Paul Clist

cool confounding and adjustment example by @jofrhwld.bsky.social below. To estimate A –direct–> Y, must adjust for B (and C or D). If you adjust for C, it partly opens collider D, so non-causal path D <– B –> Y is opened. Easy to forget about descendants partly opening parents. Sneaky colliders.

More nonsense from Scientific Reports
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This article may be many things, but scientific it ain’t

Preregistrations without Code do not Prevent P-Hacking: You can increase your chances for a significant finding in the absence of real effects even with correlations and t test despite having preregistered your hypothesis (e.g., simply changing arguments in the functions).

doi.org/10.31222/osf...

🚨 New working paper!

How well do people predict the results of studies?

@sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

ICYMI: New paper for causal effects with panel data, subsuming other approaches. We generate realistic synthetic data based on commonly studied datasets, showing our method substantially outperforms others and providing insight about what in the data-generating process corresponds to gains.

I appreciate the WSJ following up on this story, which is already in danger of being one of many forgotten scandals in elite academia.

extract from the paper reads: “This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. …“

Brexit reduced the UK’s GDP by between 6% and 8%. That is MASSIVE. #ProjectFear #wetoldyouso

www.nber.org/papers/w3445...

we did a night flight long haul with a 1.5 year old and didn't have crying.

They didn't sleep, instead doing many laps of the plane, and mainly avoiding the temptation to tickle sleeping people's feet.

Plus side - no jet lag when we landed.

USAID Is Unlikely to Be Replaced With Something Better Any Time Soon, So Stop Pretending Why Rajiv Shah is wrong, wrong, wrong, and kind of insulting

well said expatriarch.substack.com/p/usaid-is-u...

Some good news/

Home Office evaluation of the Refugee Transitions Outcomes Fund - pilot schemes to help employment, housing and integration for newly recognised refugees.

Substantially improved employment outcomes & had positive fiscal impacts.

www.gov.uk/government/p...

Amazing story in The Times. Reform UK failed to pay VAT to HMRC on its sales (tickets, merchandise). About £400k in all.

Not tax avoidance. Not tax evasion. They just didn't realise when you sell stuff you have to charge VAT.

The Economic Consequences of Effective Carbon Taxes By Felix Kapfhammer∗ This paper studies the sectoral and macroeconomic consequences of carbon taxes in four Nordic countries using a novel monthly measure of effective carbon tax rates. The suggested measure accounts for the time-varying emission coverage of taxes that are both explicitly and implicitly levied on greenhouse gas-emitting goods, thereby solving several issues of existing carbon tax measures currently used by the literature. Employing the new measure in a local projections setting, I find that carbon taxes reduce emissions as expected but also impair macroeconomic activity – though there is some heterogeneity in the effects across sectors and countries. JEL: H23, Q54, Q58 Keywords: carbon tax, carbon pricing, climate policy, emissions, macroeconomy, economic sectors

You've got to love studies like these: New carbon tax paper out in @aeajournals.bsky.social: Macroeconomics.

The headline: "I find that carbon taxes reduce emissions
as expected but also impair macroeconomic activity."

What to make of this, a quick 🧵

yes! @daveevansphd.bsky.social does, and has made a list:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
see also an old blog
blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

hopefully he doesn't mind the mention to share one his many public goods

In 1916 the BMJ published an article about the work done by James Shearer, an American physician working in the British Army as a sergeant (because he had no British qualification). He had described a "delineator" which was better than x rays for portraying gunshot wounds. This caused a sensation and a lot of interest — but on investigation the work was found to have been invented. The BMJ published a retraction, but Shearer was tried by court martial and sentenced to death by firing squad.

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

www.cgdev.org/blog/cholera...

We are thrilled to welcome Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee as the new Lemann Foundation Professors to our department, beginning in the summer of 2026.

WOW, terrific news for @econ.uzh.ch and the wider European community 🤩🤩🤩 Congrats!

Where to find development economics resources: Newsletters, articles, podcasts & videos Where can you find articles, podcasts, and videos about research and topics in development economics? This blog is your one-stop shop for accessible resources related to development economics.

🆕 Where to find development economics resources

I've updated my list of all the various sources of newsletters, articles, podcasts & videos relevant to development economics that I've come across in my three years at @voxdev.bsky.social: voxdev.org/topic/where-...

Foreign Policy has a new issue on "The End of Development."

Lots of pieces worth reading - I'll put my thoughts in this thread as I read through.

(Re the title, worth noting that development has always been about more than ODA + SDGs. That broader development is far from dead)

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Back to teaching or studying economics at university this September?

@voxdev.bsky.social has tons of useful resources for university economics courses - I have included some examples in this thread. 1/n

I think the evidence on remittances isn't so clear & a little more hopeful than you imply. e.g.
Bettin, Presbitero & Spatafora (16, WBER) is more positive than
McKenzie, Theoharides, & Yang (14, AEJ:AE)

One Woman, Two Protests, Zero Postcodes in Common: Tommy Robinson associate claims to be ‘concerned local resident’ Yesterday, former academic turned Reform UK cheerleader, Matt Goodwin tweeted a clip from the recent anti-migrant protest at the Barbican in London.  “Why are you...

“This is my local community. I’m worried about my children.”

That’s what a woman told GB News at the anti-migrant protest at the Barbican in London.

Problem is, she said the same thing at a protest in Epping days earlier. 🤦 ❌

hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/05/o...

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

Loving the new Handbook of Culture & Economic Behavior (Benjamin Enke, Paola Giuliano, @nathannunn.bsky.social, Leonard Wantchekon)--fantastic work! Grateful to the editors & authors for the insightful, well-structured chapters. As a cultural/political economy fan, I've found it enriching&inspiring!

Seeing too many diff-in-diff reviews and and summary articles but not sure where to start? We propose a new way to synthesize this growing literature using a Review in Reviews approach.

Researcher assumptions shape not just how experiments run—but what questions we ask. Outlining best practices for designing context-aware lab experiments in non-Western settings, from Sara Lowes and @nathannunn.bsky.social https://www.nber.org/papers/w33981

In my latest blog post, I discuss the intuition behind the "bad control" problem, which unfortunately still appears to be quite common in econ papers.

#EconSky

deryugina.com/the-intuitio...

A line graph illustrating the trend in child mortality in Malawi from 1990 to 2022. In 1990 the share of newborns who died before the age of 5 was almost 25%. In 2022 this had fallen to 4%. Data source: UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, 2024

Child mortality in Malawi has fallen by more than 80% since 1990

Why is public support for foreign aid so much lower in the UK than France/Germany/USA? (real not rhetorical question)