New blog post: LLMs are going to summarize your papers whether you like it or not — and they're going to drop your limitations every time.
Here's a proposal for how to fix that (and help with the reproducibility crisis at the same time!):
paulgp.com/2026/03/10/l...
Delighted to have Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde back on the pod this week. We cover demographic decline, the robustness of dollar dominance, AI, and whether his vast expertise defies comparative advantage! www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRvI...
I have a new working paper out today with Sean, David, and Abbie. It's something of an empirical user guide for people working with commonly used local labor demand shocks. A few key points...
doi.org/10.26509/frb...
As a PhD student, I was told that "seniors" are always really busy, though I speculated, I really wasn't sure how this materialized. I'm not yet SSJ3 Senior, just like baby-senior, but one way it materializes is "Death by 1000 cuts" ⬇️
Great paper, these are the sort of exercises I wish were more common in macro. Provides a way to answer how much can we relax assumptions before results no longer hold.
Transcripts from the Fed's 2020 policy meetings are out.
They cut rates to zero at the second straight emergency meeting on March 15.
Powell: "There is no useful purpose to be served in holding back today."
"W are not out of ammunition. Far from it." www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypoli...
There's been a lot of discussion on twitter on prediction vs. causal inference, and whether we will see a new frontier of ML able to vanquish the Lucas Critique. Spurred on by a coincidental(?) posting on arXiv, I spent my Christmas morning writing this whymacro.substack.com/p/learning-t...
Some evidence why consumers are still unhappy
on.ft.com/3M3EA5S
Global solutions with adaptive sparse grids are now implemented in Dynare.jl, thanks to @compsimon.bsky.social and team! This should substantially improve the ease of implementing fully nonlinear medium-scale macro models.
Excellent VSME talk by Jordi Gali, who provided a new perspective on monetary policy rules based on his Keynes Lectures and discussion at Jackson Hole of Emi Nakamura's paper. He makes a compelling case for rules for long-term real rates. Video here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrbH...
Can a central bank tighten monetary policy and actually see real interest rates FALL under monetary dominance?
My new research paper finds that under certain conditions, the answer is a surprising YES.
A thread on a monetary policy puzzle (1/10) #Economics #MonetaryPolicy #CentralBank
Tl,dr: "news" is sometimes a nebulous concept and pure rational expectations "has hands"
The paper claims that asymmetric information _alone_ cannot explain why monetary policy surprises are correlated with macro variables. Yet many papers build off the exact opposite premise. I thought that maybe this was a consequence of Karthik's model being static..but it's not
To my surprise, I have written another Substack on the Fed info effect.
I've read Karthik Sastry's excellent forthcoming AEJ many times but recently it dawned on me that one of his results seemed to contradict a well-established idea in this literature
whymacro.substack.com/p/fed-info-r...
Call for papers:
sites.lsa.umich.edu/rudib/wp-con...
Submit your work
#EconSky
📣 We are excited to share the program for the IM-TCD virtual seminar series 2025-26!
Would you like to join? Sign up here 👇:
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Nice short paper with a new way to demonstrate how critical assumptions about policy are for model dynamics
It was nice writing this blog post and not worrying about a character limit. I hope to do some more of these but it's tricky not to fall into the trap of tweaking everything and the balance of MB/MC of time spent being way off.
Original WP: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
My thoughts have been that the true "information effect" is not about better info but about vibes + institutional credibility. What I found supports this, or maybe it's just me forcing a confirmation bias. You can decide for yourself. I just hope the debate becomes more grounded
Justifications for the "central bank information effect" are largely abstract. But a new WP floats a tangible mechanism: the FOMC sometimes gets early access to important manufacturing data.
My first substack uses these claims to assess the broader debate
whymacro.substack.com/p/the-fed-in...
🧵It was a great pleasure to work with excellent colleagues across the @federalreserve.gov on a paper for the FOMC framework review. Thanks to my coauthors Travis Berge, Giuseppe Fiori, Francesca Loria, Molin Zhong. You can find the paper here:
www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds... 1/3
As far as what to infer from the paper, my initial impression is the evidence backing the overall claims is more suggestive than definitive.
Is it in bad taste to repost a critical thread word for word from twitter 🤔? Just in case I will link it here. x.com/paulbsqt/sta...
A much needed meta-analysis with an extensive replication repo to boot
Interested in top-notch research in monetary economics? Join us for this new online seminar series, co-hosted CEPR's Monetary Economics and Fluctuations program and our Center for Monetary Research! @ivanwerning.bsky.social will kick things off on Sep-4.
Sign up: cepr-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Another one to add -- IV estimation will be biased if our instrument is a function of multiple structural shocks. Evidence from Bauer and Swanson, Miranda-Agrippino, and the term structure paper from earlier in this thread suggest this is an issue with high-frequency MPS arxiv.org/abs/2208.11828
A final paper that captures the broad theme: there's nothing wrong with the premise "taking the literatures approach as given, here are some more implications". But there should be other work not taking the approach as given and "opening the black box" arxiv.org/abs/2505.12422
I have a related paper available on my website, any comments are very welcome and write about it down the road. These papers have really shaped virtually all my projects.
Many papers try to gauge if the effects of policy are non-linear by including various terms in a LP/VAR. This paper helps show when these approaches will be uncovering nonlinearities and what type (e.g., x^2 does not help you say anything about size)
x.com/pmbruera/sta...
This is a diagnostic we all should run. For example, take this gov spending series. Almost all of the weight is being put on positive shocks. So a LP/VAR with this series isn't really estimating the effects of general government spending, really it's spending _buildups_
