Brendon McConnell

what a little sweetheart. Loved the end

this has a good overview of the recent Fiscal Studies symposium to which @papiteide.bsky.social and I contributed. Our paper here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/..., more on the symposium here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14755890...

Fiscal Studies | IFS Public Economics Journal | Wiley Online Library Click on the title to browse this journal

Are you preparing a randomized controlled trial? Don't miss a special symposium of Fiscal Studies (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1475...) with three articles on power and sample size calculations. (1/3) @theifs.bsky.social

that little nose

five year old brains are creative places, pretty unconstrained. I like it

1/4 is worse than I expected.

i will likely have to bail on 1 and 4.
on 2. is it at least Timbaland produced? maybe thats the big pimpin link. I will go for "get your freak on".

irrespective, I really enjoyed this game

"st. patrick's day" -- has to be jump around
"the chinese music one" -- I wanted this to be big pimpin, but the comment says "she", so I'm going with something by Missy Elliott, I dont not why
"the song for yessing" -- Yeah, Usher
"the baby song" -- Nelly and Kelly dilemma came to mind first

nice little thread of our recent work highlighting the crime-reducing benefit of combining hotspot policing methods with spatial network models

loads around Reigate, Surrey area. They came early this year too

wow, you really nailed this Grace

really like the weaving approach here -- it's super striking. pretty effective too for multi-modal areas

thanks Scott

Universal Cash and Crime Abstract. We estimate the effects of universal cash transfers on crime from Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual lump-sum payment to all Alaska residents. We find a 14% increase in substance-ab...

That's useful to know @scottsantens.com -- thank-you. Do you know of any academic articles I can cite for that? My main reference for substance use going up is doi.org/10.1162/rest...

can yield the widely documented benefits of UBI on property crime reductions without the jumps in substance use.

conditionality re: drug use that donors face. One way that we have thought of this is that plasma donation income mimics a conditional cash transfer. Our findings suggest that some level of conditionality on UBI schemes

(e.g., the Stockton, CA experiment gave UBI recipients $500 per month). Work on crime and UBI in Alaska finds a drop in property crime, but spikes in substance use. We don't find the latter.

That relates to the aspect of this setting that most caught my interest, namely the layer of

The main mechanism appears to be financial -- monthly donation income can be $400 for regular donors.

The income one can receive from regular donation places plasma income in a similar magnitude to some of the recent UBI experiments in the US

First draft of a new paper out today [link: brendonmcconnell.github.io/pdf/plasma.p..., where we document the impact of plasma donation centers on crime in US cities. We find large and sustained effects of these centers on crime, notably property crime and drugs possession. Short thread below..

Tony Blair is a climate lobbyist for Big Tech and Big Polluters How the media got the story completely wrong.

The Tony Blair Institute's report on climate change is pro-fossil fuels, pro-CCS, pro-AI, pro-carbon markets, pro-nature-based solutions, and pro-nuclear.

These are not solutions to the climate crisis.

But they are everything his clients are asking of him.

reddmonitor.substack.com/p/tony-blair...

her little ears

love you Chance

Network Economics Conference and Summer School 2025

I'm organizing a two-day summer school on networks (10-11 September) at Monash University where Matt Jackson (@JacksonmMatt ), Sanjeev Goyal, and myself will teach a 12 hours course. It is free and anybody interested can apply here: www.monash.edu/business/eve...

link to the paper: brendonmcconnell.github.io/pdf/crime-KP...

In the paper we use London as a case study and show that disrupting crime in the top 10% of key player neighbourhoods reduces crime by 10.7% more than merely targeting the top 10% areas by crime. Same resources+better targeting => a substantial increase in police effectiveness. [3/3]

Key idea: if police are trying to reduce total crime, they should target not the highest crime areas, but rather "key player neighbourhoods"-- areas, which by dint of their spatial connectivity to other key crime areas, play a central role in the spatial diffusion of crime. [2/3]

first draft out today: how to use the spatial network structure of crime in a city to improve upon the standard hot spot policing approach, joint with @corrradogiulietti.bsky.social and Yves Zenou. [1/3]

After a long time of battling with Stata, I finally figured out how to change the aspect on a cmogram graph (I wanted a square format). Sharing in case useful. The line after the cmogram command, I typed "graph display, xsize(1) ysize (1)". Before/After pic attached.

Figure 2 in this paper is amazing -- what a great visualisation

Exposure to air pollution in England, 2003–23 | Institute for Fiscal Studies We set out how air pollution (PM2.5) has changed across England and explore inequalities by ethnicity, income deprivation, region and age.

Our IFS report on air pollution is out! Good news first: air pollution (PM2.5) has HALVED in England since 2003, with a big drop during Covid. There's no rebound post Covid, somewhat puzzlingly. We use DEFRA data, monitoring station data shows the same thing. (1/7)
ifs.org.uk/publications...