Check out the video of Stéphane Bonhomme's brilliant Sargan Lecture on feedback and heterogeneity in panel data at the 2025 RES Annual Conference in Birmingham #RES2025 @resmedia.bsky.social #EctJ In Stéphane's words, let's get "Back to Feedback"! res.org.uk/videos/res20...

#RES2025: Sargan Lecture (Prof Stephane Bonhomme) - Royal Economic Society

View the Royal Economic Society 2025 Annual Conference Sargan Lecture 'Dynamic Feedback in Panel Data' with Prof Stephane Bonhomme.

res.org.uk

"STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission" - A network-based-diffusion-analysis (NBDA) implemented in cmdstan it seems. Looks like it interoperates with my STRAND package for latent network inference. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

STbayes: An R package for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission

A critical consequence of joining social groups is the possibility of social transmission of information from conspecifics related to novel behaviours or resources. Mathematical models of spreading ha...

biorxiv.org

This looks amazing

A dataset with political datasets #3

estimated reading time: 1 min A few years ago I wrote a post about the updates I had made to my dataset with political datasets. Back then, there were more than 500 datasets in the dataset. Today, there are more than 600 datasets. Here is an overview of the categories within the datasets. We still see that a lot of the datasets are related to international relations (e.g., data on conflict and democracy), followed by survey data on public opinion (i.e., the political attitudes and behaviours of citizens). In general, there is a lot of variation in the type of data, topics, time periods and regions covered (though there is still a bias towards more recent data from Western countries). Since my previous post a few years ago, I have made some additions to the repository beyond adding more datasets. First, I have added links to a series of Harvard Dataverses related to political science journals. As I mentioned in a blog post five years ago, several journals have their own dataverse where they archive datasets well in advance of the actual publication of papers. This is a good resource for finding (new) data. Second, I have added links to a series of R packages that either include political data directly or provide an API to access data in R. These packages might especially be relevant for teaching purposes to get students to work with real-life political data in R without requiring users to download and import the data. Third, I have added more license-specific information, both to the repository itself and for the datasets in the overview. For the repository license, I have added a CC0 1.0 Universal license, meaning you can use the repository for almost any purpose (commercial or private). For the individual datasets, there is now a column providing information on the license of the dataset. This is still being updated so not a lot of datasets are covered yet. As always, feel free to suggest edits to the repository (either in the form of issues or pull requests), especially if you are aware of political datasets not currently included in the overview. You can find the repository here.

erikgahner.dk

🧵New survey paper: "Inference with Few Treated Units" Luis Alvarez, Bruno Ferman and Kaspar Wüthrich Tired of referees saying your standard errors are wrong? This survey will help you understand if you really have a problem — and, if so, how to fix it!

The free speech website where the owner (who believes in free speech) will throttle your access if you criticize him - even if you support all the far-right conspiracy theories and bigotry he supports. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed. (Gift Article)

Three users who disagreed with the site’s owner saw views for their posts plummet.

nytimes.com

He paid 44 billion to turn it into his personal megaphone. Stop participating in it right now!

Waleed Shahid@waleedshahid.bsky.social · last yr.

The top 25 political and news accounts on X in the past 30 days.

I am a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier today, the president attempted to illegally fire me. This is corruption, plain and simple. I will see the president in court. My full statement:

NEW PAPER w. Christian Gillitzer, Peer Skov, @jakobsogaard.bsky.social! We develop a new method to estimate the marginal propensity to consume (MPC). In contrast to most earlier studies, we don't rely on (rare) quasi-experiments. The idea is simple... 1/3 #econsky www.iza.org/publications...

link 📈🤖 Welfare Effects of Self-Preferencing by a Platform: Empirical Evidence from Airbnb (Hanazawa) This paper studies the welfare effects of self-preferencing by Airbnb, a practice where Airbnb utilizes its pricing algorithm to prioritize maximizing platform-wide commission revenue rather than

Conversation reminded me of this absolutely astounding book by Ed Leamer. www.google.com/books/editio... *Economic theory is fiction, and data analysis is journalism*

The Craft of Economics

A review of the Heckscher–Ohlin framework prompts a noted economist to consider the methodology of economics.In this spirited and provocative book, Edward Leamer turns an examination of the Heckscher–...

google.com

link 📈🤖 A Supervised Screening and Regularized Factor-Based Method for Time Series Forecasting (Tu, Gao) Factor-based forecasting using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an effective machine learning tool for dimension reduction with many applications in statistics, economics, and finance. Th

The Freedom of Information Act is an essential pillar of transparency and democratic accountability for the US government. Eliminating the capacity to comply with laws in general, and FOIA specifically, is a ticking grenade under our democracy.

This is where we are now: An elementary school at Fort Campbell has removed all books from its library that so much as *allude* to slavery or the civil rights movement. The wholesale erasure of history in real time.

Books mentioning slavery, civil rights removed from shelves at Fort Campbell schools - ClarksvilleNow.com

At an elementary school at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division, librarians are hard at work scrubbing the shelves for books that contain references to slavery, the civil rights movement...

clarksvillenow.com

Rdatasets is a collection of 2300 free and documented datasets in CSV format. It's a great resource for teaching and exploration! The new `get_dataset()` function from the {marginaleffects} 📦 allows you to search and load them directly in #Rstats. vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/ar...

What I should read published recently along these lines?(Bonus if it uses examples I could know something about...)

This paper gives a powerful generalization of event study models to allow an arbitrary number of events, each with a treatment dose of any sign or magnitude. #econsky 1/

New from 5 former Treasury Secretaries: “We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/o...

Opinion | Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, Janet Yellen: DOGE Is a Threat to U.S. Democracy. (Gift Article)

Former Secretaries Rubin, Summers, Geithner, Lew and Yellen argue that DOGE is a threat to America.

nytimes.com

🚨 New Research: The American Dream is Dying in Big Cities Cities used to be ladders of opportunity for their residents. Not anymore. Our new paper shows smaller cities & towns now outperform major metros for kids born into poverty. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... 1/8

This is really powerful! It's like FRED but built up in many cases from on-demand computation from micro-data. For instance, making this before today would require accessing the CPS microdata and coding up the summary yourself.

Hilary Wething@hilwething.bsky.social · 2y ago

DATA RELEASE WHEN DATA FEELS SCARCE! Check out data.epi.org -a data repository with 78,000+ series on topics like employment, wages, poverty, and inequality. You can get many measures by gender, race and state! I've been working with our @epi.org team to build this and am so proud of the result

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

TikTok boosted Republican messaging during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Race. Republican-seeded accounts received 11.8% more party-aligned recommendations. Democratic-seeded accounts were exposed to 7.5% more opposite-party recommendations. arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17831

Just had our data access rescinded for a projected using federal microdata to study and reduce disparate impact in housing markets.

The LA wildfires have given landlords an opportunity to raise rents. California has anti-price-gouging regulation that might prevent that. If you want to step beyond Econ 101, here’s a recent Econometrica paper that shows how price caps can raise welfare. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3...

Econometrica | Econometric Society Journal | Wiley Online Library

Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechani...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

I have been trying to get more familiar with the basics and advances Reinforcement Learning. I wonder if anyone have seen a paperthat use potential outcome notation within the RL world. This would make the life of many economists much easier. Anyone? All help is appreciated!

Where's the best place to start with Spinoza? Books, resources, online courses... Particularly interested in his ideas about mind/body/affect/theory of mind. Tagging the wonderful for help 😍 @helendecruz.net @thebeatphilosopher.com

We use a new machine learning technique to identify the most cost-effective policies to boost immunization demand in India. We evaluated 75 combos of reminders, incentives, and local community ambassadors. The most effective increased immunization by 44%. https://buff.ly/4j0v3IF

Week 1: This year, I'll (try my best to) summarize & bring to attention one cool economic theory paper a week (so hopefully 52 in total). First up is one of my all time favorites: Bargaining and Reputation by Dilip Abreu and Faruk Gul. It is theoretical elegance, personified.

Give people housing and they'll have kids! Obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20 to 25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%.

The Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset (with @nedregardoda.bsky.social and Henning Øien) --> 1 million speeches 1945-2024 --> Just out at Nature: Scientific Data --> Part of Politics and elections data collection rdcu.be/d5pC4 www.nature.com/collections/... (collection still open for subm.)

The Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset

Scientific Data - The Norwegian Parliamentary Debates Dataset

rdcu.be