Thelonious Goerz

“Understanding Latino & Asian Panethnic & Ethnic Subgroup Residential Segregation”: @acrowell.bsky.social et al. recommend that researchers adopt the described measurement practices "to accurately assess patterns of ethnic group segregation.” @tamusoci.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Looks like a super interesting paper! Looking forward to reading.

ICYMI: New paper for causal effects with panel data, subsuming other approaches. We generate realistic synthetic data based on commonly studied datasets, showing our method substantially outperforms others and providing insight about what in the data-generating process corresponds to gains.

That seems totally plausible. N=1, but I know that Light Rail development in Seattle faced major opposition for years from different citizen’s groups which could be bc of perceived problems.

New working paper up on SocArxiv! osf.io/preprints/so.... I use the 1940 Census and linked mortality records in combination with an IV-design to study the causal effects of racial segregation on longevity. I show that segregation reduces both Black and White longevity.

So grateful for this office view!

Leniency Designs: An Operator's Manual We develop a step-by-step guide to leniency (a.k.a. judge or examiner instrument) designs, drawing on recent econometric literatures. The unbiased jackknife instrumental variables estimator (UJIVE) is...

Excited to post a new working paper with @instrumenthull.bsky.social and Michal Kolesár: arxiv.org/abs/2511.03572

Will post a thread on it soon, but if you're interested in judge/examiner designs, I think you'll find this guide very helpful!

A huge congratulations to DOCTOR Haowen Zheng, who defended a fantastic dissertation on how changes in family formation and in the spatial distribution of jobs in US affects who moves, where they move to, & who benefits most from moving.

Haowen starts a post-doc at Michigan's Stone Center in Jan.

Other academics are fighting (sometimes literally) one another to publish Nature papers. But I am just sitting here writing abstraction layers for probabilistic programming frameworks.

Mapping subnational gender gaps in internet and mobile adoption using social media data | PNAS The digital revolution has ushered in many societal and economic benefits. Yet access to digital technologies such as mobile phones and internet re...

New @pnas.org paper constructing subnational estimates of internet and mobile adoption by gender, including gender gaps, for 117 low- and middle- income countries from 2015 through 2025.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The pronatalists have done an excellent job of using bad demography to convince the legacy media that low birth rates are a crisis.

They are using bad demography to whitewash their sexism, racism, Christian nationalism, classism, & anti-LGBTQ sentiments.

It’s why my colleagues & I wrote this:

Congrats! This is huge! 🥳

Both the Brown and Columbia agreements require the universities to report the test scores and GPAs of applicants, admits, and matriculating students by race *and color,* among other attributes.

Wait, what? What's "color" doing in there?

A sociologist weighs in.

1/9

Used this as a reference for a working group discussion on family FE designs. Great paper and led to a generative discussion!

the destruction of chattel slavery is one of the great accomplishments in our nation's history and the reason conservatives hate celebrating it is because doing so legitimizes the black counter-narrative of the united states

I want to highlight 3 things from this excellent report:
1) Women's reproductive labor is too often the solution to "population problems."
2) Low birth rates aren't a rejection of children & parenthood.
3) Supporting families is a worthy goal in itself, even if policies don't raise birth rates. 1/

Sad that this has to be my first post here, but the gutting of the FSRDC program is disastrous for demographic research.

Internal migration in early adulthood, a critical life stage marked by frequent job transitions and demographic events, contributes to income disparities between married men and women. This study adopts a life course perspective to elucidate the development of this gender inequality pre- and post-migration. Using the NLSY79 data from 1979 to 2018 and an event studies model that leverages within-individual variations in both pre- and post-migration income trajectories relative to non-migrants, I observe a steadily growing migration premium for men over 15 years post-migration. By contrast, I show a prolonged migration penalty for women that peaks around five years after migration and lasts for a decade. While improved employment status accounts for about half of men’s migration income premium consistently over time, detachment from the labor market explains a smaller proportion of women’s migration income penalty mostly in the short term. Although occupational changes and fertility do not impact men's gains from migration, they account for women’s migration penalty in the long run. Ignoring pre-migration income trends underestimates income gains among male migrants and overestimates income losses among female migrants. These results emphasize the importance of temporal dynamics in family migration and gender inequality studies.

The honorable mention goes to Haowen Zheng, “Diverging Trajectories: Gendered Income Dynamics Pre- and Post-Family Migration.” 2/3

An example of the disruption to science caused by the NSF’s 15% overhead dictate: At the University of Washington, all newly awarded NSF grants are now on hold indefinitely with no advance spending allowed.

Just posted updated version of our DID textbook! We now have drafts of all chapters, including the one on general designs! Now you can tell your friends still on X that they are DID-outdated :-) Happy easter for those of you that celebrate it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Feeling thrilled to have successfully defended my M.A. thesis today to advance to Ph.D. candidacy!

Our Annual Review of Sociology article on conceptualizing and measuring structural racism is now available.

Get it while studying racism is still legal. @tyson-brown.bsky.social @pahoman.bsky.social

(also, lots of great articles are in this volume).

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences?

This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

Very excited to have this paper with @franciscaantman.bsky.social Bruce Weinberg, and Sgeng Qu out on the (positive!) long run effects of the @aeainformation.bsky.social Mentoring program.

www.nber.org/papers/w33689

these people are literally trying to destroy america’s future

30 Charts That Show How Everything Changed in March 2020 It can be easy to forget, or look away from, the pain and disruption of the pandemic. The numbers will be there to remind us.

Helpful NYT article showing 30 exclusion restriction violations for studies claiming covid is an instrument for their preferred x variable

nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/09/upshot/covid-lockdown-five-year-charts.html

the future of the democratic party is queer Last week, Gallup released new data on the demographics of LGBTQ+ folks in the United States. Tristan Bridges has a fantastic write-up here with nice visualizations. Some key highlights include the…

My rough guess is that about 1/3 of young Democrats identify as LGBTQ+. Keep that in mind when thinking about what issues folks are labeling a "distraction" - for young Dems especially, LGBTQ+ issues are not remotely niche. scatter.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/t...