Stephan Hollander

Excessive screentime in early age associated with delayed cognitive development, both directly and indirectly through what it crowds out: play, talk, & exploration. But limited use seems fine.

Referees make the journal system work. They are selfless in volunteering their time to ensure that our science continues to progress.

All of the great referees out there please know that editors recognize your hard work and tireless effort. We do not always say it, but we do! Thank you.

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

August 1, 2025 AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Committee on Economic Statistics and Committee on Government Relations Statement from the American Economic Association on the Dismissal of the BLS Commissioner Leaders of the American Economic Association express their grave concern over the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier today. The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions. Undermining the independence or credibility of these agencies threatens the integrity of the information that markets, institutions, and the public rely on every day. Measuring the vast and dynamic U.S. economy in real time is inherently challenging. It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as more complete and higher-quality data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor-not failure or bias. The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions. We call upon elected officials to respect and preserve the independence of the nation's statistical infrastructure. Lawrence Katz President, American Economic Association Katharine Abraham President-Elect, American Economic Association Karen Dynan Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics Kenneth Troske Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Government Relations

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing

As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements

This is a big deal

It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.

Big Tech’s $400 Billion AI Spending Spree Drives Valuations to New Highs Microsoft joined Nvidia in the $4 trillion market cap club, while Meta is closing in on the $2 trillion mark.

The AI arms race is accelerating as major tech companies add to their already gargantuan levels of spending. The bets are paying off for investors, but not for all employees.

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on.

Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts.

1/

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

The Value of Software (Forthcoming Article) - Software is one of the most important assets that needs to be priced in the digital economy. It has emerged as a disruptive technology, with companies primarily valued for thei...

Forthcoming in the AER: "The Value of Software" by Roberto Gómez-Cram and Alastair Lawrence. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Do Markets Value Fed Independence? An Event Study.

If you read my work, I have always loved using em-dashes. Now I actually go through & replace them with semicolons or parentheses (even when dashes would be better) because people assume they are AI

Reminds me of the great Delve Collapse - use of the word dropped after it became associated with AI.

📢 Final-stage PhD in accounting?
Present at the Emerging Scholars Conference in Frankfurt, Oct 8–9 2025.
🗓️ Apply by Aug 8 → www.emerging-scholars.org
#Accounting #PhDlife #TRR266 #CallForPapers

Yellin' at Yellen - great new paper.

“Congress interrupted Janet Yellen, the only woman to chair the Federal Reserve Board, far more than her male peers. We find that lawmakers with daughters did it less, suggesting gender bias drove the interruptions.”

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Scrolling through a journal’s website to find your own published article just doesn’t hit the same as wandering into a bookstore and spotting your name on a spine. Same idea, less magic …

#EconSky #Academia #Publishing

First time a judge has decided a case based on hallucinated case law in the US that I've encountered.

caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-cou...

Hello #econtwitter community: if any of you has been teaching any of my papers, would you mind shooting me a DM? I would hugely appreciate that 🙏 and thanks in advance!

Insane performance, #FaithKipyegon 💪🏻 #NielsLaros #StefanNillessen pacers ❤️

Out in @pnas.org today!! We ran a field experiment with ~1000 high school students & found:

✅ GenAI tutoring boosts practice perf
⚠️ But hinders human learning, hurting perf when AI access is removed
🛡️ Safeguards like hint-based help can offset this
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Initiating out-of-office reply countdown. ETA: 13 days 🕚 Too soon to flip the switch, or just optimizing uptime? #academiclife #econsky #summerbreak

Using data on 2.5 million great-grandchildren linked to great-grandfathers (1850–1940) to find strong economic persistence across 4 generations, from Zachary Ward, @kaseybuckles.bsky.social, and Joseph Price https://www.nber.org/papers/w33923

This graph from @economist.com reveals a major pivot in #economics toward data and empirical work, with theory and modeling taking a back seat. The underlying data is open source at www.causal.claims

🏷️ @prashantgarg.bsky.social @trfetzer.com

🧵 NEW PAPER - "Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages" is live at SMR. We combine NLP w pairwise LLM evals to track ideas across media ecosystems and languages. We also figured out a way to eval unsupervised probs on widely understood supervised performance metrics.

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

A liability isn’t (always) a liability

#textualanalysis #accounting #finance

Like Great-Grandparent, Like Great-Grandchild? Multigenerational Mobility in American History 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...

The past really sticks.

Even after 4 generations, your great-grandfather’s economic status still largely shapes your own.

👉 33% persistence across time for whites
👉 But racial inequality is the key driver

The American Dream? More inherited than we thought.
www.nber.org/papers/w33923

Today we released Institutional Books 1.0, a 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability. 🧵

A revised version of the paper will be available soon. Stay tuned!

🏷️ @lvanlent.bsky.social Tarek Hassan @aakashkalyani.bsky.social Markus Schwedeler, Ahmed Tahoun

Economic Surveillance using Corporate Text Over the past decennium, we have witnessed a significant growth in the volume of company-released text data, ranging from transcripts of periodic ...

Okay, a little late in sharing. But in academic time, this is practically breaking news 😀 Our @nber.org Working Paper No. w33158 “Economic Surveillance using Corporate Text” was (somewhat recently) featured by Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/02/11/e...

👀This is impressive: Using an autonomous agent based on o3-mini and GPT-4.1, a team from Harvard, MIT & other institutions reproduced and updated an entire issue of Cochrane Reviews in two days… saving 12 person-years of work.

The AI reviews captured more papers & were more accurate than humans.