David Powell

🎉Introducing Dr. David Powell as a new Senior Fellow at Penn LDI!

Dr. Powell is a health economist with research on the opioid crisis, population aging, working conditions, and end-of-life care.

Learn more about his work: https://ldi.upenn.edu/fellows/fellows-directory/david-powell-phd

Is Claude or ChatGPT better at writing the part of the roadmap that says the last section of the paper will conclude?

I did a quick cost-benefit analysis to understand why schools delayed opening by two hours today. I estimated the benefit to be about $0 while the costs were over $9 trillion.

Imperfect Synthetic Controls The synthetic control method assumes the existence of a perfect synthetic control, which cannot exist if the outcomes are functions of transitory shocks with nonzero asymptotic variance and may not e....

New research: LDI Fellow @davidpowell.bsky.social discussed imperfect synthetic controls in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.70035

Ugh my kid’s school is teaching them about triangles without even referencing DWL!

CVS should name their smaller stores which take up less room CSV.

Quasi-experiment alert: There are multiple laws of large numbers, adopted at different times.

One reason to not get a PhD is that it permanently excludes you from all predoc jobs.

Always read the “exclusions apply” fine print. It’s full of possible instruments.

Every roll of toilet paper is 6 rolls of toilet paper.

Claude Code is amazing!

(Disclaimer: I’ve never used it, but it seems like legally everyone has to post this?)

My New Year’s Resolution for 2026 is to have the most supportive editors and reviewers imaginable.

I know it’s a little late but I’m peaking at what some of my pretrends will look like in the future and I really need someone in North Dakota to earn $1 million before midnight.

Write down what policies you’re most excited about for 2026. When you’re doing a diff-in-diff in a few years, you can consult the list. If that policy isn’t on the list, you can rule out anticipation effects.

Get excited — 2026 will be the year that your paper finally suffers its third-to-last rejection, assuring publication in 2032.

Traditional economics teaches that there are finite time and travel costs that people are willing to pay to wait for you.

But (Richard) Marxist economics provides an alternative perspective.

A log cabin is equal to no cabins.

Economist watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure:
They solved the age, period, cohort collinearity problem!

It’s tradition to open one present on Christmas Eve to help spread out your deadweight losses.

Normalize administering anesthesia to the parents too when their kid is having surgery.

Help the environment. If your kid has been bad this year, get them a solar panel instead of coal for Christmas.

6% of parenting is carrying around food that your kids say they will finish later though but you know they never will.

Spotify Wrapped measures how much you loved your kids this year.

Thankful that all my standard errors are unassailably correct.

Kids are off tomorrow to make parents truly grateful for school and teachers.

Regulating quasi-legal markets: Evidence from pain management clinic laws The opioid crisis has often been fueled by its simultaneous interaction with both medical and illicit markets, including “pill mills” that distribute …

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I wish mathematicians would consider more interesting questions. I mean, sure, there exists an epsilon greater than zero. But is it happy? Has it known love?

I misuse “orders of magnitude” millions of times per day.

The 1975 Voting Rights Act extension lowered mortality for most nonwhite groups but raised it for white adults and older nonwhite men, patterns consistent with status threat, from Atheendar Venkataramani, Rourke O'Brien, Elizabeth F. Bair, and Christopher A. Lowenstein www.nber.org/papers/w34421

This model refers to a representative agent, but I don’t remember voting for them.