Mining Causality: AI-Assisted Search for Instrumental Variables. arxiv.org/abs/2409.14202

🚨 New working paper 🚨 In large cities, wages are higher. But so are inequalities. In fact, low-wage workers earn lower real earnings there. Why? What drives spatial wage disparities? Why some workers work at lower real wages in large cities?

If academic articles were written by Youtubers: WE RAN A BUNCH OF REGRESSIONS AND YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT...

while we're all distracted by Big Tech and AI, but Trump is about to give Big Finance a USD 9trillion gift.

Amen

Democracies only grow faster than autocracies because of personalist leaders. Bad things mainly happen in overcentralized, unchecked regimes, from Chris Blattman, Scott Gehlbach, and Zeyang Yu nber.org/papers/w34093

New advanced access article by Francesco Zezza out now: "Fiscal and monetary policy in an SFC model of the Italian economy". Open access in EJEEP. Check it out 👇 Francesco Zezza elgaronline.com/view/journals/…

Coming Soon 🔥 After the success of the VIMM Seminar, we imagined learning sessions on hot applied economics topics. Welcome to the VIMM Lab Seminar: vimacro.org/lab First seminar on dynamic local projections with Stata with Jamel Saadaoui: vimacro.org/jamel-saadaoui…

Highly relevant! "Has the Rise of Work from Home Reduced the Motherhood Penalty in the Labor Market?" by Emma Harrington and Matthew E. Kahn. nber.org/papers/w34147

🇪🇺 fiscal bubble listen up: Here's our new fiscal space indicator. The FS indicator measures the share of govt spending that is actually discretionary, thus reflecting the govt's room for maneouvre. For 🇩🇪: currently at 16%, but down to zero in 2035. /1 dezernatzukunft.org/zero-fiscal-sp…

How to build AI agents for research, from simple data retrieval to deep research systems and showing how to create these tools using natural language instructions, from Anton Korinek nber.org/papers/w34202

I’ve started an ongoing project to collect all the datasets which economists can use, all in one place, organized by topic. Started with 50, further suggestions are extremely welcome. It will grow considerably.

1/ 🚀 MAJOR UPDATE The Global Macro Database (GMD) — September 2025 release is live! Our mission: democratize access to complete, harmonized, and easy-to-use cross-country macroeconomic time series. Explore: globalmacrodata.com

Great initiative! For macro/finance/international topics, we’ve assembled a number of links to different datasets (as well as code and other resources) here: sites.google.com/view/interconn… The NBER IFM data page is another great resource.

No, the NK model is neither elegant nor useful. The IS/LM model was useful — but incomplete — because its core equations summarize observable empirical relationships between aggregates. The attempt to graft a forward looking ‘Phillips curve’ onto the model was an unmitigated