The smear campaign against Mustapha Kharbouch -- falsely accused of the Brown shooting and MIT murder by powerful politicians, pundits and plutocrats -- is a prime example of how pervasive racism has become. It's also a story largely ignored by the mainstream media www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Ashamed of this government

Remarkable how little coverage this is getting. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

A brave survivor speaks on the record. Sami al-Saei, 46, used to be a freelance journalist in the occupied West Bank. He was arrested after working with reporters to arrange interviews with armed groups and was detained without being charged for 16 months. bbc.com/news/article...

For more information: github.com/danielegirar... The -lpdid- command implements the Local Projections Difference-in-Differences estimators presented in @arindube.bsky.social , Girardi, Jorda’ & Taylor (2025) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Coauthored with @alexanderbusch.bsky.social

Key new features of LPDID: * New [oneoff] suboption to deal with 'shock' treatments lasting 1 period by construction (eg, hurricanes) * Reweighted estimator w/ covariates (or additional FEs) now *much* faster * Reweighted estimator w/ covariates now compatible with wild bootstrap standard errors

Public Service Announcement: 🚨New updated version (1.0.2) of -lpdid- STATA command now available🚨 Update the command by typing ssc install lpdid, replace directly in STATA Then look at the updated help file help lpdid See below for the key new features...

The International Monetary Fund asked me to review the literature on migration economics to draw lessons for low-income countries. In a new @iza.org paper, I argue that policy for the 21st century must discard four outdated ideas. www.iza.org/publications... 🧵 thread—>

Public Service Announcement: 🚨New updated version (1.0.2) of -lpdid- STATA command now available🚨 Update the command by typing ssc install lpdid, replace directly in STATA Then look at the updated help file help lpdid See below for the key new features...

What the Democrats can learn from the UK Labour Party's complete implosion after moving right on immigration www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-cost-o...

Short version: chasing the hardline party’s voters without any real principles of your own makes you lose your own base and convince fence-sitters to support the hardline party, not you.

Masha Gessen - "The Movie I Was Afraid to See" (gift link below) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/o...

25 years ago today, SCOTUS elected George W Bush president of the United States by blocking completion of a voting canvass in Florida. A subsequent canvass by the Associated Press showed that Bush's rival, Al Gore, had won the race in Florida—and thus the contest for the presidency—by 700 votes.

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

"Migrants who came to the UK on skilled work visas in 2022-23 will make a net contribution of £47bn to the public finances over their lifetime, according to new estimates from the government’s Migration Advisory Committee." Not surprising, but some observations (1/n) www.ft.com/content/10da...

Tighter visa rules will cost UK up to £10.8bn giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"And tonight in 'Cutting off your nose to spite your face'...."

Turquoise Labour: Tough on growth, tough on the causes of growth.

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion. It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

Government has now - belatedly -published the impact assessment for the changes to skilled worker and care worker visas announced in May. Impact is estimated between -£2 billion and £-10 billion (central - £10 billion). assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e6...

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

Y'days post: The Budget suggests the Chancellor is thinking too much about short term management and too little about long term legacy mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-... What is doubly annoying about this government's focus on how its actions play with voters is that they are terrible at it

200 leading global artists, writers and actors are calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti. An impressive list here. freemarwan.org/public-figur...

Marwan Barghouti should be released now. As his relatives say, he “represents hope to Palestinians at a time when there are efforts to silence him and make him forgotten.”

1. The European Parliament’s attempt to ban plant-based foods from being sold as “sausages”, “burgers” etc is a direct response to livestock industry lobbying. This is a short thread on how utterly bleeding ridiculous it is. 🧵1/6

They were 8 and 11 years old

Kinnock voice - "I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions....and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a *Labour* government, rejecting visas for homeless 8 yr olds trying to joing their parents"

Delighted to see the Chancellor has taken forward the recommendation from Gordon Brown, @smfthinktank.bsky.social and @ippr.org to increase taxes on gambling. We called for this hugely profitable industry to contribute to ending the two child limit for benefits

Where are the headlines about this? The US has turned the life of this French judge into a nightmare - because he applied justice to Israel. This is gangsterism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The inaugural article of Reviews of Economic Literature is fittingly titled "It Is Time to Bring Scholarly Publishing Back to the Academic Community" It argues that open access crucially needs to be coupled with a new non-profit publishing model rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

Come work with us in London!

From @philipjcowley.bsky.social - thanks to a happy coincidence we have a much more rigorous than usual understanding of the impact of Keir Starmer's "Island of Strangers" speech. As Cowley puts it "It is not obvious this was the intended outcome"

📢 We’re hiring! King's College London Political Economy is recruiting an Assistant Professor (Lecturer in the UK system) in Economics. Apply here: www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/130885-... Feel free to contact me for information about the role and our department. @kcl-spe.bsky.social @kingsqpe.bsky.social

Since Trump’s ‘ceasefire’, Israel killed 900 Palestinians in Gaza. In the West Bank, 691 Palestinians were kidnapped during 1,503 invasions. If the victims had been Israelis, the Western media would have been (rightly) protesting these pogroms. Now? A guilty silence prevails...

Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly email to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

Commercial academic publishing is bad, and getting worse quickly. That's why I support the new journal Reviews of Economic Literature - 100% managed by academics and issued by @stanfordpress.bsky.social First article: "It Is Time to Bring Scholarly Publishing Back to the Academic Community"

The genocide continues, in slower pace Genocide: "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" "[E]ntire neighbourhoods controlled by the IDF have been levelled in less than a month" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

CfP🗣️: 7th edition of the Workshop on the Economics and Politics of Migration. 28-29 May 2026, in Rome! Organised by CEPR/King's College/EBRD/Sapienza Keynotes are Paolo Pinotti (Bocconi) and Vicky Fouka (Stanford). Submit your papers: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Deadline 23 Jan. 🤓🔥🍕🍝🍷

Even worse, open access + for profit publishing is a true disaster. Especially in interaction with AI & fake "paper mills" manuscripts. Maximising open access fees is the new model. It means trying to publish every submission, either at the original journal or another journal of the same publisher.

More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized. This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science. 5/n

For-profit journals are supposed to improve research quality, yet they're perversely incentivized to churn out whatever they can monetize. This was happening before AI (see Strain: bit.ly/43gJPUM), and AI will make it worse. It's insane that we volunteer our time to help them do so. 4/n

Commercial academic publishing is bad, and getting worse quickly. That's why I support the new journal Reviews of Economic Literature - 100% managed by academics and issued by @stanfordpress.bsky.social First article: "It Is Time to Bring Scholarly Publishing Back to the Academic Community"

The journal Reviews of Economic Literature has published its first article! You can read “It Is Time to Bring Scholarly Publishing Back to the Academic Community” now @pkp.sfu.ca #ReadUP

After a video seemed to show Israeli soldiers abusing a Palestinian prisoner, Israel has... arrested the lawyer who authorised the release of the video www.ft.com/content/0456...

This weeks post: How the reaction to a football ban showed how our politicians and media have become trapped in right wing Islamophobic narratives and detached from the majority of voters mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/10/how-... Within 5 hours leaders of the 4 main parties had condemned the ban.

Exclusive: In an open letter, Israeli ex-officials, Jewish artists and intellectuals say ‘unconscionable’ actions in Gaza amount to genocide and call on UN and world leaders to sanction Israel via @jgedeon.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

"That’s the quiet corruption corroding modern philanthropy: the ability to give as a license to impose one’s will. It’s a kind of moral laundering." -- Laurene Powell Jobs www.wsj.com/us-news/laur...

Reject the ongoing censorship of student media on our campuses! “Administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to provide a space of intellectual exploration and debate” —Hank Reichman, in a new Academe Blog post

Another way of looking at this same picture: The euro zone is a system that use the leverage of a central bank outside the control of national governments to force deep austerity on countries like Spain, which sent them into deep depressions that created fiscal deficits that didn't previously exist.