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Joe Fish

@sadbusdriver.bsky.social
892 followers 523 following 2K posts

PhD student doing urban econ and industrial organization at Duke. Former highest paid cashier in the Midwest; former RA at Eviction Lab; Macalester College. Not a real bus driver

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
eventually everyone in Will Stancils mentions becomes a Rational Expectations true believer. Do people know trends in real wages? No. But they can compute a counterfactual that adjusts the path of wages in the economy based on what would have happened had the labor share of income remained constant
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Here's another version: Because of the glory of the home mortgage disclosure act, we can see the income of homebuyers with mortgages. Within the same county/neighborhood/neighborhood and adjusting for unit characteristics, condo buyers are poorer than single family home buyers. it's a starter home!
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
the thing with luxury condos is that they're mostly a myth. 1. within the same county, condos sell for 35% less than single family homes 2. within the same neighborhood, they sell for 43% less 3. within the same neighborhood and adjusting for some quality characteristics, they sell for 21% less
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
a bunch of states are toying with the idea of charging companies fees based on the number of employees they have on medicaid. including washington, which wants to do a 7k / employee tax. seems like the response would be "dont hire them" www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
what's the full policy slate on this? tax the phone calls, tax the texts, tax the job applications, tax the parking spots, tax the car size, tax the swimming pools in the summer, tax the roads, tax the swipes on dating apps. any i miss?
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
the whole NYC transplants discourse is so dumb. for one, new york city -- famously a city of transplants! for two, if you're asking "how many people who live in NYC were born in the US and not in New York State" it's like 14%.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I think a fair critique of the CPI’s representativeness across households types is that there’s a lot of heterogeneity *within CPI sub component*. It’s pretty easy to make a low income basket with more weight on used cars and less on new. Harder to account for price of used Teslas vs carollas
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
reviewing ALICE, one of the many, many "alternative cost of living indices". a few thoughts: 1. the index is a lil goofy. clothing is not considered an essential, for instance. 2. no quality adjustment anywhere. not necessarily wrong but does matter 3. CPI is way more transparent methodology wise
unitedforalice.org
ALICE Essentials Index | UnitedForALICE
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
“Expected deflation is super bad” is a bit not really true in most macro models right? Like it’s only really a zero lower bound issue? Unexpected deflation sure but if it’s expected most macro models should say it doesn’t matter — I don’t think any have a Keynesian deflationary spiral mechanism
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Paper seems cool but those event studies look weird. Employment outcomes for the high exposure groups jump up right around 2021, so the effect seems very sensitive to the reference period. Eg, another interpretation is this is a plot of tech hiring in 2021 and slowdown post interest rate hikes
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
not for nothing but i think people are dunking on this too hard. the underlying econ is all done by people who are considered very respected and some of the foremost experts on this kind of stuff. whether it ends up being correct, idk, but i can assure people they've thought about your objections
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
this is one of those where the fact that chatgpt release lines up so well with "information" payrolls should count as evidence *against* chatgpt being the cause of the decline. chatgpt sucked at release and even now AI usage is at like half of information firms. alternatively, interest rate hikes
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
obviously income inequality has grown a lot and this is bad but it seems very weird that NBC is reporting a stock return number that is not adjusted for inflation and comparing it to a wages number that is.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
has anyone done a formal-ish decomposition of this? I could see / would be interested in checking a story where: 1. the first drop from q3 2021 -> q3 2023 is mostly income relabelling (look at the composition of the business boom and see if we see evidence of this?) 2. the q3 2024 -> now is AI
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
well this aged poorly.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
is this fake? 60 DB, which is what the guy says the meter reads at, is like the sound of an airconditioner
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
working paper arguing that the 2019 NYC strengthening of rent control lead to substantially less property maintence and lower housing quality. beaubressler.github.io/papers/rent_...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
a potentially bad take: saying "a company makes their money on servicing / financing their products not building them" is 1. probably true 2. a bit weird because service + production pricing is a joint decision e.g., costco makes their money on membership cards, but they could also not do that
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
longer thread on this paper, which purports to find adoption of different building codes do not increase prices. at the top, i think this study has a number of problems that mean it basically does not do what it claims to do. 1/ idk
housingwire.com
Study Finds Building Codes Do Not Raise Home Prices
Study of 2.7 million sales across 26 states finds code adoption did not raise prices consistently, and resilience can cut long-run costs.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
wild that a tenure-track professor position at san jose state pays about as much (or less) than a teacher in san jose unified have to imagine if their search works the econ job market is in rough shape
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Re the eternal traffic camera discourse, china experimented with adding traffic violations to people's credit scores, which are then used / reported in job applications and residency permits. this was much better at deterring speeding than monetary fines www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Interestingly, fashion youtubers have reinvented / rediscovered hedonic quality regressions from first principles. There's a ton of videos on what is essentially quality adjusting price by looking at fabric content and construction methods that signal quality. Very similar to what the BLS does!
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
1. lol 2. reading the article it kinda sounds like the "ballmer didnt do this" line the league is taking implies it's only bad to circumvent the cap if your owner hands the player a check with a memo that says "for cap circumvention" www.espn.com/nba/story/_/...
espn.com
Sources: NBA has no evidence Ballmer funneled money to Leonard via sponsors
The NBA has found no evidence showing LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to pay Kawhi Leonard, according to three people with knowledge of discussions between the two sides in recent days.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
The fact that <some percent> of the profiles are AI is also bad. And I say <some percent> because I genuinely can’t tell if a profile is AI unless there’s something really obvious!
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
this is a great thread, however, i want to emphasize that new apartments are middle class housing. The typical new apartment (built in the last 10 years) rents to a household with below median income.* Luxury homes are single family homes. *slightly above median adjusted for household size.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
some quick thoughts: 1. zillow's rent index doesn't track fees, so if this increases base rents, it should be pretty easy to see 2. "mandatory" fees are anti-consumer and should be banned 3. I think the pet fee bans are bad; same as why it's good to charge seperately for parking
multifamilydive.com
Seattle bans rental ‘junk fees’
The new transparency ordinance, effective July 2027, eliminates administrative service charges, pet rent and package fees and requires upfront pricing for tenants.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The SEP article on capitalism is getting a lot of debate on the other site I'm no historian of economic thought, but I'm fairly certain Hayek was against "equilibrium" as a concept and the "equilibrium" people -- Arrow and Walras, in particular -- were socialists plato.stanford.edu/entries/capi...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Idk about calibrated but it’s consistent with efficient in the “prices adjust quickly to new information” sense of the word. It’s an election with a margin of a couple thousand votes, it probably should be pretty volatile
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
A fundamental point from the model in Diamond 2016 is that price effects from spatial inequality are exacerbated by inelastic supply If supply is elastic, income inequality shows up as within-city income inequality and across-city population inequality. However, *rent* differences should be minimal
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
i'll do a longer thread on this at some point but the excercise in this substack is goofy to start, look at the biggest circles: Saiz 2010 and Diamond 2016 Those are *methods* papers; they are not primarily cited for their takes on housing affordability. homeeconomics.substack.com/p/housing-re...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Re-upping Ed Glaeser’s proposal for historical landmarks: Cities should set a cap and if you want to add a property, you have to take one off. San Francisco is historic; it should not be a mausoleum.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Here's the same idea in chart form: The decline in prime age labor force participation rate from May 2026 -> June 2026 was the largest change in non-COVID prime age labor force participation rates in close to 60 years. Probably? some sort of data / sampling issue, but worth monitoring.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Whenever the argument that "building won't work because developers cut permits when rents fall" (image is strongtowns making this argument) they are confusing 1. How markets respond to a demand shock as supply goes from the short run -> long run 2. YIMBY reforms that shift the supply curve
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
per the saint louis fed, 43% of this drop is a correction to their esimtates of the US population size, 16% is continued US aging, and the rest is June 2026 when there was a large drop in prime age (25-54) labor force participation. www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-econo...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
there's basically three semi-related reasons why reports on "median rent in X city hit <some crazy amount>" conflict so much with Census data. In order: 1. These reports oversample high end units 2. Asking rents > contract rents 3. Rental markets are relatively informal 1 & 3 go hand in hand
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Sad day that Krukow is retiring. I worry for America that we’re exhausting our supply of “announcers with cool voices”
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
off the top of my head for things that have gotten better: 1. crime 2. healthcare 3. air quality 4. cars 5. food 6. house quality (although not affordability) 7. consumer electronics 8. access to media (movies, music, etc.) 9. ability to make cool maps 10. international travel
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
i feel the loss of econ twitter with stuff like the quality of consumer goods discourse the literature on reputation incenvtives is very rich; it covers a lot of interesting stuff (why do bad mechanics not get competed, why do firms harvest reputation). alas, nobody here does those kinds of threads
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
okay, one more galaxy brain take: Another reason to legalize single stair and promote dense urban living is that double loaded corridors + subsdized suburbia encourage *massive* closets, which encourages buying more stuff. Good menswear guy article on this: putthison.com/real-people-...
putthison.com
Real People: Dressing with a Parisian Closet
Parisian homes are notorious for having small closets. That’s partly because the homes themselves are already small, and partly because...
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
I'm curious on what the econ lit is on this. intuitively, it seems like a few things could generate the "great price and good-enough quality" equilibrium 1. cost of quality is convex and willingness to pay for it is not 2. information frictions force competition to be mostly on prices, not quality
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Huh? Go back to the city run grocery stores that get fat operating subsidies, I liked that one better
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
More evidence that housing markets are connected: An AI boom in SF shows up first and most prominantly in the rich parts of SF, then the poorer parts, then the richer parts of the East Bay, then the poorer parts of the East Bay. This is why building lots of market rate housing is important
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
A good comparison to the Mamdani grocery stores are commissary stores, which sell at ~25% discounts compared to other grocers If you read their financials, commissaries provided 1.6 billion in savings, and got 1.57 billion in subsidies. So subsidies are basically 1:1 with savings.
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I need someone (me??) to come out swinging against Mamdani's grocery store because it'll be *too effective* and cause massive gentrification and rent increases
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
the food dessert literature seems very weird. As far as I can tell, there are three sets of facts: 1. there are places with poor grocery store access and poor residents 2. these places have worse nutritional outcomes (conditional on demographics) 3. Adding grocery stores doesnt fix the bad outcomes
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
I’ll give Mamdani the benefit of the doubt on the numbers but best I can figure per census, if the city totally covered you could cut prices: 1. rent only ~2-4% 2. Rent, utilities, advertising, taxes, and depreciation ~6-10% 3. All of 2), no profit, and discounts only on some goods gets you to 20%
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Much like with a work of literature, there comes a point with every chart where it ceases to be understood as the author intended and becomes a conduit of takes. be free, wage chart; i no longer can tell people in my mentions they are misreading you (you, reader, understood it. everyone else, idk)
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Here's another way to see that rent is probably the most important long-term affordability constraint: In a world where rent (shelter) prices increased only as fast as the rest of the economy, purchasing power today would be about 13% higher (measured by wages)
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Obligatory FRED posting: Yes, food prices increased faster than wages from 2022-2023; however, food prices have generally grown much slower than wages (including recently!)
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Mini-thread on the Vancouver vacancy tax (and resulting study). The tax is Vancouver's 2017 empty homes tax; the study from CD Howe looks at its impact. The study claims the tax had large impacts on vacancies and minimal impacts on prices. As I'll discuss, I think there are problems with the study.
cdhowe.org
Ripple Effects: The Impact of an Empty-Homes Tax on the Housing Market
The Canadian housing market is experiencing an unprecedented crisis. One solution being explored is the adoption of demand-side measures like Vancouver’s 2017 empty-homes tax. This E-Brief evaluates t...
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