Nate Miller

Congratulations to Frank Verboven (@frankverboven.bsky.social) for being appointed as AER coeditor, handling papers in empirical IO and related fields. His term starts on July 1. I’m delighted to have him on our team. @aeajournals.bsky.social #EconSky

Some president should really try to get Justin to be their CEA chair. He's a well regarded, broad researcher, a clear thinker, a fun and upstanding person, and really the best video communicator of economics in the profession.

🚨 An updated version of "Demand Estimation with Text and Image Data" with Ilya Morozov and Stephan Seiler is now available online:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We also make the full code pipeline available here:

The former ambassador to Denmark for the United States, Rufus Gifford, posted this video on his Facebook account:

Ht: @hpsc24.bsky.social

Spartan Community Letter: Serving the common good | Michigan State University

Respect, Sparty. "... Michigan State will never abandon our core values...Michigan State operates within all state and federal laws prohibiting race-based discrimination and preferences..." president.msu.edu/communicatio...

The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment defines the right of all people in America to speak freely.

It legally bars the federal govt from acting against anyone based on their speech.

Our executive is attacking 1st Amendment rights. American courts, congress, & people can defend them.

If you're looking for something to do:

www.mobilize.us/handsoff/

I'll be there next Saturday

Check out the recordings of this year's @macci-mannheim.bsky.social annual conference.

Interesting new paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09907

improves on both rdrobust and rdhonest!

Quite compelling... 1/n

A defense.gov article about Jackie Robinson leads toa 404- Page not Found page and the url includes "DEI" in it.

The Department of Defense deemed a story about baseball hero and civil rights leader Jackie Robinson's time in the Army as "DEI" and deleted it.

President Trump has taken an extraordinary and dangerous step of firing two FTC Commissioners.

This is a dramatic ratcheting up of the politicization of the agency--the opposite of the direction it should be going in.

Exclusive: Trump fires both Democratic commissioners at FTC, sources say President Donald Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation said, in another major test of the independence of regulatory agencies.

Trump fires both Democratic commissioners at the #FTC. Clearly contrary to the intent of the FTC being an independent agency. We’re well on our way to being ruled by an autocratic, authoritarian regime. This has to be stopped.
www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Mike spotted this before the rest of us. 🫡

Publications from 2025 are shared more on Bluesky than on X/Twitter.

Forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy: We find that consumer product markups increased more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2019.

One contribution is an approach to estimate IO-style models at scale, yielding flexible consumer preferences and estimates of marginal costs.

worth seeing

Receiving breaking news about cuts to the federal workforce every day makes me extremely disturbed and disheartened. My former colleagues are dedicated public servants who sacrifice themselves to serve the nation. Without them, this country could never be great.

Got the ball rolling on a Fed Economists starter pack go.bsky.app/GudXeoo

Fed economists, let me know if you’re on Bluesky and I’ll add you

Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 39 No. 1 Winter 2025

@heidiwilliams.bsky.social JEP has a new edition with some work on antitrust. www.aeaweb.org/issues/793. In my new book there are multiple chapters on how game theory impacts analysis of mergers and collusion.

Estimating Models of Supply and Demand: Instruments and Covariance Restrictions (February 2025) - We consider the identification of empirical models of supply and demand with imperfect competition. We show that a restriction on the covariance between unobserved demand and cost sh...

Happy to see this paper with @natehmiller.bsky.social in print! In the paper, we address identification of the price coefficient in models of supply and demand. We show how a covariance restriction between demand and cost shocks can resolve endogeneity.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Learning by doing in the global electric vehicle battery sector is estimated at 7.5 percent and accounted for 35.5 percent of battery cost reductions from 2013–2020, from Panle Jia Barwick, Hyuk-Soo Kwon, Shanjun Li, and Nahim B. Zahur https://www.nber.org/papers/w33378

A study of the welfare effects of buyer and seller power in vertical relations and an empirical approach for quantifying the contributions of each channel to deadweight loss, applied to coal procurement by power plants in Texas, from Mert Demirer and @MichRubens https://www.nber.org/papers/w33371

Hi, #EconSky! I’m Anderson, a 6th year PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. For those going to ASSA this week, I’ll be presenting my job market paper, The Effects of Privacy Regulation on the Supply of Stolen Data, during the CSMGEP session tomorrow at 8AM. Here’s a short thread about it

The Hidden Health Care Crisis Behind Bars: A Randomized Trial to Accredit U.S. Jails 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...

Excited to share results from a 4-year first-ever RCT across US jails. We (Crystal Yang & I) find that death rates are much higher in jails than officially reported & health care accreditation improves staff coordination, quality & save lives.
www.nber.org/papers/w33357

Market Power Has Grown and Antitrust Needs Strengthening, Despite What Shapiro & Yurukoglu and Miller Suggest - ProMarket Jonathan B. Baker and Fiona Scott Morton challenge the interpretations of two new papers from Carl Shapiro & Ali Yurukoglu and Nathan Miller, which question economy-wide trends toward a rise in market...

Nate’s article is well worth reading. For a comment on it by @proffionasm.bsky.social and me about why we still think market power increased for decades in part because of insufficient antitrust enforcement, see www.promarket.org/2024/10/01/m...

The Draghi report and competition policy The long-awaited Draghi report is a boost to robust competition enforcement

My take on the Draghi report on competitiveness below. No conflict with competition at all - competition supports innovation, resilience, and healthy industrial policy. www.bruegel.org/first-glance...

Interesting data from @johnlist.bsky.social about the AER. Orley has done so much for our profession.

Bright & early tomorrow at 8am in Golden Gate 1&2 at the Hilton!

See you there!

Planning your 2025 economics conference schedule? I've updated my list of general interest, IO, and theory conferences: www.igorletina.com/conferences....

New this year: you can generate a calendar file 📅 to easily track dates and submission deadlines of selected conferences.

#econsky

Getting to the bottom line: The FTC’s bipartisan Junk Fees Rule and your business .field--name-body a[href$=".pdf"]:after, .field--name-body a[href$=".doc"]:after, .field--name-body a[href$=".docx"]:after { content: ''; display: none; -webkit-mask-image: url("..

www.ftc.gov/business-gui...

Episode 86: Dan Gross on Labour Market Responses to Automation — The Visible Hand

Episode 86: Dan Gross on Labour Market Responses to Automation. #EconSky. Listen here at: www.thevisiblehand.uk/episodes/epi...