There is a good logic to this kind of fiscal devaluation - replacing payroll taxes with a VAT is equivalent to a tariff, but probably flies much more under the radar

"To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset." My piece in The Economist this week on how zero-sum thinking arises and why it matters so much for policy and politics. Based on our research at the Social Economics Lab. economist.com/by-invitation/…

When Italy prohibited interlocking directorates (i.e., common board members) interest rates of previously interlocked banks dropped by 14 basis points (similar magnitude as the impact of common ownership on airline ticket prices), consistent with pre-reform collusive behaviour.

updated the daily #tariff series with projections given the letters sent out. The letters take the average tariff rate in the U.S. from about 15% to 20% on August 3.

👀 For a limited time, watch a presentation of "Geoeconomic Pressure" by Antonio Coppola at the NBER SI Intl Finance & Macro session at youtube.com/watch?v=na7sKH…. We use LLMs to classify which governments apply pressure to which foreign targets, and how.

This is super interesting! CBO forecasts are pretty good

Not surprising if many will not pay the costs!

When Trump announced sweeping tariffs in April, economists warned prices would jump and a recession was likely. Neither has happened -- yet. My latest story looks into why tariffs haven't hit the economic data yet, and why it's still too soon to conclude they won't.

Corrigendum: after some offline discussion, HHR have moved from the bottom to the middle of my literature range. A short thread on why, including another dive into mapping moments into parameters.

We've launched Claude for Financial Services. Claude now integrates with leading data platforms and industry providers for real-time access to comprehensive financial information, verified across internal and industry sources.

Awesome history of weak separability in optimal taxation here!

Very glad to be on the NBER SI Household Finance program this year. I presented a paper on private capital markets and inequality, joint with Clara Martínez-Toledano and Ararat Gocmen. Presentation is here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=2t2Fqi… (starting 7:49:30), and a great discussion by Arthur Korteweg.

Great article on debt and financial repression featuring Hanno Lustig! harpers.org/archive/2025/0…

David Núñez Longueira Noah Smith 🐇 My reading of the empirical evidence is that there are moderate successes, France being perhaps the best example. What many people miss is that the goal is not to raise the TFR from 1.4 to 2.1, which is probably unfeasible, but rather to reach 1.7. At those levels, a gentle

Tim de Silva This is an awesome thread. My takeaways: tax leisure (to encourage labor), and things the rich have a taste for (to get their money without discouraging their labor supply)

When in doubt, taxes.. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Awesome paper. Great example of how "null" results can be super informative when they come from a credible research design!

Doug Campbell Here is a simple example by Tim de Silva. Reduced form tells you moral hazard “matters.” But model tells you it’s small timdesilva.me/files/papers/j…

Doug Campbell Tim de Silva Or this paper by Beraldi; which has some descriptive facts + model to think through them francberaldi.github.io/MyPapers/Franc…

Arpit Gupta Tim de Silva Interesting. Will give it a read. The main graph is promising for credible identification, so, half-way home.