Working paper of perhaps my fav project, w/ @joshbudlender.bsky.social We know min wages can improve efficiency statically by reducing markdowns under monopsony. We show such worker benefits erode as firms' productivity rises, b/c some firms claw back markdowns rather than share benefits.

Josh Budlender@joshbudlender.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🚨New Working Paper!🚨 @ihsaanbassier.bsky.social & I start with simple stylised fact: lower productivity firms pay ~minimum wage, even as productivity increases. What does this mean for rent sharing/passthrough? Employment? Profits? Monopsony model + 🇿🇦 admin data = striking conclusions!

🚨New Working Paper!🚨 @ihsaanbassier.bsky.social & I start with simple stylised fact: lower productivity firms pay ~minimum wage, even as productivity increases. What does this mean for rent sharing/passthrough? Employment? Profits? Monopsony model + 🇿🇦 admin data = striking conclusions!

Join us at UCT for our 2-day December Workshop co-hosted with ERSA, discussing frontier research in applied economics for developing countries! 2 keynotes: Taryn Dinkelman & Joseph Kaboski. 12 presenters from 7 international & 4 local universities, & PhD student panels.

Last day to submit! Get your papers in!

SALDRU@saldru.bsky.social · last yr.

[DEADLINE EXTENSION]: SALDRU-ERSA DECEMBER WORKSHOP We're excited to announce that you still have time to submit your papers to our December Workshop, hosted with Economic Research South Africa! We've extended the submission deadline to 12 September! For more info: econrsa.org/events/the-e...

Really excellent short interview on ABC about the SA Expropriation Act and claims of "white genocide" with Prof. Ruth Hall (@ruthhallplaas.bsky.social), acting director of South Africa's leading agrarian studies research unit, @plaasuwc.bsky.social. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6__b...

Trump administration faces criticism for prioritizing white South African refugees

YouTube video by ABC News

youtube.com

Notable how vast majority of SA knows this Afrikaner ethnic persecution/refugee thing is such obvious bullshit--literally made-up--that it's not even worth engaging with. You can't refute baldfaced fantasy with facts etc. But wonder if it makes reality less clear to rest of world

Spoke with first prospective South African PhD student today who was planning on doing his PhD in the US, but now feels he cannot commit to something so long in such an unpredictable & potentially oppressive environment. There will be more.

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 2y ago

Video of the international student at Tufts being arrested by "federal authorities" in Massachusetts has been released and it's terrifying. They're not even uniformed officers. Just secret police thugs in hoodies and masks. From WCVB: youtu.be/PuFIs7OkzYY

Speaking truth to power. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Does Columbia still merit the name of a university? | Rashid Khalidi

Columbia has long been run more as a business empire than as an educational institution. Now it’s acting like Vichy on the Hudson

theguardian.com

Like, seriously???

Reading this appalling story, I don't see how anyone can in good conscience send their kids to Columbia -- not even as a political statement, but from a basic "will they take care of my kid?" standpoint...

Joshua J. Friedman@joshuajfriedman.com · 2y ago

A 21-year-old Columbia University student who has lived in the United States since she was a child sued President Trump and other high-ranking administration officials on Monday after immigration officials tried to arrest and deport her. Yunseo Chung participated in a Barnard sit-in this month.

📢 SALDRU is proud to host the "South Africa at 30 Years of Democracy" conference at UCT! 🇿🇦🎉 A deep dive into our progress since 1994 & pathways for the future. 📅 Funded by AFD and the EU Commission, supported by the Presidency, Treasury ZA & NPC. #SA30 #Democracy #Research

Hello, Bluesky #EconSky! We're the Southern Africa Labour & Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at UCT, dedicated to challenging inequalities through policy-relevant academic research. We are one of the leading Labour & Development #Economics units on the continent. Explore our work: saldru.uct.ac.za

The Wuhan lab is STILL doing unsafe research that could trigger a pandemic AND getting prestigious pubs as incentive.😫 To fix this for the future, we have to admit we were deliberately misled on the possibility of a lab leak in the past. Horrid but true. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/o...

Steven Salzberg@stevensalzberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

interesting: @zey.bsky.social wrote a piece for the @nytimes that makes several of the same points I just made in Substack. Her piece: nytimes.com/2025/03/16/o... and mine: stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/virologist.... I assume this is just 'great minds think alike' and that she didn't read my piece

"Aligned to" is a way of saying that they have no proof that he provided anything that could be legally construed as material support to Hamas, or showed allegiance to Hamas in any way, but he said some things they decided are vaguely in alignment with Hamas and they're imprisoning him for it.

Chris Geidner@chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 2y ago

DHS cites Trump’s executive orders and then makes the absolutely meaningless statement that “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” as a justification for the arrest.

UPDATE — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now commented on the Trump admin’s detaining & attempted green card revocation of a Columbia Gaza encampment student negotiator: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Prem Thakker ツ@premthakker.bsky.social · 2y ago

NEWS: Last night, the Department of Homeland Security detained a Palestinian who helped lead the Columbia encampment. Agents told him his visa was revoked. He said he had a green card. They were confused—then said that was revoked too. His attorney demanded a warrant. Agents hung up instead.

Chotiner + Will Shoki combo as excellent as one would expect. Seriously, if you’re not a South African and only read one article about the Trump/Musk demands vs the reality of SA today, this is the piece. And an excellent discussion for SAns too! www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Make South Africa Great Again?

How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

newyorker.com

A good piece. This the flipside of Trump's maximalism, based on completely fabricated "facts" -- he actually makes it impossible for countries to comply, even if they wanted to. www.news24.com/fin24/opinio...

Carol Paton | Rush to Washington a fool's errand as Trump sets impossible demands | Business

Trump has set demands that an ANC-led government could not possibly meet. Now is not the time to try to "explain" SA's position, writes Carol Paton.

news24.com

So obvious that it feels absurd to even engage with this, but some statistics re the extreme economic position of white South Africans, in one of the most unequal countries in the world:

Also, as someone who worked a bit with real asylum seekers in the US. If white Afrikaners wanna know real persecution? Go try navigate that dehumanising & punitive system. Even if treated preferentially, that will be far worse discrimination than Afrikaners ever experience in SA.

That Trump executive order re South Africa is absolutely insane. Just straight up deluded racist myth. So unmoored from reality that it would be impossible for SA to “remedy” these accusations even if we were inclined to do so.

The Race and Stratification Working Group at NBER will have its annual meeting on Friday, April 4, 2025! Dania Francis, Vicki Bogan, Ellora Derenoncourt and I are organizing the program. Submit your paper before the December 19, 2024 deadline! conference.nber.org/confsubmit/b...

Submission: Race and Stratification Working Group, Page 1 of 2 - MyNBERNBER: National Bureau of Economic Research

conference.nber.org

Come attend the 2024 SALDRU December Workshop! 12-13 December, School of Economics, U of Cape Town. We've got a great list of speakers, and v pleased the keynote will be Dennis Egger (@eggerdennis.bsky.social) presenting "Slack & Economic Development". All welcome! RSVP: forms.gle/cwdPjw7iEjqa...

More devastating reporting from Kimon on Stilfontein and the workings of these zama zama (illegal mining) operations groundup.org.za/article/trap...

The violent underworld of Stilfontein’s zama zamas

South Africa’s illicit gold trade is lucrative and controlled by gangs

groundup.org.za

Investigation into social grant fraud is a flop SASSA investigation into SRD grant application system fails to answer crucial questions Read groundup.org.za/article/inve... by Nathan Geffen

Investigation into social grant fraud is a flop

SASSA investigation into SRD grant application system fails to answer crucial questions

groundup.org.za

Two postdoc opportunities on industrial policy at Columbia: 1. Center for Political Economy's Firms & Industrial Policy Idea Lab: cwp.submittable.com/submit/30347... Deadine: Dec 2. 2. Initiative for Policy Dialogue: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Official deadline today (11/25)! Please spread word.

Columbia Global - 2025-26 Center for Political Economy Postdoctoral Research Scholar Opportunity

Position Summary  The Columbia Center for Political Economy is seeking full-time Postdoctoral Research Scholars beginning July 1, 2025. Under the direction of the Center’s faculty Co-directors and Ide...

cwp.submittable.com

This is fast becoming the most boring & repetitive “debate” on this platform. So let me offer my two cents too 🤓 Yes, this will place will be incredibly boring if it’s mainly just politically-obsessed US liberals & progressives #onHere But hopefully that makeup will change as X keeps collapsing :)

The Globe and Mail@theglobeandmail.com · 2y ago

Opinion - The problem with Bluesky: It won’t broaden our horizons: In the wake of Donald Trump’s election win, the social-media platform has enjoyed a surge of new users looking for an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. But will it be useful, if it just creates an echo chamber for the left?

Kimon de Greef, Ihsaan Haffejee and Kimberly Mutandiro have been at Stilfontein reporting on the trapped zama zamas. Here Kimon describes the illegal mining situation (Ihsaan's pics mostly) groundup.org.za/article/stil... Here Kimon describes the rescue operation: groundup.org.za/article/scen...

Stilfontein’s dangerous and desperate illegal mining industry

Zama zamas search for gold in a vast and unmapped underground network of tunnels

groundup.org.za

Part 2, more on current situation. Be warned, very grim. Seems to me that cause of immediate crisis is indeed the police blockade. It means 100s of people need to come up in a short window, or starve. But their existing systems can only handle a few people per day. groundup.org.za/article/scen...

Scenes from a zama zama rescue

“They wanted us to go and rescue these guys, but it’s impossible.”

groundup.org.za

Josh Budlender@joshbudlender.bsky.social · 2y ago

Finally, in-depth reporting on what is actually happening in Stilfontein. Excellent piece, providing context & an explanation of what's happening now. First in a series. Not surprising it comes from Kimon de Greef & Ihsaan Haffejee, via @groundupnews.bsky.social groundup.org.za/article/stil...