iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Mauricio Drelichman

Kevin Milligan @kevinmilligan.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A tribute to David Donaldson, @ubcvse.bsky.social Professor Emeritus who passed away earlier this year. Thanks to Walter Bossert and John Weymark for writing. economics.ubc.ca/profile/davi...

economics.ubc.ca

David Donaldson - Vancouver School of Economics

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Reposted by Mauricio Drelichman

Kevin Milligan @kevinmilligan.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A tribute to Chuck Blackorby, @ubcvse.bsky.social Professor Emeritus who recently passed away. Thanks to Walter Bossert and John Weymark for writing. economics.ubc.ca/profile/char...

economics.ubc.ca

Charles Blackorby - Vancouver School of Economics

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In academic writing, "discipline" (verb) is the new "leverage".

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

+1 for the ClaudeCode desktop app, using the <code> tab and Opus 5.5 on max effort (for the kind of task you tried to give it). You’ll have to spring for at least the $20/month plan.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's the diary of the governor of Chucuito in 1780. It's not among those listed on their page. I found the reference in a book; I'd need a reference librarian there to take a look. I've written to the email address listed at the bottom of the page twice, but have gone for months without an answer.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Does anyone have a contact in or otherwise know something about Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in Bolivia? I have been trying to reach their librarians/archivists/historians about a manuscript preserved there. I have emailed every address I could find, to no response. Any leads apprciated!

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Reposted by Mauricio Drelichman

Colin Rose @crosehistorian.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you have great UG or MA students, and they want to pursue further work in Canada on the sociospatial history of conflict, violence, civil society, justice and daily struggle in #earlymodern Italy, please encourage them to reach out to me over the coming months! I am actively seeking students. 4/4

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Reposted by Mauricio Drelichman

UBC Economics @ubcvse.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Meet the incoming 2026 cohort for our PhD program.🎉We’re thrilled to have them join the UBC community at the Vancouver School of Economics!

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The government needed to do something, be seen to do something, and make it happen fast. I bet political strategists are congratulating themselves on how well this particular bit worked for them. Now I hope they take the time to fine tune things and smooth out the worst of the collateral damage.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

At UBC we have acutely felt the effects of the federal crackdown on international students. I do not love the way it was implemented. At the same time, a very substantial proportion of the "international students" that were coming in before were anything but. This became a very hot political issue.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The legality of it is a different matter. Just because something does not violate the letter of the law does not mean it is socially useful or even acceptable. Many of these franchisees added next to nothing to the human capital of their enrollees, who used them exclusively as immigration pathways.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Thanks for this clarification. It seems to me that a public PS institution would get much lower revenue from a student enrolled at a franchisee than from someone directly enrolled in their own programs, so the logic still applies.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The second reason legitimate international students are not coming is how difficult the path to legal residency has become. That’s a first order effect. But the 80%+ drop in visas conflates it with the scam college effect. I was asking to distinguish between the two. Hopefully that’s clearer now.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Putting an end to that type of immigration fraud is a good thing. Its disappearance does not impact public PSR (they never paid any public tuition), and makes it easier for legitimate students to find housing, access services, etc.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

But a blunt instrument can still do its first order job. I hazard that substantial majority of these students that are no longer coming were never students on the first place.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

What did not help was the public facing messaging that international students were not welcome in Canada, as opposed to framing it as a crackdown on immigration fraud. That did, and continues to do, real damage.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The crackdown was a very blunt instrument, to be sure, but hard to see the alternatives. Visas are federal, post-secondary accreditation is provincial. The federal government can’t withdraw the accreditation of scam colleges. This was the feds telling the provinces “sort out your own messes”.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Example: UBC had 100 intl students. Scam college had 100. After the crackdown, UBC has 80, Scam has 0. Student visas drop by over 50%. Public PS revenue drops by 20%.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

In other words, “student” visas granted and dollars collected by public post-secondary institutions had a weak relationship to begin with. The question is just how weak.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A lot of those “students” were not attending public post-secondary institutions. They were enrolling in private storefronts that pretended to be post-secondary, but really only sold student status as a path to immigration. If it is those “students” that aren’t coming, public PS will suffer little.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Are there any estimates of how much of those original 14B were legitimate post-secondary fees vs. immigration fraud storefronts? I would imagine that unis that charge higher tuition also retained most of their visa quota, so the decline is likely to be far less than proportional.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

An excellent articulation. This will become required reading for all my PhD students (even though I am in the “no-table-of-contents-paragraph” camp 😁).

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

That part was lots of fun! We had to construct a series of chicken prices in order to calculate rents correctly. It was not an accounting device either- the hens actually changed hands on a specific day. The contracts specified that they should be laying hens, not old birds good only for soup!

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

(Databases coming soon on ICPSR. The CambridgeCore people pushed the paper out the door really fast, and we weren't quite done readying the data for publication! I'll update this thread when available.)

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Housing costs are a central determinant of living standards. Together with our work on the cost of bread for the same period (linked), this piece brings us closer to understanding how early modern Spaniards lived, and what drove their long-run welfare. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

<em>The Economic History Review</em> | EHS Journal | Wiley Online Library

We study the market for common white bread in the city of Toledo through a new 266-year-long series of bread prices, obtained from the cash purchases and wholesale bread-for-wheat contracts of large ....

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The effects of the growth of Madrid, less than 90 km away, and the economic and demographic crisis of the seventeenth century are also clearly recognizable. The premium for commercial properties disappears, reflecting the stagnation of commerce and the shrinking urban middle class.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Through rental costs, we trace the impact of the sudden influx of precious metals in the mid-sixteenth century. Demand from the privileged classes sends the cost of luxury dwellings through the roof. The trickle-down effect means that everybody else pays more too. History sure rhymes.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

We observe the rental cost of up to 35% of dwellings in the city, and break them down by type and characteristics of the house, neighbourhood, and socioeconomic status of the renter.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

New article in early view at RHE-JILAEH! Together with David González-Agudo and Valentina Ramírez, we reconstruct the cost of housing in Toledo between 1489 and 1810. This is one of the longest such series in existence anywhere in the world. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

The cost of housing in the very long run: Toledo, 1489–1810 | Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History | Cambridge Core

The cost of housing in the very long run: Toledo, 1489–1810

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Why is Claude so keen on pointing out "honest" interpretations and results? Does it cheat on everything else?

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Just a special case of the Lucas Critique: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_c...

en.wikipedia.org

Lucas critique - Wikipedia

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I'm just silently judging your shopping list.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

At least you didn’t have to wait two weeks for the journal admin to reject the whole package because the manuscript was not a .doc file (!!) and make you resubmit from scratch, as happened to me with CambridgeCore.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

- Dear Journal, here's my manuscript for review. - Thanks, we'll let you know within the decade. [three years later] - Dear author, congratulations on your paper being accepted. Please correct and return these proof within the next seven and a half minutes or else.

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Reposted by Mauricio Drelichman

Ludger Woessmann @woessmann.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

📢 We are hiring 📢 Please spread the word: We are hiring a 🧑‍🎓 Postdoc (up to 6 years, non-tenure track) at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education! Come join our team as junior faculty: www.ifo.de/en/job-offer... Application deadline: July 22

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Loving it! One question: how was the decision to consider the composite "Marías" distinct names? I can see it going both ways. Since María is such a dominant name, perhaps presenting a second chart where the second name after "María" is considered the relevant one would be worthwhile.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Biometrically enforced? Otherwise they’ll just go to people who can pay others to attend on their behalf. You’ve moved even more towards third-degree price discrimination.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Ran Abramitzky created this amazing family tree of our advisor, Joel Mokyr. Explore a variety of astounding metrics of Joel's scholarly reach, including his 78 direct students, an additional 304 scholars in successive generations, and over 200K google cites! polite-baklava-a95d7b.netlify.app

polite-baklava-a95d7b.netlify.app

Celebrating 80 Years of Joel Mokyr

A private website for Joel Mokyr's 80th birthday celebration.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

What Lothar did was die. Without clear central authority, Lotharingia splintered into many fragments. Economic historians have noticed, and have used it as an instrument for city-state development. economichistory.pre.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/u...

economichistory.pre.ss.ucla.edu

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

We emphasize that Toledo (and, surely, many other cities) was very good at taming the fluctuations in grain prices. This was costly (public storehouses needed to be recapitalized often), but preserved access to food and prevented unrest.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Also, both in Braudel and in later treatments, the focus is very much on the failures of urban institutions in regulating bread markets. Riots and famines are salient events; smooth sailing is rarely noticed.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

He does make two points that have since become common knowledge: that there was a trade-off between buying and baking one’s own bread, and that urban regulation mattered. We certainly rely on these in our work.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

To avoid making a fool of myself I went back and checked and, alas, the last third of chapter 2 in Civilization and Capitalism is indeed about bread. It’s an ancillary treatment to his main focus on (again) grain markets, but we should still have cited it.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Trick question - Braudel spent a lot of time discussing everything! But in La Mediterranée he only talks about grain markets.

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

This project started as an exercise in support of a larger effort to quantify labour compensation (people were paid partially in bread). It took on a life of its own, and became more fun and rewarding than I thought possible. Hopefully some of that comes through in the paper!

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Mauricio Drelichman @mdrelichman.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

We also provide a 266-year-long series that closely reflects consumer bread prices; there are very few of these in Europe, especially for our time period.

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