Listen to the economists. Just don’t listen only to the economists.

Now seems like a pretty good time to tease the session I am organizing--with 2 IO papers and 2 macro papers about how redistributive concerns frame how we think about market power--at AEAs 2025. Nothing to do with anything we are all talking about

Envelope conditions at work!

New markups paper alert! 👇👇👇👇 How do markups vary over time along the supply chain? To address this question, I'm very excited to share a new working paper from the HBS Pricing Lab, joint with Santiago Alvarez Blaser, Alex MacKay, and Paolo Mengano: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Relatedly: I was just in Seattle, and while people tell me it's some kind of late-stage capitalist dystopia, to me it just seemed like a very nice normal city with lots of rain and good food.

Econtwitter! How do you find coauthors? A glance at my CV would show that I haven't figured this part out.

With all due respect to my sole coauthor, the wonderful (not on Twitter) Nicholas:

The housing debate is bewildering to me. YIMBYs say it's constraints on supply; populists say it's anticompetitive landlords and PE. Why not both? Furthermore, if supply's already constrained, marginal harms from e.g. landlord collusion are larger. Envelope conditions!

Tip. Overleaf has a LaTeX Review Response Template for responding to reviewer's comments. Letting your response be easier to examine can only help: as we say in psychology-and-economics—if you want someone to do something, make it easy. overleaf.com/latex/template…

Not an IO topic, but I saw this recently. Something I care about and depressing as all heck. Does anybody know what's going on (especially with the younger age demo?)

Re: heterodox vs not. I don't care how radical your conclusions are. I just care your methods are sound, your assumptions are formal and sensible, and your proofs are correct. The problem is a lot of heterodox econ just isn't that formal.

Common leadership (firms sharing executives or board directors) increases the probability of collusion by 12 percentage points ... ... and even more so when it involves an executive rather than an independent board director. Jessica Jeffers dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfkql00…

If you use the phrase "homo economicus" unironically, I can assure you we are not going to be friends.

Proves my point beautifully: we make assumptions in our models. The stronger the assumptions, generally, the stronger the conclusion, but the more likely it is to be wrong. I'm saying there's a bias-variance tradeoff. You know what's great at this? Formalism! Economics!