Why did Southern whites who didn’t own slaves defend slavery, an institution that hurt their own economic prospects? In a new Broadstreet post, Michele Rosenberg explains how planter elites relied on clientelistic relationships to capture political support: www.broadstreet.blog/publish/post...

If you want to read a good book with Klein and Coates as characters:

I believe this is the moment that President-Elect Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and @ksonin.bsky.social compared the length of their prison sentences imposed in absentia.

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

Southwest flight attendant: If you have a connection here in Chicago, just skip it. Go downtown instead. There is so much to do, so many places to eat. You will be less happy anywhere else.

Searching in HPE or related fields? Check out these great students/postdocs on the market!

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The chilling effects of RUS aggression are very much clear in the €zone. Large spillover effects have implications for: * Macro stabilization in Europe * The cost of war in general & RUS agg specifically * The calculus of costs&benefits of aid to #Ukraine * mil buildup in Europe #UkrainianView

To be followed by an executive order renaming every Slavic Studies department the Department of War and Peace

I knew Daria. Students like her are the reason I came back to Ukraine, the reason I am building a university. She embodied the Ukraine I imagine — because Ukraine is its people. People like Daria. 1/

Every day, my mother carefully boiled milk, bc otherwise we'd be exposed to tuberculosis, massive GI issues, and other pathogen-borne disease. When we came to the US, you could just drink milk cold! straight from the bottle! with no gross coat to skim! Welcome to communist-era Poland, y'all.

An underappreciated aspect of Trump’s authoritarian personality is his tendency to make policy decisions based on personal aesthetic preferences. Wind power, federal architecture,… This is a man who knows what the world should look like.

This was a lot of fun! I presented joint work w/ @luozhaotian.bsky.social & @spantoja.bsky.social asking “How Is a Dictatorship (Not) Like a Firm?” Both dictatorships and firms are hierarchical organizations, but there are some illuminating differences. Slides here 👇

This was a lot of fun! I presented joint work w/ @luozhaotian.bsky.social & @spantoja.bsky.social asking “How Is a Dictatorship (Not) Like a Firm?” Both dictatorships and firms are hierarchical organizations, but there are some illuminating differences. Slides here 👇

There are smart autocrats and dumb autocrats. Putin is a smart autocrat. Even as he otherwise consolidated power, Putin protected the independence of the Russian Central Bank. Trump is a dumb autocrat. Having regained power based on swing voters’ inflation concerns, he pours gasoline on the fire.

Kristina is fantastic. She will be a great hire for somebody. Website here: stonecenter.uchicago.edu/people/krist...

Hyde Park rooting for the good guys.

Trump welcomes a war criminal on US soil #UkrainianView

How do Americans view support for US aid to Ukraine? Here is some research from a survey I did in September 2023. A bit dated, but these attitudes have been pretty stable over time.

Paul Tillich, in The Metropolis in Modern Life: By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance… 1/3

6 to 10 million killed, of whom disproportionately many were Ukrainians. Why? Natalya Naumenko explains Stalin’s famine in the latest at Broadstreet.

Super post today in @broadstreetblog.bsky.social by Natalya Naumenko on Stalin’s famine. www.broadstreet.blog/p/stalins-fa...

Super post today in @broadstreetblog.bsky.social by Natalya Naumenko on Stalin’s famine. www.broadstreet.blog/p/stalins-fa...

Interesting paper by @sgehlbach.bsky.social, @chrisblattman.bsky.social and Yu. Even though Trump is definitely trying to build the personalist type, I suspect that even if autocracy manages to consolidate in the US, it will be a more institutionalized variety… www.nber.org/papers/w3409...

US bureau of statistics next year:

Please submit your papers to the series! #EconSky #UkrainianView #Ukraine

All you Francis Spufford fans (@himself.bsky.social), has anybody listened to the audio version of Light Perpetual? What an astonishingly beautiful performance by @imogenchurch.bsky.social.

The call for papers for the next @nber.org Organizational Economics Working Group is up! We will meet in Cambridge, MA on November 13 and 14 2025. Please submit your paper by September 1st 2025 at: conference.nber.org/confsubmit/b...

Pleased to see organizational/institutional economists Hart, Henderson and Maskin join the political scientists (and the political economist, Rodrik) in this fight for academic freedom.

Very happy to announce the publication of Workplace Politics, with @szakonyi.bsky.social and Ora John Reuter. Drawing on data from 8 countries with a deep-dive on Russia, we examine when, why, and how politicians and employers pressure their workers to vote in elections. academic.oup.com/book/60445

Would like to be able to blame the Trump Administration for my food poisoning. Fair?

Yay, we have now reached the Walter Duranty/NYT stage of "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition". Will IDF spokespeople also get a Pulitzer, though?

Signed.

Best thing I’ve read on the assault on higher education. For the history books, whoever will be writing them.

cc @columbiauniversity.bsky.social

This is terrible news re Columbia. Issue the “edgy” syllabus now, tank this sham extortion before the check clears…

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on. Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts. 1/

More of this, please. Such low-hanging fruit.

Did the Biden administration's targeted industrial policies help lift the Democratic Party in "left-behind" America? Well, no, and it might've shifted the targeted areas further away from the party, at least in the case of one place-based green subsidy. New working paper 🧵 1/9

Anybody who thinks the GOP will right itself after Trump is gone should reflect on the Epstein saga. The first time since Jan 2021 that Congressional Republicans have truly broken with Trump, and for what? Nutcase stuff. The problem is with the base. Trump is symptom as much as cause.

I love everything about @andrewroberts.bsky.social’s review of four recent books on the postcommunist transition. We know a LOT about the 90s that goes beyond facile references to “neoliberalism” or the “Washington Consensus.” Anyone tempted to work on the period would do well to start with this 👇.

Spændende! Sætter lige et bogmærke. Acemoglu & Robinson 13-årige "Why Nation Fails" er blevet et anker, hvor omkring institutioner diskuteres (de skelnede ml incl./extract inst. - se figur). Og pegede på at demokratier på den lange bane vinder. Men taber alle typer af autokratier?

Just the latest initiative from the amazing leadership of the Kyiv School of Economics. There are so many ways to help. Financially, yes, and also institutionally. At Harris, we will be hosting the first of what we hope will be many joint-degree students from KSE this coming year.

Personalist autocracies underperform, whereas institutionalised autocracies perform similar to democracies (in terms of economic growth)

New paper alert! 📣 @chrisblattman.bsky.social, Arthur Yu, and I reexamine the autocratic growth penalty—the finding that autocracies systematically underperform democracies in economic growth. TL;DR, the penalty is concentrated in personalist, not institutionalized autocracies. Details👇 1/X

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)

New paper alert! 📣 @chrisblattman.bsky.social, Arthur Yu, and I reexamine the autocratic growth penalty—the finding that autocracies systematically underperform democracies in economic growth. TL;DR, the penalty is concentrated in personalist, not institutionalized autocracies. Details👇 1/X

📣 My buddy @mikeduncan.bsky.social of Revolutions podcast fame is on Jon Stewart.

Overheard on Michigan Ave: “Please, stop. Nobody is controlling the weather. That is a conspiracy theory.” Gratitude to fact checkers everywhere.

Are you: ✅ A young scholar in econ, poli sci, or law ✅ Working on institutions, broadly defined ✅ Interested in spending a week in Italy with amazing faculty If so, please apply to this year’s Coase Institute Workshop! It’s a transformative experience for many, and always fun. I’ll be there.