iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 30/07/2026

The US Administration just cut the duration of student visas. Many have worried that visa extension backlogs will risk some students' graduation. At @piie.com I highlight a deeper problem. The rule gives political appointees discretion to do what they've promised: block most students from staying.

piie.com

A new US rule to restrict student visas will hurt the US economy

The Trump administration issued a final rule in July that gives it discretion to cut short the course of study of most international students at US universities. It will likely use this new power to b...

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 03/07/2026

What is the effect of immigrant manual labor on US firms and workers? @ethan-lewis.bsky.social and I study this with a nationwide randomized visa lottery in our new @aeajournals.bsky.social paper. We decompose the substitution & scale effects, which I'll explain, in a new @piie.com post. Thread—>

Graph: Eﬀect of a 10% increase in foreign (H-2B) hires on US hires

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 26/06/2026

🗣️ Published today in @aeajournals.bsky.social. Ethan Lewis and I use a visa lottery, as a nationwide randomized experiment, to test the effects of foreign labor on US firms and workers. doi.org/10.1257/app.... A concise summary from @nber.org —> www.nber.org/digest/20221...

Abstract:
US firms hiring foreign workers in low-skill nonfarm jobs face a binding quota on the "H-2B" visa, allocated in part through a randomized lottery. We evaluate the quota's marginal impact using the lottery, a novel firm survey, and a pre-analysis plan. Firms exogenously employing more H-2B workers in low-skill jobs increase production (elasticity 0.20–0.22), investment (1.5–2.1), and profits (0.15). The elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers is very low (0.8–2.2). Thus, the effect on US employment is zero or positive overall, and positive in rural areas. Forensic analysis suggests similarly low substitutability of black-market labor.

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Center for Effective Global Action @cega-uc.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

💡 How can we make evidence from impact evaluations easier to compare and use for decision-making? CEGA’s @ucbitss.bsky.social, alongside @nu-gprl.bsky.social, are testing the effectiveness of LLMs to automate the extraction of information from research papers. 🔗 Learn more: go.cega.org/DEVIDENCE

go.cega.org

Evidence Aggregation: Extracting Key Findings from Academic Papers (DEVIDENCE)

Aggregating findings from multiple studies into a unified database makes it easier to surface these interventions and draw meaningful comparisons.

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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The Ideology 2.0 dataset is now publicly accessible. 280,000 unique sessions, ~40 implicit measures, ~30 self-report items on the same topics as the implicit measures, 25 individual difference questionnaires, and dozens of individual self-report items. More: osf.io/2483h/overview

osf.io

OSF

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Nick Huntington-Klein @nickchk.com · 21/05/2026

This paper is now out in the Journal of Causal Inference with some updates but the same general message: LLMs were not particularly good at matching expert judgment on whether a given variable pair represented a causal relationship. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

degruyterbrill.com

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 28/04/2026

Tomorrow the Supreme Court hears arguments in a case that could terminate Temporary Protected Status for 1.4 million migrants. With 19 colleagues including 3 Nobel laureates, I estimated the economic impact of ending TPS. @cnn.com on our estimates and the stakes for the country (cc @piie.com) —>

cnn.com

These Haitian immigrants contribute nearly $6 billion to the economy. Their fate is in the Supreme Court’s hands | CNN Business

Jan Gautam may soon have to let go of hundreds of workers at dozens of hotels in Florida. That’s why the CEO of IHRMC Hotels & Resorts is closely watching an immigration case that’s before the Supreme...

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Chloe N East (she/her) @chloeneast.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Oh heyyyy check me out on @npr.org Marketplace's Make Me Smart! I talk about why Trump's Mass Deportation is harming the labor market, harming US-born workers, and why the false narratives about mass deportations persist Make Me Smart www.marketplace.org/shows/shows/...

marketplace.org

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Center for Effective Global Action @cega-uc.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Last week, researchers and policymakers shared research to advance transparency, reproducibility, rigor, and ethics in social science research at the 2026 BITSS Annual Meeting, hosted by CEGA’s @ucbitss.bsky.social. View slides from the presenters: cega.berkeley.edu/event/bitss-...

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Jon Mellon @jonmellon.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Out now open access at @ajpseditor.bsky.social. 194 potential exclusion-restriction violations for studies using weather as an instrumental variable onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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Kieran @vasculism.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

It was great to see so much innovative work at the @ucbitss.bsky.social Annual Meeting today. Thanks to Abhishek Nagaraj for the mention, I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion on using AI to advance open science! x.com/abhishekn/st...

x.com

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Nothing says “partial American victory” like “all ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz must coordinate with the Iranian military” because the Strait is “under Iranian control”

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Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

It's just an utterly relentless pattern: Every time the President de-escalates in the Middle East, the stockmarket in the U.S. rejoices. It's like they think war is bad for business.

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BITSS @ucbitss.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Excited to share the agenda for the next BITSS Annual Meeting! Join us April 16 in Berkeley for presentations on AI in research, open science, and data quality. www.bitss.org/events/bitss...

bitss.org

BITSS Annual Meeting 2026

The BITSS Annual Meeting brings together actors from academia, scholarly publishing, and policy to share novel research and discuss efforts to improve the credibility of social science by advancing…

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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

With the most robust rail network in the American Midwest, Chicago has the 2nd largest number of car-free households of any metro area (behind only NYC) Most of those households live around the L, especially the Red Line and western parts of the Blue & Green Lines

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Nick Huntington-Klein @nickchk.com · 14/03/2026

Saw @gavinverhey.bsky.social in drag on Spell Slayers which was v fun and also learned about this card which is a great demonstration of the St. Petersburg Paradox! This creature has an average power equal to infinity, and yet is realistically much smaller than measly 10k-power Jumbo Cactuar

Okaun Eye of Chaos, which at the beginning of combat you flip until you lose a flip, and double its power and toughness for each time you win.

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Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Trump finally listening to these guys

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Alexander Kustov @akoustov.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Sorry, Bluesky, but I have to say it: AI can already do social science research better than most professors with PhDs. And, for the first time in my life, I really have no idea what happens in five years. Things are changing already, we just need to wake up.

alexanderkustov.substack.com

Academics Need to Wake Up on AI

Ten theses for folks who haven't noticed the ground shifting under their feet

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Robert (Bob) Kubinec @rmkubinec.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

With some help from Claude Code, I have the app I've always wanted: elicitcausal lets you design a causal graph with your theoretical priors & preregister it. Then after you complete a study, you can upload your graph and get estimates of causal learning. Link: causal.wilddata.solutions #rstats

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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

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NBER @nber.org · 10/02/2026

New data on ICE arrests (2015–2025) show that as arrests surge, the share of arrested people with criminal convictions fall sharply, from Chloe N. East, Caitlin Patler, and Elizabeth Cox www.nber.org/papers/w34794

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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

core part of the ostensible economic justification for mass deportation was that Americans would rush in to take all the jobs immigrants left, but now unemployment rates for native born Americans are rising and the admin is sending people out to do damage control

A graph of the unemployment rate by immigration status showing a rise in native born unemployment

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Chloe N East (she/her) @chloeneast.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

New report out by yours truly @clasp.org !! ICE Activity in Trump 2.0 is Increasing Employment and Decreasing Full-Time School Enrollment for Teens in Mixed-Status Families www.clasp.org/publications...

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

MINNEAPOLIS WILL WIN

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NBER @nber.org · 20/01/2026

DACA work authorization shifted undocumented youth into safer, higher-paying jobs, showing legal barriers—not skills—limit occupational opportunity, from Aimee Chin, Kalena Cortes, and Camila Morales www.nber.org/papers/w34685

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NBER @nber.org · 17/01/2026

Examining whether GLP-1 medications pay for themselves finds no spending offsets through 5 years; savings, if any, may arise later or outside healthcare, from Coady Wing, Sih-Ting Cai, Daniel W. Sacks, and Kosali I. Simon www.nber.org/papers/w34678

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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I know people on this website are likely to be more amenable to this than I am, but I want to stress that institutional investor purchases of single family homes are a microscopic share of the market and so you’re basically not gonna see material changes in home prices from this

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The Upshot @upshot.nytimes.com · 23/12/2025

On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. But is still led to cuts that closed offices, canceled programs and deprived people of food, medicine and other aid. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

nytimes.com

How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?

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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Making immigration easier increases international scientific collaboration. Using China’s staggered rollout of visa-free access in 2023, this paper shows a causal increase in Sino-foreign co-authored research.

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