wrote a little thing for general consumption about llms and the likely overblown risk of cognitive offloading: www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/news/long-re...

Call for papers, 4th UK Workshop on Digital Economics, London 28 November 2025: competitionpolicy.ac.uk/events/4th-w... This is always a great event

Modeling computers and AI as cognitive tools provides a lens to interpret evidence on inequality, workflows, and teams, from Ajay K. Agrawal, @joshgans.bsky.social, and Avi Goldfarb https://www.nber.org/papers/w34034

🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share. Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*. I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind. github.com/bretthollenb...

Not that I always love AI everywhere, but the moral of Green Eggs and Ham is that they’re actually good once you try them…

A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. @robcapps.bsky.social wrote an excellent article @nytimes.com with views from yours truly, @emollick.bsky.social, @erikbryn.bsky.social and others. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/m...

1/2 System as a whole (ie, academia) worked, but more narrow Econ ref process didn’t. Unfortunately, seems very hard to pick up, aside from the unrealistic (in retrospect) amount of work for a 2nd yr PhD.

@ershovd.bsky.social, Yanting He, & Stephan Seiler analyse over 100 million tweets from 2014 to 2021 and find that the vast majority of commercial content on social media is not appropriately disclosed by the influencers who post it. cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DOMINANT PLATFORM SUDDENLY MODERATES A LARGE SHARE OF ITS CONTENT? 🚨 With Matt Mitchell, Martin Quinn & @mikybartoli.bsky.social, we study one of the largest moderation shocks ever: Pornhub’s 2020 purge of 10M+ non-verified videos (80% of content). 🧵👇

Pornhub's removal of all non-verified content led to a 41% drop in traffic within 1 month. Much of the displaced traffic was absorbed by competing platforms, including less regulated fringe websites (+55% visits) and mainstream competitors (+10%). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Pat Bajari was one of the most influential economists of the past 30 years, and an amazing person cla.umn.edu/economics/ne...

Possibly the dumbest of the many dumb plagiarism claims nationalpost.com/news/mark-ca...

Our edited volume, The Hashtag Hustle: Law and Policy Perspectives on Working in the Influencer Economy (with @cgoanta.bsky.social @dasfiesch.bsky.social & Isabelle Wildhaber) is available, open access www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook-o...

Self preferencing by LLMs…

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

How low has Pitchfork fallen? C. 2004 P4K would have given this a -20 with a picture of a monkey in a wig giving the finger.

I strongly believe in reading ALL of Adam Smith's work. Please start from this recent paper on identifying/measuring dynamic complementarity: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I've gotten a flurry of requests to access my slides on "Models, Measurement, and Language in Economics" (presumably thanks to the great new year's reading list from @rohitlamba.bsky.social). The file is publicly available via my web page, but here is the link: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ntgkb...

Hi, #EconSky! I’m Anderson, a 6th year PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. For those going to ASSA this week, I’ll be presenting my job market paper, The Effects of Privacy Regulation on the Supply of Stolen Data, during the CSMGEP session tomorrow at 8AM. Here’s a short thread about it

From economics publishing to congestion effects to the run on Silicon Valley Bank, here are the ten most-read research highlights of 2024. www.aeaweb.org/research/top...

If you have ever tried to read free books from sites like Project Gutenberg, you noticed that they can be uncomfortable to read, due to their layouts, type & occasional errors This project takes those free books and makes them beautiful (and still free). standardebooks.org

Happy Holidays from economists! www.jstor.org/stable/2117564

All research groups @ UCL School of Management are recruiting new PhD students: Org. Behaviour, Strategy, Operations, Marketing, & Financial Econ. Great education & research environment! Students receive full scholarship+generous stipend. Apply by Jan 1: www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/phd youtu.be/Rl2tHlXZUIM

#eeac Day 13: @tfwerner.com JMP on algorithmic vs. human collusion is of course terrific; his paper on LLMs steering consumers is also worth a look arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12143 "Using a behavioral experiment, we show that [LLMs] can indeed significantly shift consumer preferences." #econsky #econjmp

To be fair, this does get at the real issues related to new information aggregating/ disseminating technology [which are mostly unrelated to the nutty replies to Kevin's thread]. Citing Wikipedia is NOT the equilibrium now, & it's used precisely in the way that the Middlebury history profs wanted.

That's a revealing read. Thanks for posting, Igor! I guess the pattern is clear. Productivity-enhancing innovations (in the case of Wikipedia it was crowdsourcing) are met with hostility because their first-order effects are perceived as labor-saving. The term "Luddite" is not too far off.

🚨📜CALL FOR PAPERS 📜🚨 *New Data for Consumer Insights Conference* When: May 30-31, 2025 Where: Chicago Booth Submission Deadline: Jan 6, 2025 Keynotes: @susanathey.bsky.social and Greg Lewis Both methodological and empirical submissions are welcome. Submit here: ndconference2025.hotcrp.com

Assad Returns To Ophthalmology At Moscow LensCrafters — theonion.com/assad-return...

The UK Longitudinal Business Database allows any accredited researcher in the ONS Secure Research Service to track the near-universe of UK firms at quarterly frequency and to link them to other administrative and survey data sources. I have written about it here. #EconSky

And they tell empirical IO economists that no one cares about cement manufacturing…

@mohhy.bsky.social introduces an innovative structural model that captures the dynamic role of mentorship, offering both theoretical and practical insights into how accelerators drive startup success, said Prof Aguirregabiria. #EconJobMarket #EconSky newsletter.economics.utoronto.ca/measuring-th...

Want to do a funded, joint Oxford-CMA PhD on market power? Howard Smith (Oxford) and the CMA Microeconomics Unit are looking for promising candidates interested in doing research on the topic of "Beyond markups: understanding changes to competition, concentration, and market power". #EconSky 1/2

📢 @jeeanews.bsky.social Excellence in Refereeing Award 2024 announced 🎉Warm congrats @peterandre.bsky.social @felixchopra.bsky.social Daniel Ershov, Christina Gathmann Duarte Gonçalves, Moritz Kuhn, Ro’ee Levy, Mathilde Muñoz, Pablo Schenone & Adam Storeygard

Why do I think these instances are interesting? To me, these are not just random instances that LLMs are sometimes wrong (like people), these are *diagnostic* that LLMs do not have a world model and are not “reasoning”, it exposes the basic architecture. Why? 1/n

Reposting this to remind myself to re-read this paper later.

In 1st year Econ today, I was discussing the importance of information, nice excuse to pull up this paper by @ershovd.bsky.social & @juansemorales.bsky.social academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

Reminder to JMCs getting in their apps before (American) Thanksgiving that we're hiring postdocs at U of T! This is with Avi Goldfarb will be a great fit for anyone working in innovation and digital www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... #econsky #EconJobMarket

Please come work with me at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab! We're seeking a postdoctoral associate to explore exciting work focused on transformative AI. Accepting applications now. The link is in the next post.

🚨🚨 Deadline January 15 2025 🚨🚨 Don't miss it out. If you want to do a #PhD in #Economics, join the vibrant community in #Berlin and apply to one of our two cooperating programs: @diw.de: www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.... @bseberlin.bsky.social: berlinschoolofeconomics.de/phd-programm

Hi #EconSky! I am a job market candidate from Caltech in the field of IO and Finance. My research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and antitrust regulations. My #EconJMP introduces a novel empirical framework to evaluate the effects of mergers on labor markets. Website: keshiecon.com

Been waiting for this one: “Generative AI is still a prediction machine”

Latest in HBR on generative AI. hbr.org/2024/11/gene...

Here's a our new paper "The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment" We analyze a long-running field experiment of online advertising. We find no significant differences in valuations between users who see ads vs. those who don't. www.nber.org/papers/w32846

The tech industry is growing, but transitioning from other fields is hard. Find out how the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford partnered with DareIT to develop & evaluate a digital program that helps Polish and Ukrainian women get tech jobs. t.co/gxVmd8cVDA

Nathan Miller has been appointed Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division. A great appointment. I note with particular pleasure that before becoming an academic, he was a Staff Economist in the Antitrust Division. www.nathanhmiller.org

Hey #EconSky, I'm on the job market with an #EconJMP about open source software. OSS is a global public good, widely used and provided by the private sector, but the target of recent industrial policy. Paper: jeffgortmaker.com/files/Open_S... 1/

The NBER Innovation Information Initiative will award five or more fellowships of $1500 each to graduate students in economics, innovation, entrepreneurship, or related fields. Applications open at link below. Full deets in picture. "Outsiders" encouraged to apply.

Where’s CaltechTheory?