Caroline Krafft

Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.

“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

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We are currently seeking organizational and individual support for our FY27 Funding Recommendation Letter and hope you will join us in asking for more robust funding for BLS. We are asking Congress to approve $754 million for BLS in FY27 which is a 5% increase over FY26. These funds will allow BLS to train new staff, implement delayed modernization efforts, and sustain response rates in multiple programs. We are accepting sign-ons from both organizations and individuals no later than COB Wednesday March 4. Please select the appropriate link below to read the full letter and sign-on.

Care about Americans, employment, earnings, consumer prices, your local or our national economy?

@usbls.bsky.social empowers us to better recognize these & make decisions.

Consider signing onto Friends of BLS's new letter to Congress re its budget.

And spread the word.

Daron @DAcemogluMIT uses his language and authority to weigh in pointing out to the possibility of a breakdown of knowledge transmission and the reduction of the stock of skill as consequence of AI. In some societies, this has already happened in the world of "physical skills"...

📢 New paper accepted at Economics of Education Review by Bedoya, Hoyos & Estrada: "Rule-based civil service: Evidence from a nationwide teacher reform in Mexico"

#EconSky #EconomicsOfEducationReview

@ckcarruthers.bsky.social
@tyleransom.bsky.social
@sandramcnally.bsky.social

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The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing.

Happy to have contributed to this along w/ @karenguzzo.bsky.social @marthajbailey.bsky.social & Melissa Kearney. My favorite from Karen: “We spent decades shaming women 4 having kids under the wrong circumstances, 4 not having their ducks in a row. Now they are holding up their end of the bargain.”

"When the dollar falls in value... it takes more of our dollars to buy stuff from abroad." That’s the basic math of a weaker currency: imports cost more, and so do the everyday items with imported parts. The upside is that our exports are a better buy for foreign buyers.

Students on the Job Market: 2024-2025 Graduate Placement Data | APSA Data on the Profession The 2024-2025 APSA Graduate Placement Survey was conducted from November-December 2025. Collecting data from 31 participating institutions that provided data about 181 doctoral students on the job market, the survey gathered information about the job placements, demographics, and fields of study of doctoral students on the job market during the 2024-2025 academic year. Despite a lower overall placement rate than in previous years, broad placement trends remain the same, with candidates with PhD in hand being much more likely to successfully place and a majority of candidates specializing in American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

Students on the Job Market: 2024-2025 Graduate Placement Data | APSA Data on the Profession

The 2024-2025 APSA Graduate Placement Survey was conducted from November-December 2025. Collecting data from 31 participating institutions that provided data about 181 doctoral students on the job market,…

🚨 A defining moment for global health data.

The termination of the #USAID-supported Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program has wide-ranging consequences. We reflect on the collapse and argue what should come next in a new PNAS: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…

📊 9,000+ studies

Why Is Fertility So Low in High-Income Countries? (Forthcoming Article) - We consider why fertility has fallen in recent decades in almost all high-income countries. We begin by documenting declining total fertility and rising childlessness across cohorts, highlighting the need to focus on cohort versus period-specific fertility rates. With this motivation, we propose a conceptual model of fertility determination that augments the standard Becker model with an explicit role for social norms and cohort-specific contextual factors, including broad social and economic influences and an expanded set of consumption and lifestyle options. We posit that these forces have led to “shifting priorities,” reducing the centrality of parenthood. We then review existing empirical evidence –and conclude that the decline in fertility likely reflects a complex mix of changing norms around work, parenting, gender roles, and leisure consistent with our cohort-based conceptual framework. We conclude with suggestions for future research and a brief discussion of policy implications.

Forthcoming in the JEL: "Why Is Fertility So Low in High-Income Countries?" by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine.

These dogs are having the time of their lives following this week's historic blizzard in the Northeast. Please enjoy. 14/10 for all

Truth

FRED Blog:

State and metro employment: Fourth quarter 2025

fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2026/02/stat...

Altmetric from: https://nature.altmetric.com/details/187977106/twitter showing 1 X post from an account with 2,567 followers.

Altmetric for bsky from: https://nature.altmetric.com/details/187977106/bluesky saying Altmetric has seen 136 Bluesky posts from 126 Bluesky users, with an upper bound of 530,794 followers.

Some academic papers show everyone how people are posting about the paper, using a tool called Altmetric. Here's the how our new paper reached folks on twitter vs. bluesky. No comparison. Twitter is gone gone. Deader than the Monroeville Mall in The Dawn of Dead. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

ICE detained a Minnesota teen, labeled him an ‘unaccompanied minor,’ and lost him The Trump administration is apprehending and designating immigrant kids as “unaccompanied,” even as their parents in the U.S. search for them.

ICE agents grabbed a 16-year-old asylum seeker--which they aren't supposed to do

They kept him from his parents -which they aren't supposed to do

They shipped him out of state, to a Christian ministry, which they aren't supposed to do.

Then they *lost* him.

www.startribune.com/how-ice-labe...

What I Saw at a Maternity Ward in Kenya After the U.S. Cut Off Food and Foreign Aid Photographs tell a story of two mothers determined to help their babies gain enough weight to leave the hospital — only to face little to no food again.

A maternity ward doctor donated his own blood during surgery to keep a pregnant patient alive.

One woman gained fewer than 10 pounds over her entire pregnancy.

Another collapsed and had seizures during labor.

(Published Dec. 2025)

call for experimental economics conference 15-19 June 2026 for PhD students in economics

NEW Summer School in Theory-based Experimental Economics + follow-on conference @Caltech 15-19 June 2026
Please spread the word.

"Just imagine for a moment I call you… you better do exactly what I want or I'm going to impose… a 10% tariff that will last for 150 days and then go away." That’s not leverage; that’s a marshmallow test.

What problem is Trump's new global 10% tariff meant to solve?

If it's about leverage, ask: How much leverage do you get from a tariff that disappears in 150 days?

If it's onshoring: Who builds new factories based on tariff that disappear before the factory is built?

It's a tax. That's all it is.

Our @voxdev.bsky.social blog about our recent EJ paper that develops a new method to analyze open-ended qualitative interviews with large samples without using LLMs (which we show can have extremely biased results with data like ours).

Women’s participation in skills training Pakistan is constrained primarily by social and safety barriers, rather than preferences or the ability to monetise skills.

Read today's article to learn more:

Do disaster-relief cash transfers trap people in risky areas, or help them adapt? Disaster relief can discourage people from adapting to future disasters – for example, by reducing incentives to relocate. But in low-income settings, cash relief can also ease liquidity constraints and enable adaptation. Evidence from Pakistan’s 2010 floods shows that both of these forces exist but that they offset each other, so that cash relief does not cause more people to stay in disaster-prone areas.

🆕 Do disaster-relief cash transfers trap people in risky areas, or help them adapt?

Today on VoxDev, Muhammad Bin Khalid (Harvard) & Martin Mattsson (NUS) discuss how disaster relief enabled climate adaptation in Pakistan: https://ow.ly/XAgU50YiFE7

This week in development economics at VoxDev: 20/02/2026 This week we featured research on women's mobility, test scores, global hunger and more!

This week we featured research on women's mobility, test scores, global hunger and more!

Read a summary of this work here: https://voxdev.org/topic/week-development-economics-voxdev-20022026

Minnesota suburbs see ‘stealthier’ tactics as ICE stays active Minnesota residents and lawmakers say the promised drawdown has not materialized, and they are seeing ICE use more covert tactics to continue operations across Twin Cities suburbs.

Minnesota residents and lawmakers say the promised drawdown has not materialized, and they are seeing ICE use more covert tactics to continue operations across Twin Cities suburbs.

By @ncsscibelli.bsky.social

Gaza death toll for first 16 months of war far higher than reported, says peer-reviewed study Lancet Global Health research suggests more than 75,000 killed in period, 25,000 more than announced at the time

Multiple research groups are converging on estimates of those killed in Gaza. These estimates are considerably higher than the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, suggesting that the latter were not biased but did miss a fraction of deaths.
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Sudan: Evidence in El-Fasher reveals genocidal campaign, targeting non-Arab communities, UN Fact-Finding Mission says GENEVA  – The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan said in a new report today that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) carried out a coordinated campaign of de

🇸🇩 Important on Sudan this week:

(1) The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission has found that the RSF has "carried out a coordinated campaign of destruction against non-Arab communities in and around El-Fasher, the hallmarks of which point to genocide" www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

Let me explain what this genuinely EVIL memo does. The admin is doubling down on its plan to arrest, detain, and interrogate tens of thousands of legally present refugees; people already vetted who’ve lived here legally for 1+ year.

Hundreds were arrested in Minnesota before a court blocked this.

💸🚨I am hiring 2 Postdocs for my ERC-funded project SOCDEBT on #debt dynamics across countries. One position: #SocialStratification + strong quantitative skills. The other: qualitative research and #EconomicSociology. waitkus.github.io/SOCDEBT/ 🚨💸

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

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Edu policy peeps!

I'm co-chairing the edu section for APPAM 2026 conference with @doughesm.bsky.social @taylorodle.bsky.social and @brittanyvasquez.bsky.social - if you would be interested in reviewing submissions, please let us know! We're aiming for about ~10 per reviewer.

@appam.bsky.social