Honoring Christopher A. Sims, a pioneering macroeconomist and econometrician whose work reshaped the paradigm for empirical macroeconomics. He is one of the few academics to directly impact the work of central banks throughout the world. Read the PNAS Retrospective: https://ow.ly/HPPu50Zv2vb

Revisiting the determination of prices and quantities when markets don’t clear. Without the invisible hand, uncertainty shocks are stagflationary and demand shocks absorb slack, from Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, and Karthik Sastry www.nber.org/papers/w35390

"We analyze consumer surplus when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously." NEW Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper, by Bergemann, Heumann, & Wang: cowles.yale.edu/research/cfd...

Cool news: WE ARE EATING THE EARTH has been short-listed for the Penn Libraries Book Prize in Sustainability. Congrats to the other finalists, they sound great. www.library.upenn.edu/news/sustain...

Penn Libraries Book Prize in Sustainability

This annual award acknowledges outstanding contributions to the global discourse on environmental sustainability, with a specific focus on books that have a substantial impact on the public's understa...

library.upenn.edu

"A growing body of evidence now indicates that corn ethanol may generate emissions comparable to, or even worse than, gasoline once full lifecycle impacts are considered. The EPA ... concluded in 2023 that recent emissions estimates for corn ethanol exceed those of gasoline."

Richard Waite@waiterich.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The US House is scheduled to vote today on a bill to allow year-round sales of E15 (15% ethanol blend in gasoline). Our US program director writes below about why E15 would be bad for American food & fuel consumers, and bad for our environment & climate - and not even very good for working farmers.

(1/n) Holding the coursework constant but changing whether there's a diploma has no effect on wages: www.jstor.org/stable/10.10...

Burning trees for energy is as bad as burning crops for energy. New paper by the protagonist of a recent book!

@timsearchinger.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Many govts hope capturing carbon from power plants burning wood will cause "negative emissions." New Nature Sust. paper today finds this likely increases emissions for decades, generates no negative emissions within 150 years, and increase electricity costs ~3.5-fold. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote about how Trump is making America's terrible biofuel policies even worse - and how most Democrats and environmentalists are too afraid to fight back. @canarymedia.com www.canarymedia.com/articles/foo...

Federal policy on biofuels goes from bad to worse under Trump

The administration’s lavish biofuel subsidies for farmers are bad for consumers and the planet, but the problem goes way beyond his administration.

canarymedia.com

Join us in congratulating Donald Andrews for being recognized as an AEA 2026 Distinguished Fellow! His work has had a lasting influence on many topics in modern econometrics, and has repeatedly changed how econometric problems are understood. economics.yale.edu/news/260410/...

American Economic Association (AEA) Recognizes Donald Andrews as a 2026 Distinguished Fellow

economics.yale.edu

the people who collect data for government statistics like the unemployment rate, the census, etc, have boring, tedious, thankless jobs that they overwhelmingly do with integrity and honesty.

cait (and adonis)@cait.bsky.social · 4mo ago

chart guys love to be like "it's simply what the data shows. where did we get the data? why, from our beloved and trustworthy government and media institutions"

Just recorded a great pod, and I gotta say ... solar and batteries are going to win. They are the main dish. Everything else is a side dish. In 10 years, you won't be able to find anyone who disagrees with this.

Chris is a very smart, conservative economist. I enjoy talking with and learning from him. You can hear him talking about the administration on this @hellerhurwicz.bsky.social podcast open.spotify.com/episode/6eBS...

S3E1: The End of the Free Trade Era: Trump’s Sledgehammer approach to constructing a new economic order

open.spotify.com

Politico says Trump picks Chris Phelan of Univ of Minnesota/Minneapolis Fed to be next chair of Council of Economic Advisers. Is Miran going to nominated to stay at the Fed? www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

Wrote another post based on a video with Markus Brunnermeier Use LLMs to lessen the large fixed costs of managing and organizing large databases. I use the setting of HMDA mortgage data to show how a massive 250m row db can turn into a trivial data exercise thanks to DuckDB + Claude Code.

Large Datasets and Structured Databases: Claude Code for Economists

Video 4 in a series on Claude Code

open.substack.com

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

US refining group says record biofuel quotas may worsen Iran war price spike reut.rs/4c9wbrX

US refining group says record biofuel quotas may worsen Iran war price spike

The Trump administration ordered U.S. refiners ​on Friday to blend a record amount of biofuels into their gasoline and diesel this year and next, a move intended ‌to help farmers but that the refining industry said would only backfire by raising pump prices already spiking due to the war in Iran.

reut.rs

Correct. On the vast majority of the world's land, solar would produce 100x or more the useable energy per hectare vs. bioenergy. Meaning 1 hectare for energy, 99 hectares left over for food. (Also, solar farms don't necessarily need to be put on farmland, but crops do.)

Zelnut 🍉𓅨@dahliaiterations.com · 5mo ago

"No solar farms on prime farmland"? My dude, you are growing fuel corn. A single field of solar replaces several fields of fuel corn which means THERE WILL BE MORE PRIME FARMLAND to use for FOOD.

🧵A thread on "AI one-shot papers". This has not been a focus on Bluesky, but on Twitter/X and LinkedIn, there has been a large discussion of the ability to "one-shot" policy evaluation, which David Yanagizawa-Drott has been pursuing in an interesting way: ape.socialcatalystlab.org

These are the words I gave over at a recent Iftar gathering for Ramadan. I'm very grateful to our Muslim neighbors for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to connect and to be together with them at this significant time.

Chris Sims, brilliant macroeconomic empiricist, has died. His Nobel acceptance speech: www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018....

New paper out with Amanda Starc on competition in health insurance markets, in particular on the complicated ways in which asymmetric information and competition interact (spoiler: things aren’t going so well). www.nber.org/papers/w34928

Competition in Health Insurance Markets

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

nber.org

👋We’re the Health Care Affordability Lab at @yale.edu — a new initiative that pairs rigorous academic scholarship with strategic policy engagement to curb rising health care spending at every level of government. Read more: www.healthcareaffordabilitylab.org/commentary-p...

Long 🧵 tl;dr: - Global ag commodity markets are integrated - Biofuel policies raise ag commodity prices, causing ag to expand - This leads to land-use change emissions - We need to get off fossil fuels ASAP! But beware “solutions” that just swap fossil emissions for even higher land emissions

Richard Waite@waiterich.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Now that everyone’s paying attention to global energy markets and effects of faraway events on prices and decision-making, is it a good time to talk about the indirect land use effects of dedicating cropland to biofuel production or nah?

The global oil market is integrated. Changes to supply or demand in one place cause price effects that ripple around the 🌎. But did you know this is true for non-branded bulk food products like grains & vegetable oils? Below are export prices of maize (corn) from the US, the EU, & the Black Sea.

Care about Americans, employment, earnings, consumer prices, your local or our national economy? @usbls.bsky.social empowers us to better recognize these & make decisions. Consider signing onto Friends of BLS's new letter to Congress re its budget. And spread the word.

Congratulations to Charles Manski on winning the BBVA Frontiers Award for his foundational contributions to partial identification, semiparametric methods, subjective expectations, social interactions and policy decision-making under uncertainty www.premiosfronterasdelconocimiento.es/noticias/xvi...

XVIII Premio Fronteras del Conocimiento en Economía a Charles Manski

por incorporar la incertidumbre en la investigación económica y su aplicación al análisis de las políticas públicas

premiosfronterasdelconocimiento.es

Re: Slater’s departure from ATR. Look at this Ticketmaster stock chart

Person who was fired here - you should still trust BLS data. The agency is being run by the same dedicated career staff who were running it while I was awaiting confirmation from the Senate. And the staff have made it clear that they are blowing a loud whistle if there is interference.

My co-author Charles Hodgson (Yale) is hiring a full-time pre-doc to work on projects focusing on the role of information externalities. The hired researcher will meet regularly with faculty and receive dedicated research training & career development skills. Application👇

“Higher caffeinated coffee intake was associated with more favorable cognitive outcomes. " #econsky #academicsky #medicine marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/02/befo...