking forward to watching my coauthors Emily & Paola share our work on political polarization and college choices at the @nber.org econ of ed meeting today! If you’re not in Chicago, you can tune in to it on YouTube at 1:20pm CT 👇 www.nber.org/conferences/...

Looking forward to watching my coauthors Emily & Paola share our work on political polarization and college choices at the @nber.org econ of ed meeting today! If you’re not in Chicago, you can tune in to it on YouTube at 1:20pm CT 👇 www.nber.org/conferences/...

Attempting to keep up with the youngsters in the economics of education in Chicago

Every person who writes about US higher ed should have to pass an eligibility survey that includes an item like "what is the share of 4 year institutions with a <50% acceptance rate?" If you can't get that right within a certain bandwidth, you don't get published.

My first SoTL journal article is published! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CBXNN... I've been tweaking my policy evaluation course for years. Here I share results from student surveys and portfolio reflections that testify to the importance of teaching audience-centered writing.

a fun thesis to advise! Carving out a niche as the sports econ and econ history MA thesis advisor. perhaps sports econ history next

Today in Teaching in Higher Ed

Congratulations to Drake Peavy on his MA defense, "How NIL and the Transfer Portal Changed Competitive Balance in College Basketball." After graduation, he'll be going to EY in Chicago as a Transfer Pricing Consultant.

I would love to read some qual research where people ask faculty their ideal uni to work at, while factoring in where they currently work, and where they got their terminal deg. I'm genuinely curious when and which people preference status over, say, living near family. Someone please do this.

NEW PAPER: We study the effects of immigration policy on student attendance in 2025. Students born outside the U.S. were 2.2pp more likely to be absent after Jan 2025 (a 37% increase). That's ~2 extra missed days per semester. LINK: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1453 @annenberginstitute.bsky.social

I wrote a chapter for the @aefplivehandbook.bsky.social on college closures. It's a part of a great--and free--resource designed to support practitioners and policymakers in education.

I've spent sometime over the last few months working on a way to generate quizzes for my students based on their own papers. I might write up a blog about my experiment later, but for now here is the code if anyone is interested in trying. github.com/reuning/quiz...

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...

Sad news. 😢 My grandfather was part of the first faculty at Hampshire when it opened in 1970, and my mom and her siblings grew up alongside the campus in its early days. It's always been a special place for our family, to say nothing of the many students & scholars who found their paths there.

Hey, #EconSky! The administration is trying to cut NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. Click below to contact your representatives and urge them to save it. Tell your friends. Our research matters and is worth funding! www.congressweb.com/COSSA/58?fra...

Be sure to check out some new work by our own Professor Peter Nencka @peternka.bsky.social

🎉🏫New paper! 🏫🎉 "High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity" by myself, Alison Doxey, and Ezra Karger (@ezrakarger.bsky.social) www.peternencka.com/assets/high_... www.nber.org/papers/w35068

Incredible, fascinating work (as always!) by my pal @peternka.bsky.social & coauthors!