In case it’s helpful to folks, I have a set of lecture notes available for a grad-level causal inference course here: mattblackwell.github.io/gov2003-f21-si… (with great section notes from the great Sooahn Shin)

Feel free to use any of the material in your courses. Happy to share sources!

Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 109 today.

Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.

🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work.

The modal question I have been asked over the past 30 years when I give field experiment lectures is:
how can I get involved in field experiments? The barriers to entry are sometimes quite high. We need to work to overcome those as a community.

I am proud to announce the

🚨New paper🚨
Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models
Joint w/Sara Fish& Ran Shorrer
LLM use is automating many business decisions. Pricing might be next (or is already).
What if multiple firms decide in good faith to use off-the-shelf-LLMs for pricing? 1/3
#EconTwitter

🚀 **Exploring the Hidden $9 Trillion Resource in Open Source Software**

A great new piece (hbswk.hbs.edu/item/open-sour…) from Working Knowledge by Rachel Layne on Threads as @layniaclayniac details our research (w/ Manuel Hoffmann & Yanuo Zhou) delving into the often underappreciated realm of open source software (OSS),

Why is it customary in some fields to report what statistical software package you used? Math is the same regardless of what software executes it, no?

Man, Khoa's absolutely right. I experienced this firsthand in 2015 when 6 (!) microcredit RCTs came out with null findings, contradicting years of microcredit hype & I had to try to communicate this to journalists. Eventually I learned stories resonate better than p values.👇

Has anyone come across any documents or resources for RAs on how to be a good RA? (Or pre doc). Any good tips?

Asking for a friend! Who is not my RA…

Market power hinders the dissemination of knowledge.

+1% increase in journal price
➡️
-0.83% article’s citations
-1.07% citing author count
with much larger effect for citations from lower-ranked institutions.

Immediate boost to citations when an article becomes free on JSTOR.

Bank policies allowing bank customers to share their financial data from their bank with fintechs lead to more financial innovation and improve outcomes for consumers and SMEs, from Tania Babina 🇺🇸 🇺🇦, Bahaj, Buchak, De Marco, Foulis, Gornall, Mazzola, and Yu nber.org/papers/w32089

In case anyone is interested, here are the slides I shared with our PhD students today about how to do research. raw.githack.com/tyleransom/sli…

Social scientists need to write papers but we generally aren't taught how to actually do that. Here is how I get papers out the door, in 10 straightforward steps. 1/N

Open source is worth $9 Trillion and 📈

Check out the recent paper by Frank Nagle and Manuel Hoffmann that does this calculation.

or watch my summary:
cc: Hugging Face

Out now - new WP w/ Manuel Hoffmann & Yanuo Zhou. We measure the value open source software contributes to the world's economy w/ data on the most widely used OSS packages at millions of global companies. TLDR: If OSS didn't exist, companies would spend 3.5 times more on software

What is everyone doing for offline LaTeX these days? I mostly use Overleaf but need an offline installation for flights, etc.
I've been using LaTeXTools with Sublime Text for a while but noticed it hasn't been updated in a few years

Happy Holidays #EconTwitter . I just published my Structural Estimation lectures (with text, code, and exercises) from my time @uchicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, and UChicago Computational Social Science MA as section of my new online jupyterbook Executable Books entitled, 'Computational Methods for Economists

🚨 Tips for writing a POSITIVE referee report.

As an author and an editor, I’ve noticed some reviewers are better than others at writing a positive referee report. So, I decided to share 3 simple tips in the thread below. 👇

#EconTwitter

I’ve handled the review of > 1000 papers at @nature. Over time, you notice aspects of presentation on which reviewers tend to comment. In the interests of minimizing hassles during review, I offer the following suggestions (a bit targeted to climate papers).

For another set of resources on the job market, check out our crowdsourced book of advice for PhD students, 'Thriving in Economics: PhD Student Edition'

Tons of fantastic entries on the job market by a diverse set of contributors!

ai4good.org/product/thrivi…

I took a class this quarter that basically only covered one Econometrica paper, and it's been paradigm changing. The paper is Farrell, Liang, and Misra (2021), 'Deep Neural Networks for Estimation and Inference'.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.398…