I am looking for RA or pre-doc positions for the upcoming year.
reading list
paper threads
my best essays
- "the theory of trade". 05/14/2026
- "everything i know about dynamic discrete choice". 05/12/2026
- "sticky wages, disequilibrium, and the keynesian revival in modern macroeconomics". 05/11/2026
- "africa is doing worse than you think". 05/05/2026
- "closing windows and flipping coins". 04/28/2026
- "the efficiency gains from mergers". 04/27/2026
- "will price transparency cure america's high healthcare costs?". 04/20/2026
- "paying people to be unemployed". 04/13/2026
- "ludwig straub, winner of the john bates clark medal". 04/08/2026
- "breaking exogenous characteristics". 04/07/2026
- "is competition falling in america?". 04/06/2026
- "the unreasonable effectiveness of cash transfers". 04/01/2026
- "do developing countries still need to industrialize?". 03/30/2026
- "who uses ai in congress?". 03/10/2026
- "the buses really should be free": the evidence should be allowed to speak. free buses are justifiable. 02/16/2026
- "how to save american democracy": a simple proposal that both eliminates gerrymandering and is incentive compatible.
- "the economist as reporter": what are we to do when ai replaces us? 02/06/2026
- "markups from the demand and the supply side": a detailed explanation of methods in modern industrial organization. 01/23/2026
- "agent orange did not cause diabetes": the payment of disability benefits to vietnam vets for diabetes is based on junk science. 01/05/2026
- "improving nursing homes in america": coverage of recent work on what we can do to improve them. 01/02/2026
- "my ten favorite papers this year": what it says on the tin. some great papers covered though. 12/30/2025
- "should papers report their results?": disambiguating what journals are really for. 12/29/2025
- "an introduction to auctions": how much can we trust the empirical auction literature? 12/01/2025
- "why you can't find a cab in the rain": is it actually true that cab drivers engage in anomalous behavior? 11/29/2025
- "gerrymandering means the end of democracy": with modern computer capabilities, gerrymandering is an existential threat to government of the people. 11/17/2025
- "do morons make prediction markets more accurate?": sketching out a framework for assessing how biased better markets can be. 11/11/2025
- "what have we learned from HANK?": macroeconomists have begun incorporating heterogeneity into models, but how much does it really matter? 11/03/2025
- "are aghion and howitt right about competition and innovation?": the theory is intuitively plausible but the empirical backing is just not there. 10/21/2025
- "how much should we trust synthetic control estimates?": that the lines match does not mean that they are actually a control group. 10/08/2025
- "the end of competition in america?: the case for common ownership threatening future economic growth. 10/06/2025
- "berry-hausman-pakes should win the nobel prize": a clear, readable introduction to empirical industrial organization. 09/22/2025
- "against business schools": economists shouldn't assist in doing things which straightforwardly make the world worse. 09/17/2025
- "imprison younger offenders longer": age at first offense reveals information about the underlying criminality of a person, which should then be used to adjust sentence length. 09/12/2025
- "does industrial policy work?: too much of evidence which people cite in favor of industrial policy does not actually support it. that's a shame, because as i show, there is good evidence for it! 08/19/2025
- "why i support capitalism": and what i think capitalism really. 08/13/2025
- "the work of raj chetty": i just love his papers so much man. 08/04/2025
- "the gains from trade are not the gains from trade": static gains from trade come nowhere close to explaining economic growth -- instead, it is the diffusion of ideas which matters. 07/14/2025
- "the incredible macroeconomic implications of uniform pricing": prices are commonly uniform across a market, even when local demand varies. why does this happen? what are the implications? 07/07/2025
- "what do economists do?": a whirlwind tour of how economists answer questions. 06/30/2025
- "should we take everything from the old to give to the young?": on the difficulties of finding out what our social discount rate should be. 06/19/2025
- "price indices, inflation inequality, and cpi bias": explaining the difficulties associated with measuring real income. 06/12/2025
- "why do the same products have different prices?": explaining why price dispersion exists. 05/29/2025
- "the china shock": did import competition make us worse off? did it make some parts of the country worse off? 05/22/2025
- "what's the matter with india?": the judiciary makes it very hard to hire and fire workers. 05/19/2025
- "should we restrict immigration to increase innovation?": there are conditions under which labor scarcity induces innovation, to the eventual benefit of all. i argue that these conditions are unlikely to be met in the case of immigration, and that we should instead subsidize science directly. 05/06/2025
- "the life's work of paul krugman": a reasonably comprehensive overview of paul krugman's contributions to economic theory. 05/02/2025
- "the life's work of banerjee, duflo and kremer": a synoptic review of the work of my heroes. 04/07/2025
- "why tariffs are never the optimal industrial policy": gains from trade come along many more margins than you might think, and placing tariffs is the worst possible way to subsidize domestic industry. 01/27/2025
- "should effective altruists have kids?": yes. 01/09/2025
- "why does unemployment happen?": differentiating two stories of equilibrium unemployment, and using it to make predictions about the effects of artificial intelligence. 11/17/2025
- "the returns to education": we cannot, in fact, differentiate between signaling and human capital acquisition in our studies of the returns to education.
- "the primacy of reallocation in economic growth": changes in sectoral productivity need not the sectors where technology is changing in a distorted economy
- "what should our counterfactuals be?": making causal claims about long-run effects makes us choose between the unrealistic and the unknowable; explores the economic impact of the railroad
- "you don't experiment enough": on apathy as a profound bias, illustrated with a paper on the london tube
- "the moral duty to marry an immigrant": on what we can do in our fallen world
- "do neighbors matter?": a review of the literature on peer effects in education and elsewhere
- "why do firms choose to be inefficient?": in which nicholas bloom's work first became a loadbearing part of how i think about the world
- "the problem with psychology is that it has no theory": why i am an economist
wikipedia articles i've written