Proud to see our new paper shared by the journal! Many thanks to my co-author, Scott. Using a rich dataset, we estimate productivity at the firm-product level. A method we hope can be used by other researchers as more detailed datasets become available.
#EconSky #Productivity #Trade

Other countries have agency & domestic politics, too 🇨🇦

Not sure how many people realize that battery storage already supplies 30% of California’s electricity demand at peak.

Batteries aren’t the future — they’re here now.

Retrieve and work with public Statistics Canada data tables in R Searches for, accesses, and retrieves Statistics Canada data tables, as well as individual vectors, as tidy data frames. This package enriches the tables with metadata, deals with encoding issues, all...

Cansim v0.4.2 is now on CRAN. It comes with a significant update on how to access data by coordinate with an eye to greatly simplify partial table download.
It comes with a new function to create "table templates" as an easy way to filter for variables of interest and then download just that subset.

Fixed-effects estimators, pretty much like the part of the econometrician's toolbox developed before 1970s, originated in agricultural econ: a nice history of Yair Mundlak's (theoretical and applied) contributions by M. Bellemare & @dlmillimet.bsky.social

pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

#econsky

Great thread!
There's a big difference between trade deals and trade agreements. Trade deals are limited, short term, and often superficial (remember IPEF?). Trade agreements are comprehensive, long term, substantive, and require Congressional approval. US isn't doing the latter.

Excellent thread and podcast about the challenges to Britain's free trade policy in 1903....

Exclusive | Trump Advisers Took Advantage of Navarro’s Absence to Push for Tariff Pause The alliance between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick illustrates how fast things can change inside the White House.

Would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: tariff pause came when Navarro stepped out for a short meeting and Bessent/Lutnick talked trump into pausing and tweeting it immediately. Yes, Sen Murkowski, "We are all afraid".
www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Kyle Butts Kyle Butts -- Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics

kylebutts.com/blog/2025-04...

A short blog post for efficient stats coding. All about the importance of dimensionality when doing matrix operations ft. 100x speed-up of my code

This should be legal across every neighbourhood in expensive cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Not just near transit.

If Canada's going to reach goals like doubling homebuilding rates or building 3 million homes by 2030, cities can't continue to ban apartments like these on most of the land.

After being an editor for 6.5 years (4 REStud; 2.5 JEEA), I have accumulated a few suggestions that can help you avoid unnecessary rejections.

This, from my colleague
Brent Neiman says it all.

Trump admin used the results from his paper to justify tariff rates. Except they used the completely wrong number.

Staggering 🤯

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/o...

This is remarkably close to what we had six days ago. The average tariff rate of most European nations was about 1%.

TIL how to download census data (www2.census.gov) super simply.

Finder: Go > Connect to Server > ftp://ftp2.census.gov/. Login as guest and 🤯

I'm seeing a huge spike in interest in tariffs from people who normally don't work in the economics of international trade. Here are a few useful things to know about them. (1/14)

Has eliminating the federal retail carbon tax lowered gasoline prices? Yes.

With two days of data now, here's my estimate of the effect. Drop appears to fully reflect the tax change. (Note: no change CTax in QC, so that's a nice comparator.) #cdnecon #cdnpoli

When whites and minorities drive at identical speeds (according to objectively measured data from Lyft) Florida police are 24-33% more likely to issue speeding citations to minority drivers and charge them 23-34% greater fines.

These are not small effects!

Carbon pricing and the elasticity of CO2 emissions Using newly constructed sector-specific carbon price data, we study the response of CO2 emissions to carbon pricing policies for a cross-country panel…

Today the BC carbon tax has been removed. It's unfortunate that a simple climate policy had become so politicized.

Talk about ironic timing: our paper on the CO2 response to carbon pricing just came out in the April issue of Energy Economics. Hot off the press, cold in the policy grave. #Econsky

Under a reciprocal tariff system, instead of a universal one, Trump “might very well create a system where tariffs are lowered, not raised,” said Stephen Moore, a first-term Trump senior economic adviser and tariff skeptic.

Use a heat pump or electric vehicle in B.C.? You might want to change how you get charged for power use | CBC News B.C. Hydro is now offering flat rate and time-of-day billing options, in addition to its default tiered system.

Just switched. Estimated to save a couple hundred a year (I have a heat pump and EV) www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #bcpoli

Started, Going.
The spring Econ 101 course gets more exciting every day.

Chart of U.S. Corporate Profits in the Past 20 Years

This chart shows corporate profits over the last 20 years, raising the question: Are rising prices mainly due to inflation, or are corporations increasing prices beyond inflation? #econsky

On Saturday, batteries set a new record in ERCOT, supplying 9% of power on an evening w/ high thermal outages & low wind. Prices spiked to near the max for 5 minutes, 4,300 megawatts of storage surged onto the grid (and demand went down ~2,000 MW) & things went back to normal. (h/t @gridstatus.io

Interesting observation. Do you have any idea why?

Some of our instructors tried using images of questions instead of text for their online quizzes to prevent the use of ChatGPT. That strategy is no longer effective 🤷‍♂️

Pre-Doctoral Fellow/Research Technician Opportunities - Vancouver School of Economics Join the Vancouver School of Economics: Pre-Doctoral Fellow/Research Technician Opportunities The Vancouver School of Economics (VSE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is excited to announce...

We’re hiring predocs at VSE with a start date of summer 2025. Come work with me on industrial policy and industrialization past and present. Not your thing? A number of my wonderful colleagues are also hiring! Listing is here: economics.ubc.ca/news/pre-doc...

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA" (http://www.alldayta.com), a product @joshgans.bsky.social and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x

The Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD observations to firm-level data drawn from several large Census Bureau surveys. The resulting Longitudinal Employer, Owner, and Financing (LEOF) database contains more than 3 million observations at the firm-year level with information about start-up financing, current financing, owner demographics, ownership structure, profitability, and owner aspirations – all linked to annual firm-level employment data since the firm hired its first employee. Using the LEOF database, we document trends in owner demographics and financing patterns and investigate how these business characteristics relate to firm-level employment outcomes.

A line chart titled "Figure 1. Distribution of Firm Four-Year Growth Rates, 2002 to 2018 (Employment Weighted)." The x-axis represents the percentile of employment growth (ranging from 0 to 99), while the y-axis shows the average annual percent employment change (ranging from -200% to 200%).

📈📉New Census Working Paper: "Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database" by J. David Brown, Steven J. Davis, Lucia Foster (@lucia-econ.bsky.social), John Haltiwanger (@jchaltiwangerum.bsky.social), and John Sabelhaus www.census.gov/library/work...

I've now turned the BBVA-EEA Lecture I gave in San Antonio in January and in Madrid this week into a working paper: scholar.harvard.edu/sites/schola...

The paper will come out in the Journal of the European Econ. Assoc. some time next year, but it's not a final version yet. Comments most welcome!

December 12th is the deadline to cancel your hotel reservations for the AEAs without penalty! Striking hotel housekeepers, servers, and other workers have asked us not to sleep, eat, or meet at striking hotels.

There is still plenty of space at nearby non-striking hotels: www.fairhotel.org