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The Edgeworth that originally described with theory this empirically rare phenomenon is Francis Ysidro Edgeworth of "Edgeworth Box" fame. You'll never guess who his grandma is... Yep, Maria Edgeworth 🤯 mariaedgeworthcenter.com/meet-the-edg...

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 7h

The gist of it is that a firm will increase their price, but competitive pressure sets in immediately and firms compete down to marginal cost. Then this happens over and over again. Looks potentially scary for antitrust reasons, but its actually indicative of a healthy, competitive market.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 7h

Notice how choppy that line is showing gas prices in OKC? That sawtooth pattern is common in retail gasoline markets, and it's known as an Edgeworth Price Cycle. The reason it's known as that is because of my PhD advisor, Michael Noel, who wrote his dissertation on this pricing phenomenon at MIT.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 7h

Super excited to finally have my copy of @jeannasmialek.bsky.social's new book! In part, because by total coincidence she is my academic great-great-...-great grandmother. A quick thread on how these two pictures are connected culminating in me doing consulting projects in Australia of all places

Picture of a new book I'm super excited about

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Just in case I have any OKC followers that are interested… 🍻Join us for Econ By The Pint tomorrow night 🍻 Our yearly fundraiser for personal finance and economic education in the state. You know you want to hear an economic update after I’ve had a few beers 🫠 forms.econisok.org/nx/portal/ne...

Because the invisible hand deserves a cold one

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

How it started, how it's going

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If you filled up your tank when I tweeted this out, you saved about $0.55 per gallon

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Got to take a quick trip down to Norman to do a seminar yesterday. I’ve lived here for 10 years without ever really getting to see how pretty the campus is.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Accounting professors when you ask them about teaching

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I usually tell my students that stats/analysis from Federal agencies are still to be trusted because they are in the weeds, nerdy, not caught in the political drama. This Gulf of America nonsense from the EIA has me backtracking on that.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Yeehaw, y’all 🤠 mydialect.us/quiz-standar...

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

FYI if you’re in the OKC metro area, I wouldn’t be surprised is prices cycle upwards again very soon. Save yourself about 20-25 cents per gallon by buying now, or about $3 per gallon by switching to an EV

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is excellently reported, as usual for OK Watch, and this quote really nails it. My students spend a lot of money to get an education, and for most this is the pivot in their lives that brings economic mobility: better off than their parents and “The American dream.” They deserve better.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Someone should really write a paper about how heat effects learning 🤓 @joshua-goodman.com

It’s too effing hot in Oklahoma. So hot the students aren’t enjoying their macro class.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Here to see a play about an economist

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

While I finish, please enjoy this beautiful figure Hamid made. It won’t shock you to learn that wildfire smoke is bad for you, and because of this Medicaid spending goes up

Picture of a map showing a fire and which way the smoke blew 🔥💨

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Today was not a great day. Topped out at 108, and almost the entire state is in the worst wet bulb category right now

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

We have a new resident in the garden #nativeplants

Picture of a hummingbird heading to a Flame Acanthus (TX native)

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Dusting off my old macro skills to code up a DSGE model for a weird idea I had the other night when I couldn’t sleep

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

This passes more than just the sniff test of parallel trends seen in the time-series pic before. Event-study and a placebo randomization confirms we're not finding a spurious policy effect. The red line way to the left of the histogram is our estimate, that chunk of zeroes is the placebo test 😍

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

In aggregate, bean sales for Goya fell by 1.9% relative to other brands What's more interesting is that this is entirely driven by how an area voted. We tie in 2020 election returns at the county-level, and can see how purchasing changed by a store's location. Huge drop in D areas, huge gain in R

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

First, let's look at the big picture. Here are weekly sales for the top bean brands. You can see the "Trump bump" right when the Oval Office endorsement occurred A few things to note, before the endorsement Goya closely tracked general trends (see early Covid buying), but didn't after the endorse 🫘

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

This is why I don’t usually use SSRN

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Literally had a former student text and ask about this today. It’s like Sev read that text and responded for me 💪

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Some pictures from around the garden. We finally got some rain and everyone’s happy about it #nativeplants

Longhorn bee on a Mexican hat, or in emoji 🤘🐝🇲🇽🎩

A bumblebee flying toward a salvia azurea

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

It was such a treat to have prof @arindube.bsky.social visit UCO to discuss his book and prior work on the minimum wage.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Was expecting to read this and see bad news 😞 Wasn’t expecting UCO to be name checked out of the thousand+ universities in this data 😬

University of Central Oklahoma saw a 19% cut in state appropriations

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

📆 OKC Save the Date 6/9 📆 We are thrilled to be hosting Dr. Arin Dube @arindube.bsky.social for a public lecture on his new book, The Wage Standard Dr. Dube is among the world's leading experts on labor market effects of minimum wage policy changes. His visit is timely before the June 16 MW vote.

Poster for event at UCO Downtwon on June 9th from 6-7:30. Seat reservation link: https://forms.gle/972ohdptfKCGB1pt9

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

The entire rationale for giving the Thunder a billion dollars for a stadium was the “huge economic impact” they have. I can’t imagine a better two years than a championship run followed by another MVP season and possible second championship and yet there’s this from the story

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Thucydides search interest over the last year

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Picking up the book I sat down a week or two ago mid-chapter because I’m finally caught up on grading, writing, etc. This has been, and will always be, an issue 👀😞

Picture of a section titled Representation In Virginia

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

In aggregate, we find that prices fell by about 82% of the full tax amount. On the one hand - yay, consumers are getting most of the savings On the other hand - gas stations got an unintentional $0.10 per gallon subsidy at a time when many firms were facing troubles 6/

Event study figure showing incomplete passthrough. If you actually read this text, drop me the funniest emoji you can think of as a comment.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

We pulled Gas Buddy data and used one of the fun new DD estimators to see what passthrough looked like for four states that rescinded their excise tax during the 2022 run-up. Average prices in Maryland are shown here to give a first glimpse at what happens 5/

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

But how much of this tax *actually* gets passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices? And even if passthrough is 100%... is that a great way to spend foregone revenues? We answer this by looking at the 2022 gas price spike. 4/ Paper here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z6yjx...

Just a screengrab of the abstract and title of this paper

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Now that our paper has been accepted, a quick thread for #EconSky on what happens when governments remove their taxes on gasoline to curry political favor. A timely paper⛽😤 First, it seems rather obvious why you would want to bring down prices when they're doing something like this 📈 1/

Picture of average gas prices for the last 18 months. Ouch.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Well that made my Friday! 🎉🍾

Text of an email saying a part is accepted, hooray!

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Year’s end awards and graduation receptions with light bites and refreshments

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I have a PhD in […] and can tell you that academia is […] than industry. Also, look at this pretty picture of a plane.

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Travis Roach @troach.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

First monarch caterpillar of the year!!!

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