Why do workers dislike inflation? Because wages catching up to prices means costly conflict: tough pay talks, job search, bargaining. Survey + model show conflict more than doubles inflation costs. Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian & Christina Patterson. buff.ly/S1GJdlV

Ed Miliband is, as far as I can think, the only cabinet minister in this government (except possibly Rayner) to have both clearly been largely successful in policy delivery and not have vacillated like a weathervane under pressure. These are both key attributes for a Chancellor!

The era of trillionaires will be dire for democracy. Here is how we can fight back | Gabriel Zucman

The social media ban doesn’t have to stop every under 16 from using social media - if it stops most of them using it, and causes those who still do to use it less, that's a big win. 10 responses to common objections to the ban. www.edrith.co.uk/p/social-med...

I have worked in the Belgian colonial archives & what's already available to researchers is horrifying, I can only imagine how bad the rest is. We must bring the truth to light. Transparency is the only way to recovery, reparations, & eventual healing.

The subhead: When 30 States Raised Minimum Wages, What Happened to Pay and Jobs? The minimum wage job-loss apocalypse that never arrived. At work here we see monopsony, not mayhem. Assessing Card, Krueger, Dube, and the end of the textbook minimum wage story: **CROSSPOST: ARINDRAJIT DUBE... 1/

The richest person in human history is pouring his time, energy, and resources into inciting racist violence in Belfast and beyond. The United States Congress should terminate all US subsidies to, and contracts with, the firms that funnel money to his sickening skinhead project.

This is what a pogrom looks like: men in masks coming to drive you from your home. This is a collective failure of our political and media class because we did not have the courage to say no, and because too many were allowed to embrace this without shame

At moments of crisis, leaders have a responsibility to speak to, and for, their country. The PM should be on the airwaves, telling the stories of the children, teenagers and families who have been burned out of their homes; naming those responsible; and leading a national fightback against them.

I wonder how much of this disconnect is because decisions on economic (and especially fiscal) policy in the Blair governments were taken by Gordon Brown without too much participation from Blair.

"You were correctly outraged by how Ben-Gvir treated your nationals. Please think of how he treats ours.”

Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad and Mansour Kaziha distracted and delayed two gunmen at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Their actions saved the many children and staff inside the mosque and cost them their lives. n.pr/4uRJkwk

Labour lost almost four times as many voters to the Greens as they did to Reform UK in the local elections, according to new YouGov polling

It cannot be stressed enough: something like this would be impossible in a country like Brazil, certainly not with this brazenness. US institutions have turned out to be remarkably weak. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05...

Labour's processes for changing leader are hopelessly, catastrophically unsuited to government. More than half of all prime ministers since 1945 have taken over between general elections. This is not an unusual procedure. So it really matters when parties screw this system up... 🧵

This, from Nicholas Kristof, is extraordinary, harrowing, morally urgent journalism. Notably not in the NYT’s news pages, which are an exemplar of that silence. Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

Remember when one of Wesley's junior Ministers led us to believe Palantir couldn't access identifiable patient data? Turns out that wasn't true.

A please @labouruk.bsky.social, stop saying that it's up to us to stop Reform. YOU could stop a Reform government in 2029, by introducing the proportional representation so many in the country have been clamouring for. The only way Farage can win is through our crazy first-past-the-post system.

utterly brilliant slides on Marx thank you Jesús Fernández-Villaverde www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/ET_... x.com/JesusFerna70...

After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel

Novel solution to problems inherent to for profit academic publishing: Nonprofit publishing!

New working paper on the California Fast-Food minimum wage (will come out as NBER WP soon but posting now). Big increase in wages. Big drop in separations. Little change in jobs. (Bonus: sheds light on QWI vs QCEW measurement of jobs.)

After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Interesting how no-one around him either in office or assisting him feels able to intervene privately and explain to save him from himself. In fact the incentives are so extreme that the way to respond is to draw attention to the error and invent an entirely new arithmetic to justify it.

The executive director of World Press Photo said this image shows the inconsolable grief of children losing their father in a place built for justice. It is a stark and necessary record of family separation following the U.S. reform policies. n.pr/4d0E5EA

🚨🚨Revised paper 🚨🚨 The Balance of Power in Franchising w/@ulrichatz.org, Blake Eliason, @mikelipsitz.bsky.social, @pnorlander.bsky.social, & @stpinto.bsky.social. We built the 1st comprehensive panel dataset of franchise contract terms: 46,000 documents, 4,500 chains, 20+ provisions, 2009-2024. /1

In our paper, we use @arindube.bsky.social @dgirardi.bsky.social et al. (2025) LP-DiD method. Example: The horizontal 0 line = “control” group; blue bars = “treated” group. Treatment: outsourcing (strange medicine). Before (left): earnings evolved similarly. After 0 (right): 12% drop.

It's the 7th month of the US bombing random ships in Latin American waters they claim are drug smugglers (reminder that two survivors who were rescued were repatriated, not charged), and the death toll is 150+, and it barely gets discussed.

“Israel is repeating the Gaza playbook in its war on Lebanon: large-scale displacement of civilians, destroying infrastructure, targeting hospitals and healthcare workers, and killing journalists. And the world has become numb to Lebanese loss and suffering” — my comments to @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social

Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”. I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him. Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation... 1/

NEWS: The Trump administration confirmed it bombed a girl’s school in Iran. It's one of the most devastating military errors in decades. Trump lied about it. Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties. 175 are dead. Most were kids. Hegseth should be fired.

A few hours after NYT reported that the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing many children, the White House last night posted this video mixing airstrike footage with Top Gun, Iron Man, Gladiator, Halo, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, John Wick, Superman, Transformers and Dragon Ball Z

See here for implantation: bsky.app/profile/dgir...

📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats: The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R! If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you Here: github.com/danielegirar... #Econometrics #CausalInference @arindube.bsky.social

📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats: The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R! If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you Here: github.com/danielegirar... #Econometrics #CausalInference @arindube.bsky.social

About Kevin Warsh paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-bad-heir...

A quick take on Warsh. In terms of ideology and theory, at first glance he looks like a fairly standard pre-2008 'hawk' but he's perhaps closer to 80s monetarism: he thinks inflation is caused by government spending and money printing. 1/n www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

What’s so misguided about the formulation “authoritarianism is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” which I have heard from Ezra Klein and others, it’s that it misses the point: that’s true of authoritarianism *everywhere*.

This is good, addressing people directly, including those who have supported Trump

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

The ICE Seven

NORWAY PM: I HAVE REPEATEDLY CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO TRUMP THAT IT IS AN INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE THAT AWARDS THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Losing my mind at the Dems with their billionaire backers and powerful friends who have come up with the brilliant strategy that the party should adopt the policy positions of the avg MAGA voter — apparently ignoring that independents and swing voters even exist. Is this what $40 million gets you??

Gallego ("moderate" Dem) is going with "ICE needs to be totally torn down" (not "reform and retrain"). This is a pivot point for the country on immigration. You have been seeing this in the data for a while, and now officials are snapping to the public opinion www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ice-is-a-7...

Israel continues its war on healthcare for Palestinians www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/w...

Until recently, much of the evidence on these effects was at the subnational level and within country. I discuss three papers using novel cross-country evidence on the effects of national election outcomes (presidential and parliamentary elections), which are likely more consequential (14/n).

In the second part of the talk, I discuss recent work on the economic effects of elections through two main forces, representation and agency (13/n).

The first is “Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections” (AEJ: Applied) by @dgirardi.bsky.social. Using a cross-country RDD, Girardi finds that left-wing electoral victories cause large short-term decreases in stock market valuation (15/n).