Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

Congratulations DHS Secretary Stephen miller on continuing to be DHS Secretary

Consistently, in survey after survey, housing availability and affordability is THE number one issue facing Massachusetts voters. A ‘status quo’ approach to housing from any elected official, of any political party, should be considered malpractice today.

Good post by @joshgans.bsky.social on why the scientific publishing system will not collapse from the rise of AI-supported research. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...

Devil's advocate: it makes refereeing at top5s both easier and harder. Easy to reject because something isn't totally new because some other previous top5 already exhausted the topic. Harder because it is a lot of appendix reading...

There is/was a tradition at Wesleyan econ seminars to introduce speakers as trained at [PhD] and educated at [Undergrad]. Easy to be proud of where you were educated when the university prez writes like this

What are we going to do about the impending slop paper deluge? I thought @causalinf.bsky.social had some terrifying estimates of just how many papers (and referee requests) are coming causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

My favorite paper of 2019 has just been conditionally accepted at AER (lmao) The Voting Rights Act rapidly increased Black wages in the South via public employment & redistribution static1.squarespace.com/static/59dc0...

No one ask me how many of the fancy buttons I clicked during the talk

Just passive-aggressively sent this to a phd student coauthor after a docx popped up in our project repo, so I thought I would spread the @kjhealy.co gospel here too plain-text.co

Claude Code can be pointed to a robustness table or figure, and add buttons and appendix slides to beamer talks. In totally unrelated news, the slides for the talk I'm giving today will have more buttons and appendix slides than any talk since my JMP

We can have nice things in Newton (at least until their originally planned execution date) www.newtonbeacon.org/newton-centr...

There's a chance this is going to evaporate my comparative advantage in research against the machines, but we have got to get Claude Code access to the HathiTrust full-text

I'm interdisciplinary af, but this from public health makes no sense to me. The problem isn't not using causal language with observational data. The problem is not attempting to use causal identification strategies with that data. The econ toolkit isn't perfect, but it is better than language edits

In 1400, Oxford had a population of 6,000 and about 6 killings a year. Triple that of London and York. Why was it so violent? Students got off with impunity, as they had clerical privileges! Nice evidence on institutions

Cursing the boomer NIMBYs who want to kill this, while walking with my family along the very much not traffic calmed part farther east on Washington St in Newtonville. Love to walk alongside drag racers to get to Whole Foods mass.streetsblog.org/2026/02/10/t...

There's been a lot of hot air about AI replacing lawyers. It would be informative to know if Anthropic is relying on Claude or their highly paid corporate counsel to deal with Hegseth. Though that last sentence em dash...

And if we build more dense housing near the T, we can make that number go so so much higher

Begging for the results in the title: Uber improves air quality: AQI better by ~1%–2% in the year of entry, and the probability of unhealthy air quality episodes falls by 8%–18% following its introduction. Why? substituting trips in older, less efficient vehicles with Uber rides

American planning in a nutshell: building apartments in a wealthy neighborhood? You need special permission and must rent 20% of them at a loss to poor people. Combining 10 apartments into a mansion for one extremely rich family? By-right process, no subsidized housing requirement, and a tax break.

Big BU Econ day at the AER: Terry (former BU faculty), @lisatarquinio.bsky.social (former BU phd student), Hassan (current BU faculty), Chaney, and Buchardi have a great paper on that shows a positive causal effect of immigration on local innovation and wages www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

One week down, one more week to go until our trash is collected. I hope raccoons know not to rip open trash bags full of used diapers...

Figure 1B from the new Soltas and Gruber paper shows standardized time to build. I'm assuming Boston isn't in the graph because our time to build is infinite

LLMs and assistant professors. We're not so different, huh?

🧺 Paper Picnic 2.0 is here! More journals. New features. An easier way to keep up with the latest research in political science and adjacent fields. 🧵👇

Despicable echoes of what Boston politicians were saying about people with names like Fitzgerald a century ago

Infant mortality increased following the Nazi expulsion of Jewish doctors, according to Helge Liebert and Beatrice Mäder in a new REStat paper!

Clawdbot, write yourself a skill to reconstruct CVs and Google scholar hindex from linkedin posts

#CambMA #MAPoli Excited to be supporting Burhan Azeem for State Senator. His kickoff campaign event is tomorrow night. Please join me and @bmcavin.bsky.social for this event and show your support for more #housing and better #transit in Massachusetts. bsky.app/profile/burh...

Parenthetical citations > footnotes > endnotes, social media edition

Haven't seen it on Bluesky yet: a nice paper is making the rounds, estimating that the cost of housing permits in LA can explain 1/3 of the gap between construction costs and housing prices. That is: LA's terribly slow housing permitting is extremely costly!

Newton is delaying trash pickup because of the snow, and most neighborhoods are delayed 2 days. But our trash is delayed a full week, so @asteinlight.bsky.social is talking like a J6er

Blackboard: So unpleasant and awkward to use that not even Einstein the cheating AI tool wants to touch it

regex, latex incantations, fixing git problems, and my coauthors' ugly and unkempt code. All great LLM targets

Any car that hasn't moved in the period between the last storm ending and the next storm beginning should immediately be towed, stripped of hazardous materials, and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to become artificial reefs like they do with old subway cars.

“We’re losing workers & businesses to NC, Texas, Florida, & NH, while the same fight playing out in Wellesley repeats itself across the Commonwealth.” commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/in-w...

Excited to see what solutions ChatGPT has for Harvard Less excited to find out which fun synergistic ideas make it across the river... www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Newton friends, I know this will shock you, but the NIMBYs are grumbling about the traffic calming on Washington St between West Newton and Newtonville. Locals should fill out this survey from the area council to tell everyone how great the pilot is www.newtonvilleareacouncil.com/survey

Yes, Massachusetts needs to legalize traffic enforcement cameras. The bills do an excellent job of addressing privacy concerns, the fees are low and go to the car not the driver, as it is license plate based This law will save lives #AutomateSafeStreetsMass www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/16/m...

Lost track of how many referee reports I had on my desk. Now I have six... fml

Fantastic stuff here from Pritzker. If you're a Democratic governor, mayor, or city council member in a high COL blue state right now and you aren't laser focused on increasing the infill housing supply, either get your shit together or resign and let someone who will do the job.

Six stories and 58 units

Bleak. I love it

This from Illinois makes the MBTA Communities Act look like a wimpy quarter measure. Jealous af

“Right now we settle for managing problems instead of solving them.” 🚨Massachusetts most effective pro-housing local official is running to become Massachusetts most effective pro-housing state official. Burhan Azeem for State Senate!

Here’s the piece the White House is threatening NY Fed economists over in case you wanna read it: libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-...

When RFK Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development. Those fears are beginning to come true www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/h...

Absolute top notch R hex icon for a quality dataset package