Steve Berry

🚨 Predoc Opportunity at Yale! 🚨

Care about research that changes policy?

My research team works within state government to advance evidence and learning for a smarter safety net!

And our predocs have excellent PhD placements. Apply here!

#EconSky #EconTwitter #Predoc #ResearchJobs #HealthPolicy

California Now Allows More Ethanol in Gasoline — Is This Going to Save Drivers Money? Drivers will be disappointed. First, it is likely that very little E15 will be sold in the state. Second, if E15 were widely adopted, it would not cause large drops in gas prices. Californians pay …

Traveling last week and way behind on posts. Start with Aaron Smith's excellent EI blog explaining why California raising allowed ethanol content in gas from 10% to 15% won't save drivers money, despite study funded by Renewable Fuels Association study.
energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/c...

The Yale crew is awesome and doing incredibly innovative things in the Medicaid and SNAP space.

If you're interested in health policy and a predoc, run, do not walk, to apply for this!

New paper!

elliotlipnowski.com/wp-content/u...

The Federal Trade Commission is hiring PhD Economists (very late, because shutdown)!

Please repost/quote so JMCs can see.

- no experience: www.usajobs.gov/job/851497400
- some experience: www.usajobs.gov/job/851497300
- much experience: www.usajobs.gov/job/851496000

#Economics #EconSky

Core Economics institution bans Larry Summers for violating code of conduct standards. www.aeaweb.org/news/aea-sta...

Every IO economist's favorite weekend of the year!

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by....(1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment" which are "uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes" unlike SAT/ACT scores

Yale launches new program to serve as a hub for policy-relevant health economics research Co-directed by Janet Currie and Zack Cooper, the Tobin-Cowles Health Economics & Policy Program will catalyze rigorous economic scholarship that can directly inform policy.

We're launching the Tobin-Cowles Health Economics & Policy Program, a hub for policy-relevant health economics research at Yale.

Co-directed by Janet Currie & Zack Cooper, the Program will catalyze rigorous economic scholarship to directly inform policy: tobin.yale.edu/news/251117/...

The first Bush WH tried to gut wetland protections, but failed because of a major backlash (sparked by the main character of my new book) that included the head of Bush’s EPA. Now Trump’s EPA is trying to gut wetland protections and it’s barely news.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/c...

Update on California's Mystery Gasoline Surcharge: holding steady around $0.50 per gallon. In last 6 weeks, however, mostly due to higher spot prices, not downstream margins. Worrisome given one recent and one impending refinery closure. For context: energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/08/18/c...

Yale’s Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS) @yaledatascience.bsky.social is seeking applications for postdoctoral positions. These are cool, generously supported, competitive positions, expected to last 2-3 years, for independent scholars working on the foundations of data science.

This paper shows how exposure to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) during childhood affects women’s health outcomes in early-adulthood, as well as the health of their infants.

NEW in @nber.org by Janet Currie and Jessica Van Parys: nber.org/papers/w34464

Update your syllabus and stay on the frontier - it will increase your students’ wages. Epic work by my colleagues @barbarabiasi.com and @profsongma.bsky.social #linkoftheday

www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/...

If you missed the webinar last Friday on wood burning/harvesting, forest management, and carbon implications, the RSVP link below now has the slides and the recording. Feel free to download the papers at the link below as well.

🧵Words matter. We are experiencing a flood of unrestrained antisemitism and hate speech. As a survivor of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack, I know where this leads. We have to stop tolerating and normalizing antisemitism and all forms of bigotry.

www.cmfdata.org Great data drop! @rickhornbeck.bsky.social

White House nears deal to lower obesity drug prices for Medicare coverage The GLP-1 drugs, produced by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, have been credited with helping weight-loss, preventing diabetes and other positive effects.

This would be a big deal if it happens www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

wtf?

Economics Literature Search Full-text search across 15,000+ papers from top economics journals and NBER working papers. Track how empirical methods have evolved over time.

Dropping a beta version of this page while everyone is up and processing baseball!

This tool lets you search the full text of papers from the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal series, and over 30,000 NBER working papers.

paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

Reply to: Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management Timothy D. Searchinger, Steven Berry, Liqing Peng The critiqued study by two of the authors of this Reply uses the carbon harvest model (CHARM) to estimate carbon emissions from wood harvest as the carbon added to the atmosphere—fully accounting for silvicultural gains—relative to the carbon that forests would store if left alone. This comparison to no-human-activity is the standard approach for calculating emissions from burning oil, driving cars and other human actions, and is the same forestry-accounting approach used in land-use change models long relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Global Carbon Project and many other papers. In the accompanying Comment, Sohngen et al. reject this approach, arguing mainly that emissions of one activity should be compared with those in an economic counterfactual, which means the emissions produced by the economically estimated, most-likely alternative activities. Citing their previously published global timber model (GTM), they claim that new wood harvests “can reduce” atmospheric carbon, which means they are carbon negative. However, although economic models, when credible, can usefully project shifts in behaviour, they do not determine the emissions of these behaviours; by confusing emissions of one activity with emissions avoided by another, the approach by Sohngen et al. makes physical emissions disappear. We elaborate below and also explain how the GTM’s findings that economic forces offset new wood-use emissions by creating more forests stem from large misinterpretations of underlying studies (even by a factor of 75) and from modelling structures that largely assume their conclusions.

Does burning more wood lead to more forests & help the climate? In a new Nature paper, WRI & Yale researchers show such claims rely on flawed accounting and models, and misinterpret underlying studies.

Read the papers: rdcu.be/eNkXX

RSVP to a webinar 10/31, 9:30 ET: hub.wri.org/events/2025/...

The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales 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...

"Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers' electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22%..."

“Agriculture is really our biggest environmental problem.” A nice overview of my hot takes on organic, grass-fed, and other fake solutions. Props to @envdefensefund.bsky.social for standing by the science when a lot of green groups are following the zeitgeist.

worth.com/sustainable-...

Opinion | How to lose the 21st century, in three easy steps Trump is throwing away what could have been the next great American century.

America’s advantage in science made us rich, and kept us powerful. It’s why we have the most innovative companies, the most successful tech sector and the mightiest military.
Why is Trump trying to slaughter the golden goose?
wapo.st/41iUzAW

Vibe shift in the culture towards earnestness

Why are guinea-pigs the colours they are? Sewall's got a DAG for that.

We couldn't not rate this classic early DAG by our beloved collective granddagy, Sewall Wright.

14/10. Ten for the DAG, plus one for each cute guinea-pig node.

From Wright (1920) "The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in Determining the Piebald Pattern of Guinea-Pigs"

For a more reliable source to answer "what was the most foundational work in weak identification (and much more) over the past several decades?" I can think of no better place than the Cowles 2025 Conference on Econometrics Celebrating Don Andrews that I will attend next week.

Wow. This is the paper I have been waiting for. Mobile apps are brain rot, with meaningfully bad economic consequences for those who overuse them.

Next week, I'm teaching another round of my online Mixtape course on BLP-style demand estimation!

The sessions are hands-on and last time we had a ton of great questions. Sign up here: www.mixtapesessions.io/session/dema...

Every city that has driverless cars before driverless metros needs to hang its head in shame.