🚨Understanding Migration Responses to Local Shocks New version of paper with @borusyak and Brian Kovak! 1/6 Many papers find that local labor demand shocks have sizable effects on wages and employment, but surprisingly small or imprecise effects on local population.

if you were thinking of applying to phd programs for math/tcs soon you may want to consider econ instead econ theory has a healthy culture towards valuing new questions, balancing application with elegance, and is well positioned for relevance in "doing math when math is solved"

Ok, this is in progress! Here's a preview (Top-5 pubs from the last ten years with a simple TWFE specification + replication data; matched samples between TWFE, Callaway-Sant'Anna, and Borusyak-Jaravel-Spiess) with thanks to Astra, Kevin Chen, & Jon Roth

5/ However, linking WTO membership to carbon pricing commitments is complicated. Carbon pricing creates distributive externalities that disrupt the terms of trade. So, adding carbon pricing disrupts the delicate balance of trade concessions under the WTO. And the direction of these externalities depends on how carbon is taxed. – With a demand-side tax, levied where fuel is burned, the balance is shifted against energy exporters like Saudi Arabia and Russia. – With a supply-side tax, levied where fuel is extracted, the direction flips: Saudi Arabia and Russia gain, while countries that rely more heavily on energy imports, like Japan, Korea and India, lose.

We empirical economists lived through a roughly 20-year period where the amount of data grew faster than the amount of intelligence available to process the data. We made careers out of the rather trivial activity of taking publicly accessible data and just finding insights in it

3/ How much does WTO-enabled trade add to global emissions? The countries that gain most from WTO membership are the same ones whose emissions rise most because of it. That's the leverage the WTO can use to cut emissions.

A critical tension in global governance is that trade agreements raise CO2 emissions, and pricing those emissions would disrupt the balance of concessions the agreements are built on. But trade agreements also offer an opportunity. Leaving the WTO is costly; leaving the Paris Agreement is not. That gives trade agreements leverage that climate agreements always lacked. Our new NBER paper asks whether the WTO can use that leverage to sustain a carbon price. We show that it can: with simple amendments to its rules, the WTO could cut global emissions in half. 🧵Thread 1/

What if the jagged frontier is mainly math + code (which you can push arbitrarily far with RLVR), and everything else starts to plateau because it is still bottlenecked by human generated data? Model performance in non-verifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code. But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G (itself driven by RLVR), or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training (which is still continually happening on a massive scale)? A lot of things depend on the answer to this question

5/ However, linking WTO membership to carbon pricing commitments is complicated. Carbon pricing creates distributive externalities that disrupt the terms of trade. So, adding carbon pricing disrupts the delicate balance of trade concessions under the WTO. And the direction of these externalities depends on how carbon is taxed. – With a demand-side tax, levied where fuel is burned, the balance is shifted against energy exporters like Saudi Arabia and Russia. – With a supply-side tax, levied where fuel is extracted, the direction flips: Saudi Arabia and Russia gain, while countries that rely more heavily on energy imports, like Japan, Korea and India, lose.

3/ How much does WTO-enabled trade add to global emissions? The countries that gain most from WTO membership are the same ones whose emissions rise most because of it. That's the leverage the WTO can use to cut emissions.

A critical tension in global governance is that trade agreements raise CO2 emissions, and pricing those emissions would disrupt the balance of concessions the agreements are built on. But trade agreements also offer an opportunity. Leaving the WTO is costly; leaving the Paris Agreement is not. That gives trade agreements leverage that climate agreements always lacked. Our new NBER paper asks whether the WTO can use that leverage to sustain a carbon price. We show that it can: with simple amendments to its rules, the WTO could cut global emissions in half. 🧵Thread 1/

Economics is the *only* scientific field in which the concentration of institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers (i.e., more winners at top universities) has increased over time.

It's worth separating two issues in the *China Shock* debate. Autor-Dorn-Hanson was a positive development for academic research. It paved the way for a lot of interesting work on trade and inequality. Several follow-up studies estimate similar distributional effects using different data and methods (see Rafael's thoughtful thread on this). Outside academia, however, the results were widely misinterpreted. Many used them to push protectionist agendas and to argue that trade with China was a net negative for the US economy, which the results never supported. This kind of misinterpretation will keep happening until we adopt stricter guardrails on how to present cross-sectional estimates. As @ben_moll and @oliverhanney's Vox article argues, the practice of making aggregate claims from cross-sectional estimates is pervasive but generally invalid, because of the *missing intercept* problem.