iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Ended 2025 with a Q&A interview saying I'd like to meet Janet Yellen Started 2026 by meeting Janet Yellen

Hillary Stein, Janet Yellen, Alex Albright at ASSAs in Philadelphia

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CSWEP @aeacswep.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

It’s that time! 🎉 CSWEP’s CeMENT workshops for women & nonbinary junior faculty are back July 29–31 at the Chicago Fed. A fantastic three days of mentoring, feedback, panels, and community. 📝 Apply by Feb 1, 2026 👩‍🏫 Mentors needed too! Details: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co...

aeaweb.org

CeMENT: Mentoring for Junior Faculty

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Anna Stansbury @annastansbury.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

This is a fascinating paper. It's the first (afaik) to actually document food&drink&retail scheduling unpredictability using actual firm data. It illustrates v clearly why unpredictable scheduling makes these jobs so difficult:

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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 08/10/2025

Posted a short blog post with updated data (and public repo with data) of current state of Econ job market: paulgp.com/2025/10/08/j...

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Sandy Black @econsandy.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Society of Labor Economists (SoLE) Annual Conference will be May 1-2, 2026 in Denver, Colorado. Submission portal is now open! Deadline for submissions is October 31--don't forget to submit! It will be a great conference! (organized by me and @jrothst.bsky.social) mailchi.mp/sole-jole/so...

mailchi.mp

SOLE 2026 Submissions Open

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/08/2025

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients into Clear Quantities

Abstract
Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear models, but is more challenging for more complex models with, for example, categorical variables, interactions, non-linearities, and hierarchical structures. Here, we introduce an alternative approach to making sense of statistical models. The central idea is to abstract away from the mechanics of estimation, and to treat models as “counterfactual prediction machines,” which are subsequently queried to estimate quantities and conduct tests that matter substantively. This workflow is model-agnostic; it can be applied in a consistent fashion to draw causal or descriptive inference from a wide range of models. We illustrate how to implement this workflow with the marginaleffects package, which supports over 100 different classes of models in R and Python, and present two worked examples. These examples show how the workflow can be applied across designs (e.g., observational study, randomized experiment) to answer different research questions (e.g., associations, causal effects, effect heterogeneity) while facing various challenges (e.g., controlling for confounders in a flexible manner, modelling ordinal outcomes, and interpreting non-linear models).

Figure illustrating model predictions. On the X-axis the predictor, annual gross income in Euro. On the Y-axis the outcome, predicted life satisfaction. A solid line marks the curve of predictions on which individual data points are marked as model-implied outcomes at incomes of interest. Comparing two such predictions gives us a comparison. We can also fit a tangent to the line of predictions, which illustrates the slope at any given point of the curve.

A figure illustrating various ways to include age as a predictor in a model. On the x-axis age (predictor), on the y-axis the outcome (model-implied importance of friends, including confidence intervals).

Illustrated are
1. age as a categorical predictor, resultings in the predictions bouncing around a lot with wide confidence intervals
2. age as a linear predictor, which forces a straight line through the data points that has a very tight confidence band and
3. age splines, which lies somewhere in between as it smoothly follows the data but has more uncertainty than the straight line.

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Hannah Recht @hannahrecht.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

🚀 I made a tracker that shows when the Census Bureau adds or removes datasets from their APIs. Dashboard at www.hrecht.com/census-api-d... and follow @censusapitracker.bsky.social for major updates. I've been wanting to build this for years but now seemed an especially important time to keep track.

hrecht.com

Tracking Census Dataset Changes

See when the U.S. Census Bureau adds or removes datasets.

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Academics responding to referee reports

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Emma Wiles @emmawiles.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

TLDR: AI caused a lot more job posts, but no more jobs! While the intervention did save employers time, the welfare loss to jobseekers from time wasted on applications is 6x the size of the welfare gain to employers. Suggests widespread use of LLMs can harm market efficiency.

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Emma Wiles @emmawiles.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

🚨 New paper alert, with @johnjhorton.bsky.social! Using an experiment run on a large online labor market, we provide evidence that providing employers access to an AI-written first draft of a job post harms the efficiency of the market. emmawiles.github.io/storage/jobo...

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Katie Drummond @katie-drummond.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Is AI liberating human programmers—or programming them right out of their jobs? At @wired.com we kept hearing conflicting accounts, so we surveyed 730 coders and developers at every career stage about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job: www.wired.com/story/how-so...

wired.com

How Software Engineers Actually Use AI

We surveyed 730 coders and developers about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job. The results amazed and disturbed us.

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Important paper on the home insurance market. Authors use novel data on 15 million insurance policies + document many new descriptive facts. For instance, "the average person’s homeowners insurance [costs] 17% of their monthly principal and interest payment." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This paper leverages novel data on 15 million home insurance policies to understand how credit scores and natural disaster risks affect the price of home insurance. We find that individuals with subprime credit pay 30% more for home insurance than individuals with super-prime credit. These differences are not explained by property or contract-level characteristics, and likely reflect how insurers use credit score to price anticipated future claim filing behavior. Leveraging a house-level match with a proprietary disaster risk model, we find that the passthrough of expected annual disaster losses is close to one on average, higher than one for individuals with lower credit scores, and below one in high insurance-regulation states like California. We show that despite a passthrough rate for disaster risk close to one, disaster risks account for less than a quarter of premiums on average, and around a third in high-risk states like Florida and Louisiana. These findings reveal that at the policy-level, the disaster risk component of insurance prices is on average smaller than the discount given to people with high credit scores. Insurance prices often depend more on who lives in a home than on the disaster risk a home is exposed to

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Claire Adida @claireadida.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

The Deportation Data Project collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets. A public good provided by academics and lawyers at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia.

deportationdata.org

Deportation Data Project

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

TIL "property tax revenues adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US." And this revenue smoothing is not symmetric: "municipalities are significantly more likely to reassess in up markets as opposed to down." H/t @nber.org WP by Chen & Cohen: www.nber.org/papers/w33238

image shows abstract of the nber working paper. here's the abstract: "Property tax revenues – the largest discretionary source of revenue for local governments - adjust at a pace that is inconsistent with property values in the US. We show that this form of revenue smoothing may be rooted in the political economy of municipalities. Measures of local budget stressors are positively related to upward assessments of a property’s value. Moreover, municipalities are significantly more likely to reassess in up markets as opposed to down – consistent with maximizing tax base and revenue collected. Using micro-level evidence from justpassing school referenda in Illinois, these shocks to municipal liabilities lead to significant increases in property assessments without any associated increases in market values or transactions. Passing a referendum over the prior 3 years increases the probability that a house is reassessed upward by 23%. This flexible form of revenue smoothing creates avenues for personal rent extraction. We find that local tax assessors: 1) have tax assessments on their own properties significantly lower than neighboring properties; and 2) these tax assessments grow significantly slower than neighbors – lowering their tax bills. We further document a significant connection between the underassessment of tax assessors’ own properties and the tax-maximizing assessment gaps documented in the districts they operate."

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Sam Dodini @microsamonomics.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

🚨🚨 What happens when you take a bunch of human capital out of a local economy? Is brain drain a real thing? And what are the consequences? In a new paper, we shed light on this in the context of highly developed economies: Sweden and Norway. #Econsky

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

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Jacque Schrag @jacqueschrag.com · 18/03/2025

Grateful for small joys these days, like a little more sunlight every day. Fun little map I made last week 📊

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James Feigenbaum @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

NEW PAPER: "Examining the role of training data for supervised methods of automated record linkage: Lessons for best practice in economic history" with Jonas Helgertz and Joe Price now forthcoming (and nicely proofed) at Explorations in Economic History 🧵 authors.elsevier.com/c/1kiv03I~dW...

authors.elsevier.com

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Hey #econsky! FYI: our @oiginstitute.bsky.social annual research conference is Nov 13-14, 2025! - Nov 13 is the main conference day ft. keynote by David Card - Nov 14 is a workshop day for early career researchers Learn more + submit here (deadline: 4/11): www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/co...

minneapolisfed.org

Call for Papers | Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute

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Christian Traxler @chtraxler.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Happy to share that @annabindler.bsky.social & I will organize the 16th #TWEC Transatlantic Workshop on the Economics of Crime in Berlin. Save the date: 26-27 September 2025. CfP follows next month #econsky

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CSWEP @aeacswep.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Based on feedback from past participants, potential applicants, and mentors, the CeMENT workshop will now be held June 30 - July 2, 2025, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. To apply, go to: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co... Deadline to apply is March 15.

aeaweb.org

CeMENT: Mentoring for Junior Faculty

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Aria Golestani @ariagolestani.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

📣 Submit your crime paper by Feb 14. 🔸 4th Workshop on the Economics of Crime for Junior Scholars 🔸 29-30 May, 2025 🔸 Quattrone Center, UPenn 🔸 Keynote: @amandayagan.bsky.social 🔹 Send your paper to: WEC.Jr.Econ@gmail.com @emmarackstraw.bsky.social

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David H. Montgomery @dhmontgomery.com · 21/01/2025

2/ If you combine most Americans not reading much and a few reading a lot, you've got some Power Law nonsense developing! The 4% of adults who read 50 or more books did at least 28% of ~all the country's reading~ — more than the bottom 80% combined. The top 20% read 75% of all books.

A bar/area chart with the title, "20% of American adults do 75% of the country's book reading."

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David H. Montgomery @dhmontgomery.com · 21/01/2025

At the end of the year, I ran a poll for @today.yougov.com asking people how many books they read in 2024. The answer is not many! The median American read ~2 books~ last year; 38% of Americans didn't read ANY. But... 1/

Bar chart with the title "Most Americans didn't read many books last year"

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Ben Golub @bengolub.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

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Cyrus Samii @cdsamii.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Students at Brown have used the Google Maps API to create a live tracker for traffic flows under congestion pricing in NYC. It includes a real-time diff-in-diff type comparison between NYC, Boston, and Chicago: www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com

congestion-pricing-tracker.com

Congestion Pricing Tracker | Benjamin and Joshua Moshes

This project is run by Joshua Moshes and Benjamin Moshes, under the supervision of Brown University Professor Emily Oster

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C. Kirabo Jackson @kirabojackson.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

As I am now handling papers at AEJ:Policy again, I want to encourage authors of papers that identify partial equilibrium effects to consider (in a rigorous manner) how they relate to policy effects or general equilibrium effects.

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Me (today) revisiting some old code written by me (years ago) @xkcd.com

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Updated my blog for the first time since 2023. It had been so long that I needed to read one of my old blog posts to even remember *how* to update it! Thank you, 2018-self for the RStudio + {blogdown} workflow refresher: thelittledataset.com/2018/08/26/l... #rstats #blogdown

thelittledataset.com

Let Me Upgrade You | The Little Dataset

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Marcella Alsan @marcellaalsan.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Excited to share results from a 4-year first-ever RCT across US jails. We (Crystal Yang & I) find that death rates are much higher in jails than officially reported & health care accreditation improves staff coordination, quality & save lives. www.nber.org/papers/w33357

nber.org

The Hidden Health Care Crisis Behind Bars: A Randomized Trial to Accredit U.S. Jails

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...

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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 27/12/2023

Medicaid fights crime. 📈📉 www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?r...

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Sandy Black @econsandy.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

I was incredibly honored to be awarded the CSWEP Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. When I accepted the award, I talked about the importance of mentoring. The lessons I pass on are kind of obvious. But they are important, so I am going to share them yet again. (A🧵)

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Sandy Black @econsandy.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Apply for the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute's Visiting Scholar Program--a great opportunity (!) to interact with outstanding scholars who care about Inequality. Deadline January 17, 2025. www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/vi...

minneapolisfed.org

Apply for the Visiting Scholar Program | Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute

The Institute is currently seeking Visiting Scholars for the 2025-2026 cohort

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Recent WSJ article on "ghost jobs" features a sankey plot showing one person's job search process in 2024. (H/t Serena Dao) www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

sankey plot showing how serena dao's 260 job applications progressed thru the job search process

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

✨ Reminder: the deadline is Friday, January 17 to apply for OIGI's Visiting Scholars program ✨ More info + apply here: www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/vi...

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Brad Shapiro @btshapir.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Now that I seem to have gotten new followers interested in my editor takes, If you're asked to do a referee report and you're not sure if you have enough time, just quickly reply to the editor that you don't have time. Do not let the request languish. Ghosting a request is the worst option.

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

✨ NEW in @jlaborecon.bsky.social: "The Impact of the Retirement Slowdown on the U.S. Youth Labor Market" by Paul Mohnen ✨ In recent decades, labor supply of older Americans has increased while labor mkt outcomes of younger Americans have deteriorated... how much does the former explain the latter?

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Iceberg inspiring me to work on my job market paper

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Allison Shertzer @econhist-allday.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

In case you want a lot more personal views in your feed from people who absolutely do not speak on behalf on their employer haha

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Strategic selection into when to start kindergarten increases average achievement... but "widens racial + income achievement gaps, partly b/c only higher-income parents select on children’s gains from waiting." Paper by Michael Ricks [ft. v. cool compliers-related diagrams]: tinyurl.com/529zayaj

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

"The Mortgage Piggy Bank" 🏡 🐖 🏦 Bernstein and Koudijs (2024) estimate effx of mortgage amortization on wealth accumulation They find +1 euro of amortization leads to nearly +1 euro of wealth. 2/3 from ⬇️ expenditures, 1/3 from ⬆️ labor supply QJE: tinyurl.com/3v2wk4bb Ungated: tinyurl.com/3e8rmuf4

academic.oup.com

The Mortgage Piggy Bank: Building Wealth Through Amortization*

Abstract. In 2013, the Dutch government mandated that new conforming mortgages must fully amortize. Within a difference-in-differences design, we estimate

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Daniel Tannenbaum @dtannenbaum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Hi #econsky, the Nebraska Labor Summit will take place Friday, March 28, 2025 at the University of Nebraska, with keynotes by Marika Cabral and Jesse Rothstein. It's a super fun, junior-centric research conference. Deadline is this Sunday, December 1. Submit your papers here: tinyurl.com/2rb8xyxw

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Dani Sandler @dismalscientist86.bsky.social · 18/09/2024

I made a starter pack of government economists. go.bsky.app/K7fAcMi

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Alex Albright @allbriteallday.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Had a great seminar visit at @unlincoln.bsky.social! Also featured an excellent stop at the art museum on campus. S/o to @dtannenbaum.bsky.social for the lil tour! Some faves from the campus + Sheldon museum:

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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

To celebrate my moving to BlueSky I am giving away LaTeX goodies. Always wanted to have a clean, nice-looking, readable, complete and supporting visual track changes reply to referees? Look no more: the template you're looking for is here: github.com/paolocrosett... Happy BlueSkying to everyone.

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Sebastian Tello Trillo @sebastiantt.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

* Please Share * We are hiring a full-time two-year RA! (or pre-doc?). Very excited about this position because you could be paired to work with many awesome economists at Batten (Ben Castleman, Andrew Simon, Derek Wu, Tim Layton) and myself! More info down here 👇 jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...

jobs.virginia.edu

Pre-Doctoral Associate, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America | Research at University of Virginia

Apply for Pre-Doctoral Associate, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia job with University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America. Re...

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Seema Jayachandran @seema.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

It's a treat to have a paper highlighted in the NBER Digest! Couples' choices about when to relocate offer a lens into how they value each person's career success. In both Sweden and Germany, they seem to prioritize men's careers, even when the woman has similar earning potential. bit.ly/MTO-T

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