Ended 2025 with a Q&A interview saying I'd like to meet Janet Yellen Started 2026 by meeting Janet Yellen

It’s that time! 🎉 CSWEP’s CeMENT workshops for women & nonbinary junior faculty are back July 29–31 at the Chicago Fed. A fantastic three days of mentoring, feedback, panels, and community. 📝 Apply by Feb 1, 2026 👩‍🏫 Mentors needed too! Details: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co...

My personal highlights from the ASSA meetings: open.substack.com/pub/dismalsc...

Highlights from the 2026 ASSA meetings

These were some of my favorite sessions and events from the ASSA meetings this weekend.

open.substack.com

This is a fascinating paper. It's the first (afaik) to actually document food&drink&retail scheduling unpredictability using actual firm data. It illustrates v clearly why unpredictable scheduling makes these jobs so difficult:

Robert Metcalfe@rmetcalfe.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Check out Hannah awesome JMP on job schedule unpredictability and how minimum wage policy affects such unpredictability: hannahfarkas.github.io/files/The_Ec...

Posted a short blog post with updated data (and public repo with data) of current state of Econ job market: paulgp.com/2025/10/08/j...

Society of Labor Economists (SoLE) Annual Conference will be May 1-2, 2026 in Denver, Colorado. Submission portal is now open! Deadline for submissions is October 31--don't forget to submit! It will be a great conference! (organized by me and @jrothst.bsky.social) mailchi.mp/sole-jole/so...

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

🚀 I made a tracker that shows when the Census Bureau adds or removes datasets from their APIs. Dashboard at www.hrecht.com/census-api-d... and follow @censusapitracker.bsky.social for major updates. I've been wanting to build this for years but now seemed an especially important time to keep track.

Tracking Census Dataset Changes

See when the U.S. Census Bureau adds or removes datasets.

hrecht.com

Academics responding to referee reports

TLDR: AI caused a lot more job posts, but no more jobs! While the intervention did save employers time, the welfare loss to jobseekers from time wasted on applications is 6x the size of the welfare gain to employers. Suggests widespread use of LLMs can harm market efficiency.

🚨 New paper alert, with @johnjhorton.bsky.social! Using an experiment run on a large online labor market, we provide evidence that providing employers access to an AI-written first draft of a job post harms the efficiency of the market. emmawiles.github.io/storage/jobo...

Is AI liberating human programmers—or programming them right out of their jobs? At @wired.com we kept hearing conflicting accounts, so we surveyed 730 coders and developers at every career stage about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job: www.wired.com/story/how-so...

How Software Engineers Actually Use AI

We surveyed 730 coders and developers about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job. The results amazed and disturbed us.

wired.com

Important paper on the home insurance market. Authors use novel data on 15 million insurance policies + document many new descriptive facts. For instance, "the average person’s homeowners insurance [costs] 17% of their monthly principal and interest payment." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The Deportation Data Project collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets. A public good provided by academics and lawyers at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia.

TIL "property tax revenues adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US." And this revenue smoothing is not symmetric: "municipalities are significantly more likely to reassess in up markets as opposed to down." H/t @nber.org WP by Chen & Cohen: www.nber.org/papers/w33238

🚨🚨 What happens when you take a bunch of human capital out of a local economy? Is brain drain a real thing? And what are the consequences? In a new paper, we shed light on this in the context of highly developed economies: Sweden and Norway. #Econsky

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

Grateful for small joys these days, like a little more sunlight every day. Fun little map I made last week 📊

Axios@axios.com · last yr.

Parts of the U.S. will gain three hours or more of daylight between Thursday's spring equinox and the summer solstice on June 20, per NOAA's solar calculator.

NEW PAPER: "Examining the role of training data for supervised methods of automated record linkage: Lessons for best practice in economic history" with Jonas Helgertz and Joe Price now forthcoming (and nicely proofed) at Explorations in Economic History 🧵 authors.elsevier.com/c/1kiv03I~dW...

Hey #econsky! FYI: our @oiginstitute.bsky.social annual research conference is Nov 13-14, 2025! - Nov 13 is the main conference day ft. keynote by David Card - Nov 14 is a workshop day for early career researchers Learn more + submit here (deadline: 4/11): www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/co...

Call for Papers | Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute

minneapolisfed.org

I just found out that @epi.org has updated and modernized its invaluable archive of State of Working America data and tabulations. Check it out! data.epi.org HT: @benzipperer.org

Topics - EPI Library

The EPI Data Library offers comprehensive, up-to-date labor data from Economic Policy Institute analysis, covering wages, inequality, and economic trends across demographics.

data.epi.org

Happy to share that @annabindler.bsky.social & I will organize the 16th #TWEC Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime in Berlin. Save the date: 26-27 September 2025. CfP follows next month #econsky

Based on feedback from past participants, potential applicants, and mentors, the CeMENT workshop will now be held June 30 - July 2, 2025, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. To apply, go to: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co... Deadline to apply is March 15.

📣 Submit your crime paper by Feb 14. 🔸 4th Workshop on the Economics of Crime for Junior Scholars 🔸 29-30 May, 2025 🔸 Quattrone Center, UPenn 🔸 Keynote: @amandayagan.bsky.social 🔹 Send your paper to: WEC.Jr.Econ@gmail.com @emmarackstraw.bsky.social

2/ If you combine most Americans not reading much and a few reading a lot, you've got some Power Law nonsense developing! The 4% of adults who read 50 or more books did at least 28% of ~all the country's reading~ — more than the bottom 80% combined. The top 20% read 75% of all books.

At the end of the year, I ran a poll for @today.yougov.com asking people how many books they read in 2024. The answer is not many! The median American read ~2 books~ last year; 38% of Americans didn't read ANY. But... 1/

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

Students at Brown have used the Google Maps API to create a live tracker for traffic flows under congestion pricing in NYC. It includes a real-time diff-in-diff type comparison between NYC, Boston, and Chicago: www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com

As I am now handling papers at AEJ:Policy again, I want to encourage authors of papers that identify partial equilibrium effects to consider (in a rigorous manner) how they relate to policy effects or general equilibrium effects.

Me (today) revisiting some old code written by me (years ago) @xkcd.com