Micro theory is underrated.

I would enjoy freeski slopestyle more if the announcer described the tricks in radians.

We first need to debate what we are optimizing here. Then we can debate how to optimize it.

Putting Tyler aside for a moment, those who weren’t there for it have no idea how great how the 2005-2010 blogosphere was for economics. The reach was wide but people actually had the space to lay out arguments. There wasn’t the sloganeering that there is in on X and the comments

The world is built by people who focused on one pursuit longer than anyone else thought was sane.

Submit your text-as-data work by 13 March for the MPWZ-CEPR online workshop (13-14 April): tinyurl.com/2s3j8kxf We welcome submissions from all fields of economics & other social sciences that use unstructured data. with Philine Widmer and Sascha becker!

Results from my Claude Code audit of six Callaway and Sant'Anna packages (two in python, two in R, two in Stata). Same specification, same dataset, same covariates, same estimator, almost never do they agree. open.substack.com/pub/causalinf/…

People see government remedies more easily than market ones. When the state acts, it’s visible, documented, and later remembered as "the solution". That creates an observation bias. In work with Nicky Tynan on London’s shellfish contamination problem (1880–1910), the evidence

ChatGPT Pro's suggested layout for my bathroom renovation.

Conjecture: AI will generate larger percentage productivity gains in home production than in the formal market. Households buy expertise at retail prices, with after-tax income, and with little to no economies of scale.

Conjecture: If AIs become oracles, research will become similar to being a graduate student. We will study under “someone” who knows much more than us, wrapping our heads around what they have to say and asking questions when statements are not obvious. When we feel like we

There are a lot of short paper journals, but I want one that ruthlessly forbids information not necessary for understanding the result. No references to the appendices. Only references to papers with results you use. Little framing. Saying you contribute to three literatures is

The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment since 1952. We just got the first Iran-afflicted measure for April, and it's at the lowest level ever recorded.

An interesting side effect of AI is that I’m starting to cite more theory papers. When it recommends an applied micro paper I hadn’t cited, it’s sometimes interesting, but it rarely changes how I would talk about my paper. The theory papers it recommends, though, really do

Thinking of starting the "Journal of Authors Redoing Their Older Work with AI"

I don't know much about gold, and I'm sure much of its value comes from speculation, but it seems relevant that people risk jail time to steal copper.

This has me wondering: are there any great answers for what determined the speed of collapse? Obviously the Soviet model was terrible, and the Samuelson take is wrong here. But it is responding to a real question: why hadn’t it already failed by the time Samuelson wrote this?