Juan S. Morales

Sharing our recently published short policy article in EconPol Forum. We discuss how platform design and social incentives interact to amplify divisive content, and how a minority of users and inauthentic activity (like bots) can distort perceptions of opinion: www.ifo.de/en/econpol/p...

A Stepping Stone Approach to Norm Transitions (July 2025) - We propose a model to study when an intermediate action can serve as a stepping stone that enables the elimination of a harmful norm. While the intermediate action may facilitate the fir...

And the dev keynote at the CEAs this year was also related to this

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Misperceived Social Norms: Women Working Outside the Home in Saudi Arabia (October 2020) - We show that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support women working outside the home (WWOH) and substantially underestimate support by other similar me...

The seminal work on this is www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=... and there is a review here www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Lots of good work in this area of "correcting misperceptions" and many which do find both attitudinal and behavioral changes

It's all great but this may be the best part: "He even went as far as to deny someone looking to board with an expired bus pass," police said in the news release.

"Social Media and Political Polarization in Canada: Perspectives from Political Science, Economics and Psychology" live blog
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📢 New publication! 📢
Does political violence backfire in mature democracies?
In this article, @kkrakows.bsky.social (@kingscollegelondon.bsky.social) and @juansemorales.bsky.social (Wilfrid Laurier University) examine how the January 6 US Capitol Attack affected public support for US politicians.

Political violence in democracies: An Introduction - Andrea Ruggeri, Ursula Daxecker, Neeraj Prasad, 2025 It is well established that democracies experience less political violence than autocracies. Paradoxically, however, this widely accepted fact has led scholars ...

🚨🚨🚨Announcing a special issue on “Political Violence in Democracies” published by @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social and edited by @andrearuggeri.bsky.social, U Daxecker, and me. In this very long 🧵, I will introduce the special issue with its 14 articles. doi.org/10.1177/0022...

Legal Reforms, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from Mexico | Economía LACEA Journal

New article in Economía/LACEA: Legal Reforms, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from Mexico. Gustavo J. Bobonis, Roberto Castro and Juan S. Morales study the relationship between divorce laws, CCT programs, and IPV in rural Mexico. economia.lse.ac.uk/en/articles/...

The Laurier Economics Department’s faculty at are always doing great work, so it's been lovely to see so many getting recognized for their accomplishments in the last few weeks. The announcements are already out there, but it's worth collecting them all in one place. students.wlu.ca/programs/laz...

Congratulations @nikolaimcook.bsky.social, recipient of the 2024 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Economic Science!

ontariosuniversities.ca/university-i...

If you're attending the 2025 @canadianeconoassoc.bsky.social Meeting this weekend in Montreal, keep an eye out for one of the 13 Laurier econ faculty that'll be there!

This paper was the first project I ever started working on and the last chapter of my dissertation. It took long but it's finally published! 🎉 We study how divorce laws and conditional cash transfers interact as determinants of intimate partner violence in Mexico: economia.lse.ac.uk/articles/502...

U.S. Applicants | Lazaridis School of Business and Economics

At the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, we made a decision few weeks back to hold applications for grad study open for people in the US.

www.wlu.ca/academics/fa...

Ernst Fehr

Juan S. Morales

21 May CeDEx will host 2 seminars: 1st will be @juansemorales.bsky.social of @wilfridlaurieruni.bsky.social 1-2pm A40 Sir Clive Granger Building. 2nd (joint with @uniofnottingham.bsky.social Sch of Econ Senior Academic Seminar Series) Ernst Fehr of @econ.uzh.ch 3-4.30pm in A40 tinyurl.com/2aptkyjm

Good predictions so far...

Incredible work. And sadly something that could be easily weaponized by an authoritarian government. Honestly I think the researchers have to consider the potential trade-offs of publicly releasing this data given the current political climate.

Possibly the dumbest of the many dumb plagiarism claims
nationalpost.com/news/mark-ca...

Not working politically...

Canada is in an amazing position to attract as much world class international talent as it is willing to accomodate.

Sharing News Left and Right: Frictions and Misinformation on Twitter Abstract. On 20 October 2020, prior to the US presidential election, Twitter modified its user interface for sharing social media posts. In an effort to re

Friction is often proposed as a way to stem the spread of misinformation. This 2024 study suggests that it *does* decrease reshares of misinfo, but there's a big downside; it may reduce reshares of high-factual information even more.
academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

Why Dean Karlan, chief economist of USAID, resigned on Tuesday He was hired in 2022 so the aid agency could get 'more bang for our buck' with its projects. He tried to reach out to help in the rebuilding of the agency. On Tuesday he tendered his resignation.

Dean Karlan's job at USAID was LITERALLY to improve the efficiency of its programs.

DOGE is clearly not actually after cutting fraud and waste. And its actions will clearly make the US weaker while also making the world a worse place.

www.npr.org/sections/goa...

No words. This is absolutely horrendous news

If Canadian universities had a bit of vision, they would be launching a Manhattan project to poach every US-based top researcher. And the federal government would be drastically expanding tri-council funding and creating an expedited review process for those holding NSF and similar grants.

The WLU econ dept is excited to be hosting Economic Outlook 2025, which will focus on immigration in Canada. We have two exciting speakers: Pedro Antunes from the Conference Board of Canada and Jennifer Hunt from Rutgers University. Register now to save your seats! www.eventbrite.ca/e/economic-o...

bsky.app/profile/trav...

one more go.bsky.app/UhWxdmh

Bluesky is emerging as the new platform for science - Mike Young Academy Scientific Twitter is about to find its true successor. And it is not X. This, our latest release, shows that the Bluesky network of scientists is growing — and growing.

A mapping of how Bluesky is becoming the new Scientific Twitter

mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

You can now list your Bluesky account in your RePEc profile, like you already could for Mastodon and Twitter. Log in at the RePEc Author Service, click on "contacts", enter it and save. It will be listed on your profile at IDEAS after the next nightly refresh.

authors.repec.org

#econsky #RePEc

Could you add me? 😃

Plot of engagement versus time for the same post on Bluesky and Twitter shows significantly higher engagement on Bluesky.

as an experiment, I posted the same post to twitter and bluesky.

here is the time series of engagements (sum of comments, reposts, likes) from the two platforms.

Note that I have 39K followers on twitter and 7K here, so engagement per follower here is more than 10 times higher here on bluesky.