Stephan Hollander

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

Interesting paper highlight that binning can be misspecified in panel settings - this drives misinterpretation of extreme temperature shocks. #linkoftheday

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1ya6z...

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
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GitHub - BenjaminGor/Latex_Notes_Tutorial: Latex Book/Note Writing Tutorial Latex Book/Note Writing Tutorial. Contribute to BenjaminGor/Latex_Notes_Tutorial development by creating an account on GitHub.

How to Reproduce this Book Exactly with LaTeX - great resource for writing Latex #linkoftheday
github.com/BenjaminGor/...

This is terrifying.

"[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them."

...

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" -@seanjwestwood.bsky.social

NBER grants to fund research into economic measurement - I find this agenda very compelling and important #linkoftheday
www.nber.org/news/nber-la...

Oof, this is super slick! Go check it out 👇🏻

This paper’s been popping as “evidence” that you can’t do real #causalinference w/ obs data. To me it shows you need rigorous pre-specified design (in addition to the willingness to fold when your hypothesis is not possible to answer with the data at hand). #EpiSky, #CausalSky, #AcademicSky

🚨Next time you hire, don’t take it easy! In a new working paper, @elliottash.bsky.social, Jason Sockin, and I show the difficulty of the interview signals to workers whether the job is a good fit. 🚨

Paper link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Do any other languages (Dutch, German, Spanish) share this quirk, or is English alone in having a verb whose past tense is an exact anagram of its base form?

Are there any other English verbs whose past tense is formed by simply rearranging the same letters (with no additions or deletions) as their present tense — like eat → ate? I can’t think of another example #NLP #linguistics

This study uses computational methods, including #AI, to analyze textbooks from public, religious private, & home schools, focusing on how they portray people, topics, & values over time.

Read: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Subscribe: www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en...

#AICommunity

FT graph showing massive UK public support for the opinion that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU.

Ah! Good morning, reality. And welcome. We’ve been expecting you…

Added Finance job decomposition, and Federal Reserve Bank/Board jobs (zero so far this year...)

MIT-hoogleraar Pattie Maes: ‘Niemand snapt hoe taalmodellen werken, ook de bedrijven erachter niet’ Terwijl bedrijven zoals OpenAI en Nvidia vol gas geven in de race naar superintelligentie, waarschuwt de Belgische MIThoogleraar voor de gevaren.

MIT-hoogleraar Pattie Maes: ‘Niemand snapt hoe taalmodellen werken, ook de bedrijven erachter niet’

🏷️ @barriosecon.bsky.social

Thanks for sharing @florianederer.bsky.social Now that’s art — a true masterpiece!

✉️ @jgassen.bsky.social

Agree! 🏷️ @benjaminmangot.bsky.social @johnjhorton.bsky.social

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

I love this article by @briancalbrecht.bsky.social in the Wall Street Journal (and not just because I am graciously mentioned by name). He provides a simple but powerful defense of Economics, of the supply and demand framework.

Rings a bell, unfortunately

Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 39 No. 3 Summer 2025

Summer 2025 Journal of Economic Perspectives Freely Available Online

www.aeaweb.org/issues/814

“In a footnote to that table, however, it listed 1,095 different cost figures”

🏷️ @telisdemos.bsky.social

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Jonathan Weil in www.wsj.com/finance/inve...

What are you looking at?

Weil: “The schedule of investments in the fund’s latest annual report listed 1,089 individual private-equity investments in a table that included the fair value and acquisition date for each”

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A big thank-you to the JEP editors and the data editor @larsvil.bsky.social and his team

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Tutorial Package for: Text as Data in Economic Analysis This tutorial package, comprising both data and code, accompanies the article and is designed primarily to allow readers to explore the various voc...

𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝗴𝗲

We also put together a tutorial package which allows you to apply the things we do in the paper yourself: doi.org/10.34894/KND...

#economics #accounting #finance #management #business #textualanalysis #nlp

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To read it, go here: pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

5/7

… including patent documents and job postings.

incorporating computational linguistics techniques into the analysis of economic shocks, new opportunities arise for real-time economic data, offering a more nuanced understanding of market and firm responses in times of economic volatility

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… a geopolitical event: insights that often elude traditional non-text data sources.

This approach enables extracting actionable intelligence, supporting both policy-making and strategic corporate decision-making. We also explore applications using other sources of corporate-generated text, …

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