The WPA for the 2030s

Meanwhile, here in Newton, thoughts and prayers (and no override) for the school budget from the mayor

But I'm sure they developed a ton of walkable areas near the THREE commuter rail stops into dense multifamily housing, right?

33 units... Across from the T station... No parking... "indoor storage space for 46 bicycles"... "Nobody spoke against the proposal." Maybe we can have nice things?

I'm all for progressive primary challengers in deep blue districts. But is it too much to ask that they aren't economically illiterate? Why is housing is so expensive in Greater Boston? A lot of hedge fund owned SFHs in Newton? www.newtonbeacon.org/a-youth-revo...

Looking forward to giving Claude this transcript plus my list of working papers and asking it "How screwed are my standard errors?"

Google Scholar just dropped a new LLM-ish thing labs. Taking it for a test spin on the literature I know best, historical census linking. A thread scholar.google.com/scholar_labs...

Very happy to share our new paper on “The Global Incumbency Advantage”! 👇👇 We provide the first estimates of the incumbency advantage at the national level for all elections worldwide since 1945. with Raphaël Descamps, Ben Marx and @vincent-rollet.bsky.social. Short 🧵 below (1/n).

But I am very excited to be presenting at the @nber.org Race and Stratification Working Group meeting this Friday! You can watch all the talks live streamed on YouTube. I’ll be giving a short talk on my research on the murder of George Floyd, de-policing, and race. www.nber.org/conferences/...

Agree fully with the sentiment, but "well armed and supplied" is doing a lot of the work here. Thank you, industrial revolution.

I honestly don't get it. Is she planning to retire to the suburbs and run for mayor of Newton or Needham?

Building affordable housing ➡️ support for funding housing. Nearby homeowners ⬆️ support; renters ⬇️ support. Both are “the policy adjacent”—secondhand recipients & drivers of policy feedback. Forthcoming @ajpseditor.bsky.social ( doi.org/10.1111/ajps...) w/ A. Magazinnik & @msands.bsky.social 1/9

Swampscott, Boston, and other towns banned them in the 1910s explicitly to keep out immigrants. Here we are in 1969 finally repealing that…magically right after the Fair Housing Act was passed. archives.lib.state.ma.us/server/api/c...

If you're going to make up the data anyway with LLMs, why stop at n=114?

After a month with Codex, Leontief’s point feels more prescient than ever: as automation shifts to cognitive tasks, it may become clear that we are not that different from horses after all.

Greater Boston has really nice weather for at most three weeks each spring and fall, but people still really want to move here, and we should make it easier to build infill housing in its urbanized areas so more people can live here

This is the future I want for Storrow Drive

Emmanuel Grégoire, bienvenue dans La Guerre Contre La Voiture.

The Downton Abbey model of land as bespoke heirloom rather than tasteless asset—an ideal situation for workers such as the Earl and Countess of Grantham.

"Dada"

I would like slightly less geopolitics in my "good" transit news, please and thank you

AIs are better at squinting enough to make pretrends look parallel than holding their noses long enough to pretend an exclusion restriction holds?

I found my first econ history AI one shot paper! Holy shit was I not prepared for how terrible it would be. A quick thread

I'm clearly misunderstanding something, but how is the AI paper factory running RCTs?

This but for NIMBYs

“Your town can’t be a little town of 20,000 people, as it’s always been, if you also want it to be much more affordable. You’re going to have to build a significant number of new homes if you want your kids to be able to afford to live where they grew up.” www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/21/b...

A question I should probably know the answer to, but how far back does the housing permit data go? Do we have consistent data from before the 1970s?

📢New WP: Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries Using California state and local minimum wage increases 2000-2019, we find minimum wage hikes increase workplace injury rates for low-wage workers. A plausible mechanism is work intensification 🧵 w/ @rjisungpark.bsky.social & Michael Davies

I am excited to organize this conference with Yana Gallen. Please submit, repost, and also circulate to your networks.

If/when the machines rise up, comments like this are going to be read aloud at my trial > you created the 1k sample on the fly. that means no seed and no paper trail. do you think that was a good idea for something we're actually going to use?

Great @jfsheehan.bsky.social thread in IZ and Cambridge IZ in particular Goals and revenue sources for IZ really matter (and they probably matter even more in Greater Boston outside Cambridge/Boston where even more of the wealth and property value is in SFHs)

Phew. Glad the disruption will last long enough for wise American voters to punish a future Democratic administration for it

Me, when I think my editors or referees might be listening:

We revised our Skyscraper Revolution paper github.com/Ahlfeldt/DPs... Added indirect inference to estimate the QoL effect of density by matching causal reduced-form estimates in the model => more realistic counterfactuals. Quick read @voxeu.org: cepr.org/voxeu/column... @bsoeberlin.bsky.social

Would be a real shame if he broke some state laws too

“I believe in inclusionary zoning as a mechanism to economically integrate neighborhoods, not as a tax on all new housing.” - @senkhanhpham.bsky.social (D-Portland), OR Sen. Hous. Comm. 2/2

Thee street project slowdown is objectively bad on its own. But I'm terrified that this is going to inspire all the NIMBY-curious mayors in Greater Boston to be even more anti bus and bike, pro car and parking

Environmentalists that are anti-density and pro-parking are like public health advocates that are pro nuclear waste bathing.

Love it when the @bostonglobe.com gets into the "selecting on the dependent variable business"

Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics “University as a Melting Pot: Long-term Effects of Internationalization” Debates on international students often focus on capacity, funding, or competition. My paper shows the main effects on natives are not academic or economic, but social.

We’ve spent decades making walkable neighborhoods like these nearly impossible to build today. Beacon Hill v. Federal Hill Old Montreal v. Old Quebec But which ones are the best? 40 iconic neighborhoods. 1 champion. 🇨🇦🇺🇸 Round 1 voting ends March 25 www.remainplaces.com/walkable

You know what doesn't deadhead? Trains

Upping the stakes. I want to see someone present an empirical paper in a seminar slides-free (by hand)

Exactly nowhere in this article is there mention that Marblehead voted down a multi-family zoning requirements plan in the MBTA Communities Law, forfeiting $3.8M in state grant opportunities and the revenue an expanded tax base would generate. Small, rich towns in MA would rather die than grow.

In totally unrelated news, Marblehead is out of compliance with the MBTA Communities Act and ineligible for a bunch of state grants after paying for an anti housing referendum

welcome, godzilla, to the war on cars

This is my favorite LLM benchmark. While Claude’s tone sometimes drives me crazy (“I’m going to be honest with you”) it at least sometimes pushes back petergpt.github.io/bullshit-ben...

I'm not so sure about the exclusion restriction here given the clear effect of IKEA openings on marital strife and divorce rates

Personally I'm more of a stick than carrot guy when it comes to NIMBYs, but this is pretty cool. Bribe NIMBY towns per unit of new housing allowed inpractice.yimbyaction.org/p/scott-wien...