Now out in open access: "Aspirational Iconography: The European Union Flag as an Extraterritorial Political Symbol” doi.org/10.1080/2469.... Ben Forest and I explain why people fly “foreign” flags and why such displays can evoke powerful emotional reactions, both positive and negative.

Excited to get to welcome Steven Levitsky to McGill to kick off our first annual conference on democratic studies led by the new Diamond-Brown Professor Juan Pablo Luna.

I can't say it better than my colleagues -- apply to join our Economics Department @mcgill.ca. We are hiring and looking especially for Econometrics and IO.

Big congratulations to this year’s Nobel Prize winners — including our very own @mcgillarts.bsky.social alum, Peter Howitt (BA Honours Economics)! #NobelPrize #McGillProud reporter.mcgill.ca/peter-howitt...

And it’s a wrap! #SMOQK 2025 at Concordia - 5 excellent papers in development economics. What a great community we have in the Sherbrooke Montreal Ottawa Quebec and Kingston area. See you again in a year!

And another set of amazing papers for the afternoon with @cmichaudleclerc.bsky.social (Laval), Zemar Hakim (Queens), and @caitbrownecon.bsky.social (Laval) #SMOQK2025

And we’re off! The 3rd annual SMOQK devo day at Concordia, with great presentations by Sylvain Dessy (Laval) Paula Lopez-Pena (Queens) this morning

🆕 Roads to Ethiopia’s structural transformation Today on VoxDev, Tasso Adamopoulos (York University) discusses how Ethiopia's large-scale road expansion accelerated structural transformation: voxdev.org/topic/macroe...

OPINION: "Pronatalists argue that there will be too few workers to sustain the economy and too many older people for those workers to support. However, that is not necessarily true—and even if it were, increasing birth rates wouldn’t fix the problem," Root et al. write. buff.ly/EYgNpNm

Proud to share our paper on gender norms in 🇵🇾, out in the July 2025 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change. With colleagues @McGill.ca and Fundación Capital, we ran a lab-in-the-field experiment to understand how an interactive digital application can influence beliefs about gender norms.

Proud to share our paper on gender norms in 🇵🇾, out in the July 2025 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change. With colleagues @McGill.ca and Fundación Capital, we ran a lab-in-the-field experiment to understand how an interactive digital application can influence beliefs about gender norms.

My coauthors @lesja.bsky.social @karenguzzo.bsky.social & I have a new piece in @theconversation.com , which offers insights into why most demographers do NOT think there is a current fertility crisis and the panic about population decline is unwarranted. 1/ theconversation.com/fears-that-f...

🆕 Can talking about girls’ education improve educational outcomes? Today on VoxDev, Chris Cotton (Queen's University), Ardyn Nordstrom (Carleton University), Jordan Nanowski (CMHC) & Eric Richert (University of Chicago) outline evidence on girls' education in Zimbabwe: voxdev.org/topic/educat...

Still a few hours to go cast your vote! #democracyisawesome

Dear Canada, Happy election day!! 🎉 🗳️ Just one simple thing to do: cast your vote! Vote your heart out! Make yourself heard! I assume you understand your assignment, yes? Merci, thank you.

Timeline cleanse brought to you by my garden hellebore

A few comments on the @mark-carney.bsky.social platform released today. You can find it here: liberal.ca/cstrong/. I provided some 'sounding board' advice here and there to those working on the platform. As always: I disclose, but you can decide what weight to put on that. Thread below...

Today's cool young researcher #econtwitter #econsky is @hgninafon who works on topics related to development + health, particularly in W Africa - and is a newly minted PhD, congratulate him!

For no particular reason, it might be a good time to repost my Starter pack of academic economists who study international trade go.bsky.app/G3dqAYg

It’s 9am TFT time here, and citizens are already gathering to protest Tariffs by the United States. Our plain clothes Officer Penguins are attempting to maintain calm, but unfortunately we keep losing them in the crowd.

Wordle but Canadian 🇨🇦 www.canucklegame.ca

Congratulations to the Young Lives team for this very well deserved recognition of their important work in Peru Enhorabuena!

Prof. Erik Martinez Kuhonta, @mcgill-isid.bsky.social Associate Member and former Director, published an Op-Ed on the recent arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Court of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in the Globe and Mail. Read here: www.mcgill.ca/isid/channel...

Tariff-free joy flows from Canada to the world—receive this heartfelt and positive export from the land of resilience and love. 🍁🧡 (and forward the positive vibes)

In response to an article questioning gender-sensitive foreign aid, @fscoamodio.bsky.social and I wrote on the benefits of investing in women in Canadian development assistance. To be clear, we were not consulted about the photo they chose for our story. www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/03/07/p...

You've been asking yourself "where is the Canadian guy"? But you knew he would show up just when we needed him. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ozb...

You know, it takes a lot to really piss Canadians off. Yet, here we are. #elbowsup

My new piece with @popovaprof.bsky.social and @danielbeland.bsky.social - “Putin seems to be counting on the Trump administration to do his dirty work for him by browbeating Ukraine into conceding via coercion what Russia has so far been unable to win for itself on the battlefield.”

Today is a reminder of Zelensky's superhuman stamina and strength. He deflected deeply unfair vile attacks in his 3rd language and kept it together while two bullies threatened his country's existence and repeated the tired but infuriating propaganda tropes of the aggressor.

This is brutal.

So - I've actually led Ebola outbreak response at USAID. This is bunk from Elon. They have laid off most of the experts, they're bankrupting most of the partner orgs, have withdrawn from WHO, and muzzled CDC. What's left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically.

Dean Karlan's job at USAID was LITERALLY to improve the efficiency of its programs. DOGE is clearly not actually after cutting fraud and waste. And its actions will clearly make the US weaker while also making the world a worse place. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

No words. This is absolutely horrendous news

Forthcoming in JOLE: "Differences in On-the-Job Learning across Firms" by Jaime Arellano-Bover and Fernando Saltiel www.journals.uchicag... @ChicagoJournals #EconSky

Major kudos to the I4R team for this meticulous work documenting very serious research integrity issues. Hard to not highlight the importance of this work for research transparency when we need *more* trust in science. Also, extremely disheartening and very disappointing to see the scale of this.

We are looking to engage with researchers (especially early career based in the LMIC) on the labour market impacts of AI in developing countries. The first step is a very short (!) expression of interest, to be followed by development of a more detailed proposal. www.wider.unu.edu/opportunity/...

“A US-Russian alliance — or even just alignment of views and values — would be dangerous to Canada, said Popova. "That's really the fundamental danger here, that they seem to be aligned in how they think the world should be run — no longer through the rules-based order that prohibits conquest, but

@nytimes.com we all beg you to stop sanewashing this.

Fully agree. Enough already. We are not interested and not interested in these US media takes either. That's the only story, and it should end here. Full stop.

ATTN: French-speaking PhD students working on Gender Economics --> Apply now to this event! À ne pas manquer!

Please read this very important op-ed by my brilliant colleague Shelley Clark.

This is insane

Three further things to keep in mind: 1--This is not a trade war. It is a general aggression currently using trade as tactic. I'd like to see creativity in non-trade countermeasures. 2--Any countermeasure will also hurt us, it's true. That's a cost. Choose ones that hurt them too. 3-Hit 'em hard.