This QJE paper is fantastic. The type of big economic history work I wish there was more of. I'm teaching it tomorrow, which will be fun. I think it shows the fundamental power of careful, long-run historical data work. With the power to inform current policy debates.

I wrote a Stata command that plots distributions of variables after absorbing variance from fixed effects (or controls variables). Here are examples. Read this thread for an introduction & motivation. github.com/leojahrens/fed…

🚀JMP alert🚀 My paper w Joel Ferguson applies machine learning to 1970s-80s satellite imagery to revisit one of the 🇨🇳 Chinese Miracle's first major reforms, the Household Responsibility System—the end of collective socialist agriculture. What we found was quite surprising. 🧵

RIP Jonathan Eaton. He leaves behind an impressive legacy that transcends beyond the trade literature. A thread to honor his immense contributions: 🧵

Thanks tylercowen for the MR shoutout for my new Substack, Global Developments. First post, on public housing, here: global-developments.org/p/leasing-like… Posts in the pipeline: - Europe vs. America: Beyond GDP (Neoclassical edition) - The Myth of Deng Xiaoping - How Asia Works, 10 years on

Industrial policy can work, but only under the right circumstances. Taiwan’s industrial planners explicitly chose a niche that built on their existing strengths in manufacturing. The US CHIPS Act does not, explain Chang-Tai Hsieh, et al. bit.ly/48pAvhO

This semester I've been teaching "Economic Inequality and Growth" at UC Berkeley. This is a thread with some of my favorite graphs. First, the headline everyone's-seen-it graph: falling then rising income inequality in Anglophone countries.

Apologies, this one is a little dark. 1/

"Tariff engineering" is when a company tweaks a product to get a lower tariff rate. The Subaru BRAT of the 1980s got around the 25% "chicken tax" on US truck imports by adding jump seats in the back to qualify as passenger cars. Some more examples: 1/

My econ history paper gets published! Historically, land were hardly traded directly; instead, they can be redeemed in the future. We collect >4000 contracts from Qing Taiwan to test why ppl hesitate to sell their land--the answer turns out to be weak state problem! (1/n)

Today we released the first papers from OpenResearch's Unconditional income Study, which gave 1k ppl $1k/mo for 3 yrs & had a N=2k control group This 🧵 is for RCT nerds: how did we measure the cash's fx? Learn about 96% response rates, blood draws, changing a state law & more..

A timely and inspiring read from James Scott's "Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast," published last year. RIP. annualreviews.org/content/journa…

What happened to U.S. Manufacturing? Here are some highlights from the essay I wrote for the American Worker Project that backup my comment in the quote below 1/

Can you name these path-breaking economists who changed the trade & development consensus in the 1960s & 1970s?

Jonathan Eaton was an exceptional scholar and a wonderful mentor. Cecilia Fieler and I wrote an intellectual obituary describing his academic work and legacy that was just posted on VoxEU. cepr.org/voxeu/columns/…

The gains from agglomeration are believed to be highly localized. New research shows that large industrial plant openings not only raise the productivity of local incumbent plants but also of distant plants hundreds of miles away econometricsociety.org/publications/e…

thomas chaney and I updated our working paper on "Trade and the End of Antiquity" (which recently got some airtime here). A short re-cap: 1/n

🚨New WP Alert🚨 Jen-Kuan Wang and I analyze Taiwan's 1950s land reform, long seen as central to its economic takeoff—and to the East Asian Miracle. By digitizing archival data, we bring new causal evidence to the table. What we find is surprising! oliverwkim.com/papers/KimWang…

I've read through Oliver Kim and Jen-Kuan Wang's paper. In short, this empirical study is groundbreaking. It provides evidence for what some historians have been arguing: Taiwan's land reform success has been exaggerated and turned into a miracle narrative. Thread (1/15)

I am pleased to see VP candidate JD Vance is engaging with our research. A thread below offering comments and implications for Trump’s tariff proposals.