Sandro Ambuehl

Delighted to announce that Ingvild Almås will join the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich in June 2025 as the 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧-𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡. Welcome, Ingvild!

More information and official press release: www.econ.uzh.ch/en/news/insi...

I am just a simple man, begging you not to include constants in your tables when you include a bunch of fixed effects.

Is my own experience an outlier or is it a different mechanism? I always felt that once I did something, that thing was taken, so my younger brothers didn’t want to do that thing anymore and searched for something else to focus on

Unsolicited sci writing advice:

Writing that something always or never happens (e.g., Ɐ(x)) makes your claims vulnerable because it only takes one counterexample to break them.

The most dangerous version of this? "No prior research has addressed this question."

And don't forget the abundance of violent crime

economists' creed

I guess the most space-saving way to pack 17 equally-sized squares into a single bigger square is a good example of such platonic horror

In Poland, we know all about fighting illiberal regimes. Here are our lessons for the Trump age | Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura Our political history is one of catastrophe, communism, and developing powerful antibodies against oppression, say Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

An Israeli friend once told me that they have an expression to describe a particular kind of person: “full throttle in neutral.” The jewish culture seems to great with such expressions

Econ is called the dismal science because it was anti-slavery early on, and some historian thought that was against the “natural order.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dis...

It's extremely useful -- for all tasks that can be independently checked (does the code work, does the cited paper actually make that point, etc.). Given the many errors the frontier versions still make on tasks that can be checked, I don't think it can be trusted on tasks that can't be checked yet

DeepResearch is helpful but you really can't trust it. A review I just had it do claims that "promise tactics" are a well-used influence strategy, but the paper it cites does not contain the word "promise" at all. For a different paper, DeepRes claims the opposite of what's in the paper's abstract

Same issue in switzerland. Bequests usually play the key role.

Someone who graduated from Stanford only about 10 years earlier than me told me that at the time there was a saying: "There are 2 kinds of econ professors. Those who marry their students, and those who marry their secretaries." Hard to imagine from todays point of view.

Reviews of Economic Literature has been launched

True open access, managed by academics for academics, it follows our mass resignation from JES where the commercial publisher imposed very problematic conditions.

Submit your literature reviews in economics!

rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

Almost all of the Julia Donaldson / Axel Scheffler books are great! There are many more, highly recommended!

Here's a nice "proof without words":

The sum of the squares of several positive values can never be bigger than the square of their sum.

This picture helps make sense of how ℓ₁ and ℓ₂ norms regularize and sparsify solutions (resp.). [1/n]

The behavioral/experimental economist named Werner that I’ve known for a while is actually this guy: sites.google.com/view/peterwe... Surprising accumulation of Werners in the field!

What do people think is the probability the SAVE act will get passed? Can't find anything on prediction markets, but the act seems to be an important (and scary) step to entrench the current admin (by making voting harder disproportionately for more liberal-leaning groups such as married women)

I think it's asymmetric. If there's a flaw in a paper, every selection of referees has a good chance to detect it. Also, there are only a small handful of journals at each level, so you can't dip as many times as you'd like. Redrawing detects flaws, but prevents vetos. Or, yes, editors deciding.

If someone has some idiosyncratic beef with a paper (e.g. they don't like structural estimation in principle), but it keeps going to that person, that person acquires essentially a veto-right over the paper (I know some names). I think science works better if nobody has such a veto right.

The currently most famous swiss person is probably Roger Federer. But the most important Swiss person to ever have lived is probably the guy below (Euler), besides the Bernoulli dynasty, perhaps. Remarkably, all of them came from the city of Basel.

... don't forget the climate change deniers in the earth science departments

Not sure this is what you mean, but there's a literature on good vs. bad control variables. Here's a great and very short article on it coauthored by one of the spearleaders of that literature, Judea Pearl: ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser...

This is amazing!! Huge congrats! Great place for experimental economics!

YouTube video by TED How to Fight (and Win) an Information War | Peter Pomerantsev | TED

We know a lot about how fake news spread, what makes propaganda effective, etc. But what to do about it? This is one of the few pieces I've come across that offer solutions, based on what the British tried in Germany before and during WWII. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHH...

Harvard completely caved... they're even regurgiating the propaganda

Knoblauch: Wir essen immer mehr «Chnobli» Der Knoblauchkonsum in der Schweiz hat sich in den letzten zwanzig Jahren fast verdoppelt. Warum eigentlich?

So you’re the culprit: www.srf.ch/radio-srf-1/....

…and all those people that used to be really old but look like teenagers now

In my experience, a challenge is to play such that its sounds as good to the audience as it sounds to yourself when you play it. These two ways of perceiving the same music can leave very different impressions…