What’s the matter with India? I argue it’s the courts. They leaves firms unable to conduct business, and make the country as much as 10% poorer. nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/whats-the-...

Banger

What Matt means here is he used to uncritically write articles about "paper in top journal finds result consistent with progressive policy" & now he's worried those articles were refereed and accepted with a less critical and unbiased eye than he had thought. Like, clearly true! Everyone knows this!

A group of researchers has attempted to replicate our work on self-control and asset market prices published in the Review of Financial Studies (doi.org/10.1093/rfs/...) and not been able confirm our findings. See doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

In fairness to Kruse, if I were an academic best-known for plagiarism I would also feel distinctly threatened by AI tools

The very best inventors are sensitive to top tax rates, especially the foreign born. An elasticity of 1 means that a 1% increase in tax rates leads to a 1% decrease in foreign born inventors! Paper below, blog post Tuesday (I’m back to writing >1 per day lol) t.co/gNXRknmt4y

Between 1995 and 2001, 35 million workers were laid off from state-owned enterprises in China. They were pushed into creating their own companies, leading to an increase in the number, size, and quality of entrepreneurs. t.co/cPSoNwDTQc

Nature is healing 🥹🥹

Today I make the case that you should, if at all possible, have someone better than you be the biological parent of your kids. Read it here: nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/why-your-c...

What are the most important questions in economics? What should someone who wants to change the world work on?

The podium is fundamentally Freudian

This is the best blog post I’ve ever written. It is not possible to infer where the gains from education are coming from, given our tests. Signalling vs human capital questions are, at the moment, empirically unresolvable. nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-return...

Hey econ folks, I’m working with an historical data set which lacks a great measure of tfp. (Specifically, I can’t tell capital intensity). Is gross value added per worker a reasonable proxy?

The rollout of the internet substantially reduced unemployment. To learn all about equilibrium unemployment, read my latest blog post! nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/why-does-u...

Just read Aumann’s Agreeing to Disagree and alas, I now must be a Kahanist

Truly the Ron Swanson of websites

Berkshire Hathaway’s website is *iconic*, btw www.berkshirehathaway.com

Firm size stays the same as productivity increases. This implies that entry costs must rise with productivity, and we should expect a bit less from productivity enhancing policies, especially if no. of products connected to no. of firms. www.nber.org/system/files...

Should the FTC break up Meta? A key fact in estimating effects is the acquisition premium, or the difference between first and second highest bids. I estimate that Facebook buying Insta and Whatsapp was not anti-competitive. You can read more on my blog! nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/should-the...

I walk between the shelves in the library, and think: What fools are we to believe that we shall ever exceed machines? Which can, in one instant, grasp the whole sum of human knowledge? Our time will have been like the tinkering of cavemen with tools.

Tomorrow on my blog: should the FTC break up Meta? Under what conditions is banning start-up acquisition optimal? And much more. And stay tuned for a very substantial post on equilibrium employment rates over time!

Read a 1981 paper by Akerlof which bugged the hell out of me — “Jobs as Dam Sites”. He seemed to treat the number of jobs as fixed? Which is just, weird?

Do neighbors matter? How much of our outcomes is attributable to the people around us? I review the evidence, which points to small but real effects. nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/do-neighbo...

Gonna be using Bluesky now!