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Cory Smith

@politicory.bsky.social
1.7K followers 561 following 413 posts

Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. All about the long run and development #EconSky www.corybsmith.com

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Reposted by Cory Smith
Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 15/10/2026
Perverting the power of the state into a tool for targeted political attacks is an assault on democracy itself. Shattering our institutions harms every Conservative American and every Liberal American.
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Reposted by Cory Smith
FOX 5 DC | Local News, Weather, and Live Streams | WTTG [Unoffi… @fox5dc.com.web.brid.gy · 03/10/2026
fox5dc.com
UMD student, 22, reported missing, last seen in campus parking garage
Police at the University of Maryland are looking for a student who's been missing since early Friday morning. Dilan Shaan Ashar, 22, was last seen on Oct. 2, according to the University of Maryland Police Department. Ashar's parents reported him missing to the Prince George's County Police Department, saying that they were worried about their son. Ashar was leaving his residence around 2 a.m. on Friday, and was captured on security camera at Terrapin Trail Garage on the UMD campus. He was last seen wearing a black University of Maryland hoodie, gray sweatpants and white shoes. Ashar is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs about 185 pounds. University and local authorities are continuing their investigation. Anyone with information about Ashar's whereabouts is asked to contact the UMPD.
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
For some reason, my dashboard always appears empty so I have to find the specific deposit link in my email and go there
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I guess I don’t understand what the option is other than removing any at-home assignment The incentive to use them as practice is the less game-able exam late. Removing that structure reduces “AI did my homework” but also the benefit of practice structure outside the classroom
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Reposted by Cory Smith
Jas Easterly @jaseasterly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Canada is our indispensable ally and friend. ✔️211 years since the last war ✔️~5,500 miles of shared border ✔️Economic and military integration. Only neighboring countries Portugal–Spain (225 years) and Sweden–Denmark and Britain–France (~211–212 years) have been at peace for so long.
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Reposted by Cory Smith
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Imagine if you mailed the IRS a check to pay your taxes, but they left their mail unopened for years and then arrested you for failure to pay taxes. That’s effectively what ICE is doing to increasing numbers of people now; people out of status only because of GOVERNMENT delay.
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
My only contribution to the lottery debate is that the impacts of lottery wins have been studied already. e.g., $50k USD gets your kids 0.3pp more likely to go to college. The shot at $1m gets your kids 0.5 x 6pp ~3pp more likely to go to college. So, much higher! www.nber.org/papers/w22679
nber.org
Parental Resources and College Attendance: Evidence from Lottery Wins
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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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Other trick I've been using is to use heavy water to brew the coffee
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Claude is currently indirectly referring to itself as human ("human-transcribed" for work it transcribed). Should I be worried, Anthropic?
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Reposted by Cory Smith
Kori Schake 🎃 @kschake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
“My country right or wrong: when right, to be kept right, when wrong, to be put right.” - Major General Carl Schurz 🇺🇸
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Gotcha. Thank you! This didn't make it into my quick read
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Question: I'm seeing 6-3 in the news. Did I miss a 5-4 portion (for this decision)?
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Related: you can't enforce norms/protocols which get lost along the way with compaction (e.g., "when you do X, don't take shortcut Y")
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
I weight RCTs very heavily, too But wouldn’t you agree that most medical choices & decisions do not have RCT evidence (much as we’d like)? In many cases, we just have to do our best with bad evidence
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
You can literally see the original Roman colony preserved underground with accompanying text (+ artifacts & history through the subsequent 2000 years) share.google/opoWmQ98gFaJ...
share.google
Google Search
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
My calendar for the fall just shows one never-ending faculty meeting
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Nothing has convinced me that LLMs were human more than them getting tripped up on classic Stata bugs/bad behavior
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Very similar to what I wrote as an RA when asked for code
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
A++++
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
"Dope! it was egen not gen"
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
There's something very satisfying about catching an LLM tripping up on a Stata "gotcha" behavior you're very familiar with and you can wisely instruct it with your experience
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Yeah, just to be clear, I think college is worth it for most people considering it -- benefits & costs both high (but costs a bit lower than the writer flippantly implied)
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Don’t necessarily disagree, I think for the article’s framing I would have put it on the “benefits” side of the ledger (and then said benefits > costs)
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
For parents subsidizing their kids during that time, those costs may also be real ones (as a transfer to their kids)
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
I agree, thats good “opportunity cost” logic (you’d pay for it anyway). But if we’re going to go the econ route, why only use that logic on one element (room & board is paid either way) and not the rest (wages)?
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
I do agree the writer had in mind things on the right tail (“hundreds” of k not 100k). And half are below the median anyway
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Fair, but my only pushback would be if it’s “what people are talking about”, it would often be the last figure (all-inclusive costs) x4. If we say some things shouldn’t count due to opportunity cost logic, we should do so holistically (not just on room & board)
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
True. Though if we’re going to econ opportunity cost route, 4 years of foregone wages would be quite high!
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
To be fair to the writer, you have to multiply this by ~4. The statement is about the degree & these graphs are for annual costs if I read correctly
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
So, we just don't know and have to live with that. If your baseline was a large, clear effect, then you should probably scale back your assumptions, at least for this level of ban. Otherwise, we can't really comment on modest-but-important positive effects and stronger bans could do more
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
The sad truth is that this kind of unclear result (or set of results) is pretty normal in cases where there's not enough data and it's easy to read too much into single results. The paper's "very good but not perfect" assumption set (diff-in-diff) also adds some uncertainty
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Fwiw, the subjective well-being result seems pretty sensitive to how it's coded. Their single ("pooled") estimate is -0.3sd and closer to statistical significance than many other outcomes (Table 2). So, the best single estimate is negative not positive
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Imagine we found that test scores improved but subjective well-being didn't. Or online bullying fell even if subjective well-being improved I can easily see the anti-phone folks rightly noting how important each of those outcomes were and justifying the bans on that basis
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
On the positive takes, even assuming the subjective well-being effect is significant, it requires (1) ignoring the initial negative effect and treating year 2 as a permanent increase (2) ignoring the fact that the bans have at least 6 chances to improve a meaningful outcome [multiple testing]
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
On the negative takes: this is a classic "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" points. The standard errors for many important outcomes are often ~0.1sd so confidence intervals are going to include really meaningful changes even if not much clearly pops out.
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Negative takes treat it all as a wash (no effects) but positive takes have highlighted the (eventual) positive effect on subjective well-being (initially negative but then positive) Neither seems well-supported to me
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
In my read, there are at least 6 major outcomes tested (Figs 6-7) including discpline, attendance, well-being, test scores... Most of these show statistically unclear ("null") results (attendance, bullying...) or mixed (test scores). Some are negative (disciplinary incidents)
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
My take on the cell phone ban study (tom-dee.github.io/files/w35132...): I think the subjective well-being increase would be worth it, but we need to treat it as preliminary rather than definitive given how many outcomes and periods are tested
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Reposted by Cory Smith
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Four months ago, the Trump admin “temporarily paused” immigration benefits for nationals of 39 countries plus the Palestinian Authority. Tens of thousands of applications each month have just been stuck in a filing cabinet with no progress. People are stuck in limbo; some are even losing their jobs.
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
What are the overdue fees for something like that?
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
I don’t have a take on the overall debate, but the “firing above their heads” claim is not widely accepted “Marshall's findings were later challenged as mistaken or even fabricated,[11][12][13] and were not replicated in a more rigorous study…” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowardi...
en.wikipedia.org
Cowardice - Wikipedia
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
bsky.app/profile/diew...
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
This should hopefully become a textbook example of “passthrough.” Consumers paid most of the tariffs in higher prices even though importers nominally made the payments Unfortunately, consumers won’t get rebates it seems
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Question: do we know for sure that the FBI under Biden did not stop a similar number?
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Don’t forget: USPS postmarks now come later in the process so that more mail-in ballots can be rejected!
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
73 32 99 111 109 112 108 101 116 101 108 121 32 97 103 114 101 101 33
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
I agree that’s a good metric, especially if no Harris donations
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Cory Smith @politicory.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Some highly engaged voters vote in the other party’s primary if they want to influence that decision (eg, to stop an unwanted opposing candidate). Possible here?
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Reposted by Cory Smith
Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Evil. No other word for it.
Donald J. Trump
K
@realDonaldTrump
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?
We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!
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