Rohan Sandhu

Before the Booker Prize gets announced today, here’s my ranking of the shortlisted novels:
1. Flesh
2. Audition
3. The Rest of Our Lives
4. Flashlight
5. The Land in Winter
6. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

(But #6 is probably going to win)

Official publication day www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shared-pro...

Currently reading @drodrik.bsky.social’s new book, releasing in a few weeks.

Join us for a launch discussion with Dani Rodrik, @chatibbasri.bsky.social, Rebecca Henderson, & @johncassidysays.bsky.social, on October 29, at Harvard Kennedy School.

Register here: www.hks.harvard.edu/events/share...

Really interesting case study on transformation support in a 🇩🇪 industrial region. Here's just one feature: “The final design reflects an intentional choice to avoid setting legacy sectors and new industries against one another... 1/

In a new case study, Sebastian Buck and I unpack the origins & functioning of a €3 billion investment instrument established by the German state of Saarland. Since 2022, the fund has made investments with the twin aims of stabilizing existing industries and enabling long-term transformation⬇️

The US Place-Based Policy Supply Chain 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...

It depends on whether you’re defining capacity at the level of a place or an institution. For the former, I’d think in terms of the range of functions that need to exist to implement federal policies (that’s the lens I’ve used in this piece). See also a recent paper: www.nber.org/books-and-ch...

An Abundance of Capacity (SSIR) Optimizing for outcomes will require building out a range of local public and private institutions.

@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social & @dkthomp.bsky.social's Abundance has become a Rorschach test among policy analysts w/ much discussion focusing on the impediments that government may have imposed upon itself. But beyond that conversation is a more expansive state capacity project ssir.org/articles/ent...

An Abundance of Capacity (SSIR) Optimizing for outcomes will require building out a range of local public and private institutions.

"Evidently, the state capacity needed to generate this abundance won’t just be a top-down federal imperative...We need to take an Everything Everywhere All at Once approach to building the institutional capacity required for an abundance of economic prosperity." @ssir.org ssir.org/articles/ent...

An Abundance of Capacity (SSIR) Optimizing for outcomes will require building out a range of local public and private institutions.

"Evidently, the state capacity needed to generate this abundance won’t just be a top-down federal imperative...We need to take an Everything Everywhere All at Once approach to building the institutional capacity required for an abundance of economic prosperity." @ssir.org ssir.org/articles/ent...

An Abundance of Capacity (SSIR) Optimizing for outcomes will require building out a range of local public and private institutions.

@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social & @dkthomp.bsky.social's Abundance has become a Rorschach test among policy analysts w/ much discussion focusing on the impediments that government may have imposed upon itself. But beyond that conversation is a more expansive state capacity project ssir.org/articles/ent...

An Abundance of Capacity (SSIR) Optimizing for outcomes will require building out a range of local public and private institutions.

"The state capacity needed to generate this abundance won’t just be a top-down federal imperative. It’ll involve building out the capabilities of a range of local public and private institutions, the system hubs and their spokes."

New piece from @rohansandhu.bsky.social

“Mapping the AI economy” My new report w/ @shriyared.bsky.social @brookings.edu www.brookings.edu/articles/map...

@shiraovide.bsky.social @profhicks.bsky.social @nickbunker.bsky.social @berkeleyolab.bsky.social @pkrugman.bsky.social @kevinroose.com @conorsen.bsky.social

Absolutely no one:

Me: here are my best 10 movies of the 21st century:

(And 5 more: The Lobster, The Squid and the Whale, No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight, LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring)

Kinda surprised about Tár being so low, tbh. But maybe too recent.

. @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social: "I worry about a politics that often sees only problems of corporate & oligarchic control. That is a politics with so totalizing a theory of power that it has a lost a clear view of policy... That is a world in which the left will fail, both substantively & politically"

It was very invigorating to be at - and help organize - the 25th anniversary celebrations of the MPA/ID program. Some reflections:
www.linkedin.com/posts/rohans...

Pre-doc opening:

Come work with @harvardrte.bsky.social on research about place-based policies, industrial policy, and local labor markets with Gordon Hanson, @drodrik.bsky.social, and the rest of our great team!

#EconRA #EconSky

Folks in the Boston area, we (@harvardrte.bsky.social) are hosting a panel discussion tomorrow with regional leaders at the forefront of building tech ecosystems in Colorado and Wyoming, Chicago, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sign up here: www.hks.harvard.edu/events/ameri...

The Reimagining the Economy Project is now on Bluesky! Follow our work here ⬇️

Reimagining the Economy is an economics-centered program based at the Harvard Kennedy School. We work on local labor market, industrial, and productive development policies in the US & around the world. We combine rigorous research with practitioner insight.
www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/wien...

Excited to share v1 of our new paper on the Economics of Digital Public Infrastructure.
This work provides a conceptual framework for thinking about how to measure the ways infrastructure creates value.

Real privilege to work with @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social

t.co/ENfNTMTgdU

"The bedrocks of successful climate action are limits on greenhouse gas emissions & cooperation with countries where emissions are growing fastest. A myopic & imperialistic focus on domestic energy production will take the world in the opposite direction"

From @ifp.bsky.social's Brian Potter: where do Nobel Prize winners come from? | would be interesting to unpack how these trends correlate with public R&D investments, especially during and post WWII in the US www.construction-physics.com/p/who-wins-n...

.@emollick.bsky.social, @raffasadun.bsky.social, et al study 776 P&G employees & find large effects of #AI on collaboration & expertise: individuals w/ AI match the performance of teams without AI, produce more balanced solutions, & report positive emotions on the job papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The "supply chain" framing allows us to unpack the process, the rules, intermediary institutions through which "horizontally-differentiated policy actions" are designed, funded, and implemented within "vertically structured policy domains"

We discuss supply chains for 6 domains: strategy and planning, business recruitment and retention, small business support, community redevelopment, workforce development, and technological innovation. Across all of these domains, policies are implemented via a range of local intermediaries

Need to read, but the idea of place-based policy “supply chains” seems extremely helpful. Especially in a v centralised country like the UK 👇👇👇

Finally, today's institutions and rules are an accretion of over 150 years of innovations and updates to policies. We trace this history - from the creation of land grant colleges in the 1860s to New Market Tax Credits, Empowerment Zones, Opportunity Zones, & Bidenomics in the last couple of decades

Gordon Hanson, @drodrik.bsky.social, & my chapter for @nber.org's upcoming volume on place-based policy. We discuss the history of innovations in place-based policies in the US & unpack the "supply chains" through which these policies are implemented in different domains | www.nber.org/papers/w33511

+ Can we change people's incentives? Previous zoning regulations were instituted by coalitions of elites, as
@yappelbaum.bsky.social writes in #Stuck. Do such elite motivations (w.r.t. immigration, race, class) eventually find other ways to creep into policy even if we get rid of zoning? (5/5)