iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jack Billings @johnhbillings.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Allegheny County has now received a court order mandating regular property tax reassessments. 1. I have some light reading available for anyone interested in the subject. 2. Is @alleghenycounty.bsky.social sending anyone to the IAAO conference in Calgary in October?

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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

we have got to put that into a causal inference lecture

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Jack Billings @johnhbillings.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

🚨New Report!🚨 "Modernizing Property Tax Assessments in Allegheny County" by Connor Schwartz and me; a project of @prohousingpgh.org 1/11

Screenshot of title and executive summary of a new paper:

Modernizing Property Tax Assessments in
Allegheny County∗
Jack Billings, PhD† ; Connor Schwartz‡
July 7, 2026

1 Executive summary
Allegheny County has gone nearly half a century without regular countywide
property assessments, creating a growing gap between assessed values and actual
market conditions. As county leaders consider legislation to mandate regular
reassessments, Pro-Housing Pittsburgh conducted a preliminary reassessment
analysis using the Center for Land Economics’ toolkits and publicly available
data. Our sales ratio analysis indicates that reassessment would likely shift as-
sessed values upward more in the City of Pittsburgh than in the surrounding
suburbs. Within the City, neighborhoods that have seen strong recent demand
growth, including Lawrenceville and Bloomfield, would likely experience larger
increases relative to the citywide average. We estimate that a regular reassess-
ment program could be administered by the County at a marginal cost of roughly
$1 million per year, with plausible annual welfare gains of tens of millions of
dollars. Our work here shows that a relatively small team with limited time,
working for free with the county’s available data can produce assessments of
similar or higher quality to the existing assessments. With improvements to
data quality and more nuanced modeling, we expect significant improvements

Screenshot of Figure 4: Median sales ratio by census tract, new assessments.

Most median sales ratios are close to 1.

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Jack Billings @johnhbillings.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

This is cool and now in my "interesting papers to read later" folder.

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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

everyone should read this but in particular phd students should read this to learn how to properly title graphs

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

With Google's AlphaEvolve, we have mounting evidence that LLMs can discover novel & useful ideas, especially when given access to tools and systems. These results are impressive: given 50 open math problems, the AI rediscovered the leading approach 75% of the time & improved on it 20% of the time.

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Adam @adamshap.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

A highly relevant paper by my colleague Mauricio Ulate, and coauthors Andres Rodriguez-Clare and Jose Vasquez assessing the consequences of the recent tariffs. U.S. real income falls by 1% by 2028, with some states having declines of more than 3%. www.frbsf.org/wp-content/u...

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Jack Billings @johnhbillings.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Spoons vs shovels, 1901, quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/s...

An incident which struck me at the time as quite amusing occurred not long since on North Broad street. A steam shovel at work had attracted a large number of spectators, including two Irishmen, who, judging by their appearance, were toilers temporarily out of employment.

As the big shovel at one lick scooped up a whole cartload of dirt and dumped it upon a gondola car, one of the Irishmen remarked: “What a shame, to think of them digging up dirt in that way!” “What do ye mane?” asked his companion. “Well,” said the other, “that machine is taking the bread out of the mouths of a hundred laborers who could do the work with their picks and shovels.” “Right you are, Barney,” said the other fellow.

Just then a man who had been looking on and who had overheard the conversation remarked: “See here, you fellows. If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?” The Irishmen, to their credit, saw the force of the remark and the humor of the situation and joined heartily in the laugh that followed, and one of them added: “I guess you’re right, Captain. The scoop’s the thing after all.” —Philadelphia Public Ledger.

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Kevin A. Bryan @afinetheorem.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA" (www.alldayta.com), a product @joshgans.bsky.social and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x

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Pietro Biroli @pietrobiroli.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I'm not an R person, but I totally agree with this point: we're doing students a disservice by teaching them stata. Even worse if you're teaching at a public university: using public money to create consumers for a private company.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

This is how science should work. 💡

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Tayfun Sönmez @tayfunsonmez.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Thank you to many who provided valuable input on my monograph on minimalist market design. Here is a much revised and expanded version. It introduces a design framework that is useful for generating cutting-edge research with strong potential for policy impact. #EconSky arxiv.org/pdf/2401.00307 1/

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 10/12/2024

"Simply put, when immigrants come to a place looking for jobs, they also demand goods and services—thus creating jobs for native-born workers… The question has always been which effect is bigger." @jerusalem.bsky.social and Rogé Karma brilliantly review research including mine in this podcast—>

theatlantic.com

The Immigration-Wage Myth

Does the American worker have good reason to fear immigration?

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Johannes Haushofer @johanneshaushofer.com · 09/12/2024

Very happy that this paper is out after a long time in the making. Many thanks to participants, RAs, advisory board members, and coauthors.

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Owen Zidar @omzidar.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Pretty striking findings! www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/app/uploads/...

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Ariel Kalil @arielkalil.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

University of Chicago Harris School PhD student Rohen Shah is on the job market! Rohen is a fabulous applied microeconomist working at the intersection of behavioral and labor economics. Check out his J-PAL funded JMP here: uchicago.box.com/s/fh735yvmlt... Website: sites.google.com/view/rohen-s...

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Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Imagine seeing this learning curve and then deciding to slap a tariff on it

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Jack Billings @johnhbillings.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I helped write a report on the effect of Pittsburgh's Inclusionary Zoning policy on housing construction. Here is a link to it: www.prohousingpgh.org/pittsburgh-i...

prohousingpgh.org

Inclusionary Zoning Research — Pro-Housing Pittsburgh

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Stéphane Benveniste @stephanebenveniste.com · 18/11/2024

Impressive research showing the persistent overrepresentation of high-income groups in U.S. elite colleges over a century 🇺🇸 This echoes my work on French elite colleges (Grandes Écoles), where admission rates for children of alumni first dropped but have then remained ~80x higher for 80 years 🇫🇷

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Jenn Dowd @drjenndowd.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I knew flu all but disappeared but fascinating to see the low levels of other respiratory pathogens during time of peak COVID precautions. Tons of great #dataviz overall in this 🔥@ourworldindata.bsky.social COVID report: ourworldindata.org/key-charts-u... #publichealth #episky #demography

Figure showing levels of respiratory pathogens detected in the Seattle Flu Study fom 2018 to 2024-- can see dramatic drop in levels for pathogens from early 2020 to mid 2021 when mixing was much lower due to COVID precautions.

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