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Jason Abaluck
@Jabaluck
Professor of Economics at Yale SOM
New Haven, CT
faculty.som.yale.edu/jasonabaluck/
Joined April 2009
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Aug 22, 2022
    I thought I'd try to reconstruct Bryan's discussion with a 13-year-old about the minimum wage based on the below tweet: (@bryan_caplan let me know if anything is inaccurate)
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    Bryan Caplan
    @bryan_caplan
    Aug 17, 2022
    Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage. Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive. It's just emotionally unappealing.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Sep 1, 2021
    With dozens of researchers at Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and IPA and several other organizations, we ran a cluster randomized trial involving almost 350,000 people and 600 villages in Bangladesh to assess the impact of community masking on COVID.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Feb 8, 2025
    The best study I know estimates that each dollar of NIH spending generates $1.40-$2.80 in value counting *only the private return from drugs*, ignoring consumer surplus, med devices, public health, behavioral science, etc...
    479K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Nov 22, 2024
    This is a very common sentiment: people who have never subjected their hypotheses or forecasts to actual testing think that anything that seems plausible to them is completely obvious and couldn't be otherwise.
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    Tyler Austin Harper
    @Tyler_A_Harper
    Nov 22, 2024
    This is a perfect example of why so much social science is nonsense. You don’t need a study for this. Just ask anyone with a passing familiarity with marijuana: “hey do you think legal weed will increase the number of people who play video games and eat snacks all day?” Uh…yes?
    312K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Aug 24, 2024
    This is one of the more interesting articles I have read this year: the former dean of Harvard Medical School had a start-up in the late 1980s based on using GLP1s to treat diabetes and weight loss, but Pfizer stopped funding it despite promising early results. Two lessons:
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    Jeffrey Flier
    @jflier
    Aug 23, 2024
    What if I told you that I co-founded a startup in 1987 that obtained world-wide rights to GLP1 as a metabolic Rx, collaborated with Pfizer to show key activities, & abandoned it in 1990 when Pfizer lost interest? I tell the previously untold tale in an open access paper now up
    842K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    May 12, 2025
    Good news everyone! The unpopular and seemingly irrelevant lecture I give in my health econ class on "Most favored nations agreements" just became prophetically relevant. Bad news everyone! This is a terrible policy. 🧵
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    Rota
    @pli_cachete
    May 11, 2025
    Can someone tell me what opinion to have on this
    953K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Dec 10, 2024
    A book review of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This is probably the first book review you will read that has absolutely no spoilers and that you will appreciate equally whether you have read the book or not (at least if you read to the end).
    463K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    May 26, 2022
    My preferred policy solution to gun violence is to hold gun purchasers liable if the gun they purchase is ever used in a crime, then to require gun owners who can't otherwise demonstrate a capacity to pay to purchase insurance.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Dec 22, 2024
    I suspect we are about to enter an interim period where AI exceeds human performance on many cognitive tasks, but this is not common knowledge, and so most people and institutions act like this is not generally the case.
    191K
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Dec 10, 2024
    Replying to @Jabaluck
    Anyway, this is the story of how I was tricked into reading 1/3 of Ulysses when I bought Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow on Kindle, but they instead sent me Ulysses with the *wrong title page* and *Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow* plastered at the top of every single page.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Sep 1, 2021
    Replying to @Jabaluck
    The reduction was larger in villages where we (randomly) used surgical masks than those where we used cloth masks; in surgical mask villages, we saw a 12% reduction in COVID overall and a 35% reduction among those aged 60+.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Sep 1, 2021
    Replying to @Jabaluck
    With this 29 percentage point increase in mask-wearing, we saw a 9% drop in serologically confirmed COVID.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Sep 1, 2021
    Replying to @Jabaluck
    Since severe morbidity and mortality are concentrated among the elderly, this suggests that community-wide masking can be an extremely effective tool to combat COVID.
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    Jason Abaluck
    @Jabaluck
    Sep 1, 2021
    Replying to @Jabaluck
    If going from 13/100 to 42/100 people wearing masks leads to reductions of the magnitudes above, near universal mask-wearing (as is possible with enforced mandates in some areas) might lead to substantially larger reductions.