Arin totally "gets it"

Honestly, tons of academics who I greatly respect don't realy understand AI including - what it does, how it's evolving, how it's affecting research. That's bad.

Nice post that highlights that while there has been a substantial reduction in wage inequality since 2019, the reduction is substantially smaller than the rise in wage inequality since the early 1980s. Perspective is important.

Trump has become too toxic even for the German far right. www.politico.eu/article/germ...

This is crazy. Apparently this guy was planning to do a mass shooting in Breckenridge (CO) as a way to kill liberals. Relevant for me because my son and I were planning to be in Breck next week to ski (we changed our plans for other reasons but - chilling). www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adve...

Something I want to be very clear about. The tightness fueled reduction in wage inequality is a limited affair - it's mainly about raising wages in the bottom half of the pay distribution, mostly in the bottom 1/3. It doesn't solve all our inequality problems, especially top concentration.

New Substack post: The wage compression that persisted. arindube.substack.com/p/the-wage-c...

New Substack post: The wage compression that persisted. arindube.substack.com/p/the-wage-c...

I think it speaks somewhat poorly of the state of our world that I got really excited using VS code, integrating Python, Stata, Overleaf, with AI all in one platform.

Over 8 million workers are getting a long overdue raise. 19 states increased their minimum wage this month. More workers now live in states with a $15+ wage than those stuck at the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Much needed relief for working families as wages lag behind the cost of living

Once upon a time, the American government actually paid attention to the oil men before doing coups and interventions (see next post). We used to be a country, a real country. www.cnn.com/2026/01/09/p...

“When people give me things, I post them.” That’s a terrifying decision rule for someone comfortable wielding unchecked power over anyone in this world.

Interesting! @aaronsojourner.org @arindube.bsky.social

Who is ready for 2027?

"An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from—not toward—a federal officer when he opened fire." Great video analysis of Minneapolis shooting from NYT. These frames show drawing of gun and exact moment of first shot. www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

We will remember Renee Good.

It was not "domestic terrorism.” It was state sanctioned violence. A family will forever live with the pain caused by the admin's reckless and deadly actions. Abolishing ICE is not enough. They must be held accountable.

Two biases distort how we judge economic life of ordinary people. One, often elite-driven, downplays the harms, especially inequality. The other is plain negativity bias, often amplified by media. Our goal? Strike the right balance: acknowledge real progress without pretending the work is done.

Beyonce joins the ranks of a policy failure

It's amazing how myopic the tech elite have demonstrated themselves to be. They have very little support among voters in either party, and this will show up in policies. And yet, they seem to show little recognition of this. At some point, a tax on their wealth will be the least of their concerns.

Merry Christmas! 🎄🎁

Important work using U.S. tax data shows businesses have absorbed minimum wage increases without affecting employment, and through higher revenue-likely reflecting price & productivity offsets. Also shows how reallocation towards more productive firms offers another margin of adjustment.

It's quite remarkable how economists on X skews right. The Bluesky/X divide within the economics community is like a microcosm of American politics

Labor market was so awful in the 1980s that real wages fell for the bottom fifth of workers and didn't bounce back for over a decade

The 1980s really didn't produce good wage outcomes for the bottom half of the American workforce. Worse than before, and what came after (partial rebound in the late 1990s and 2010s.)

This stuff really happened! And it really crushed workers. It's so odd see a kind of whig economic history re-emerge in the last few years

Growth of real wage (purchasing power) has continued to be strong,* and broad-based, even as nominal wage growth has slowed. *not affected very much by quirks in last month's CPI print.

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I was also bored and pulled up the replication package. The results are quite sensitive in aggregate to needing the controls. Here's the replication of Figure 3, including the case w/o controls:

One thing this discussion highlights - as did Bharat and Neale's NYT oped - is that the ideas initially proposed by my colleague @isabellamweber.bsky.social on strategic price caps resonate with many people, and worth engaging with seriously.

This from @davidshor.bsky.social made me LOL. "having wealthy people or economists be mad at you is a feature, not a bug" .... anyway, it's a very interesting conversation I recommend it.

Really enjoyed this discussion between @pkrugman.bsky.social and @hcrichardson.bsky.social. Something Paul said that I want to highlight: negativity bias affects both right and left. I discuss this in my book as well. Some thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Between 1979–2019, top pay (90th pct.) climbed 53%, middle only 23%, bottom (10th pct.) even lower 7%. (Productivity per hour climbed much more at 73%.) But since 2019, fast gains at the bottom have already reversed about 1/3 of the rise in pay inequality. A 🧵 about my book: The Wage Standard.

Arin Dube has developed, along with co-authors, a body of work since the beginning of this century that has changed the conventional wisdom in econ about minimum wages. This book will be accessible to a broad readership. And I can't wait to see more from Dube and other empirical labor economists.

yes. Yes. YES!

Can’t wait for this!

"The go-to-guy" on minimum wage" I would say one of the top labour economists in the world rite now. #Econsky

Between 1979–2019, top pay (90th pct.) climbed 53%, middle only 23%, bottom (10th pct.) even lower 7%. (Productivity per hour climbed much more at 73%.) But since 2019, fast gains at the bottom have already reversed about 1/3 of the rise in pay inequality. A 🧵 about my book: The Wage Standard.

Affordability starts with your paycheck. #TheWageStandard

Very excited to see The Wage Standard in The Next Big Idea Club's Must Read Books list!

Waiting for Instacart's rebuttal: "Critics are wrong; we are not extracting consumer surplus via price discrimination. We are merely randomizing prices to estimate a demand elasticity so we can extract consumer surplus better through uniform pricing."

I was disappointed with several elements of The @economist.com recent articles on minimum wages. To their credit, they've published my response. Here are some links to the research I reference and to some other research which had to be cut from the published letter 1/N

Finally, it's always worth pointing people to Dube and Zipperer's excellent minimum wage own-wage elasticity repository (and the accompanying working paper) www.nber.org/system/files... @arindube.bsky.social @benzipperer.org

Here is a handy summary of the literature on the various margins from the latest Handbook of Labor Economics by @arindube.bsky.social & Attila Lindner for reference:

The Economist makes a good point in warning that, at some point, high may be too high, and that we should look beyond the effects on employment. But, I don’t think there is (yet) any consensus that we reached the maximum as they seem to imply in their piece.

Arin Dube has incredible work on this (@arindube.bsky.social) Here’s his page collecting it all in one spot: arindube.com/minimum-wage...

🚨New Working Paper!🚨 @ihsaanbassier.bsky.social & I start with simple stylised fact: lower productivity firms pay ~minimum wage, even as productivity increases. What does this mean for rent sharing/passthrough? Employment? Profits? Monopsony model + 🇿🇦 admin data = striking conclusions!

Wrote a new paper on the econometrics of financial event studies, would value feedback! It's very new. With my amazing grad student Tianshu Lyu www.tianshulyu.com, who is on the market. You should hire him! paulgp.com/papers/finan...