Ethan Ellis

The timing of this paper is perfect.

Like in a state of the world way. Just great to be surrounded by smart, thoughtful people dedicated to making the world better through rigorous policy research!

This is pretty corny, but #appam2025 made me feel hopeful for the first time in a while

Best live band out there — truly one of a kind. Drove down from Minneapolis to see them in Chicago last week!

Good evening to be in Seattle!

-Saturday 8:30-10:00am, serving as a discussant on the Supply-Side Healthcare Policies panel

-Friday 8:30-10:00am, presenting The Effects of Sentence Length on Recidivism (work with @aaronsojourner.org, @chrisuggen.bsky.social, and Nick Dickens assessing the effects of a recent sentencing policy change in Minnesota on judicially assigned sentences and reoffense outcomes)

Folks going to APPAM, I'll be presenting/discussing 3 times! Would love to get feedback and talk shop with folks. Here's where you'll be able to find me:
-Thursday 1:45-3:15pm, presenting The Effects of Occupational Licensing on Racial Wage and Employment Gaps (V preliminary, would love a couauthor)

Paperwork burden, stigma and stress are common for SNAP and increase food insecurity. Many (most) recipients are children, disabled or older, while many already work, if they can. Not letting people go hungry should be a fundamental function of government.

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

So proud of Alan for this work — I often bring this up to non-academics as clear proof of the existence of gender-based discrimination and need for DEI

It's great to root for a functional baseball franchise like the White Sox

Anyone have any papers they like on how capital constraints contribute to racial educational attainment gaps?

Reminding myself to avoid doing double threshold workouts on lecture days. Legs were sore and brain lacked the oxygen to coherently answer hyper-specific model specification questions about 2xT diff-in-diff.

Someone get @jaketapper.bsky.social on the case!

My guess? Fateh will win, but there will be lots of hand-wringing about ranked choice voting, because it will 2 or 3 rounds

Democrat Johnny DuPree Flips Republican-Held Mississippi Senate District in Forrest County Johnny DuPree, a Democrat who served as the mayor of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for 16 years, has flipped a Republican-held Mississippi Senate seat.

BREAKING: Democrat Johnny DuPree has flipped a Republican-held Mississippi Senate district in a special election.

DuPree was previously the mayor of Hattiesburg.

His win imperils the Mississippi Senate GOP's narrow supermajority.
www.mississippifreepress.org/democrat-joh...

Coercion and Monopsony in Modern American Manufacturing: Evidence from Alabama Prison Labor Susan Helper Suresh Naidu Akseli Palomaki Adam Reich Aaron Sojourner We study coercion and monopsony in contemporary U.S. manufacturing labor markets. We combine administrative data from the Alabama Department of Corrections work release program with a unique survey of workers in the Alabama auto supply chain where workers report their work-release status. We first present descriptive patterns of work-release labor, finding that the use of incarcerated (i.e., work-release) labor is concentrated in the auto supply industry, especially in the Montgomery area, where Hyundai’s assembly plant is located. In the survey, the share of plant-level workers who are incarcerated is negatively correlated with non-incarcerated wages. The survey also enables estimation of hypothetical quit elasticities separately among incarcerated and non-incarcerated workers. Incarcerated workers are estimated to have quit elasticities less than half that of non-incarcerated workers. Because Alabama law requires employers to pay the same wage to incarcerated and non-incarcerated workers in the same jobs, the additional monopsony power introduced by employer access to incarcerated workers creates an incentive and ability for employers to reduce plant-level wages to, and employment of, non-incarcerated workers. We build a quantitative model of firm-specific labor supply that, for incarcerated workers, distinguishes the roles of coercion (the risk of physical harm in prison from not working), wage garnishment that blunts the consumption effect of higher wages, and monopsony (limited mobility across employers). Using it, we estimate effects on free and incarcerated workers’ welfare from i) reforming prison conditions to eliminate violence, ii) eliminating prison labor wage garnishment, iii) imposing a $15 minimum wage, &iv) abolishing prison labor. Free worker welfare goes up in all scenarios...

How does employer access to prisoners’ labor through work release impact the well-being of those workers & of free workers?

New working paper by Sue Helper, Suresh Naidu, Akseli Palomaki, Adam Reich, + me provides evidence, focus on auto manufacturing in AL
#EconSky
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Pop off Minnesota distance running: Joel Reichow top American male, Annie Frisbie 2nd American female at NYC

SoxMachine branching out into concert reviews when?

Oh hell yeah

GF and I finally finished Twin Peaks, so I officially cancelled our Paramount+ subscription and left a cathartic cancellation note for Bari Weiss and David Ellison

I’ve been thinking a lot about a new kind of polling I’d like to see. We have polling that measures public opinion, which is obviously important, but I’d love to see a little more empirical work on public knowledge: what do voters know about politics and policy?

Fox really should have played Neverender during last night's game

Quite a world when a federal judge has to call in a federal official to specifically tell him he can't use tear gas on children in Halloween costumes

Go Blue Jays, but also hell yeah Will Klein

I stayed up until 1:53am watching a baseball game between two teams I don't care about only for Freddie Freeman to hit a home run as soon as I took my dog out to pee

Fox playing Lil Boo Thang to end the inning is giving me throwbacks to Companion

Back when I lived in Berdychiv, Ukraine, the Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had a friendly rivarly. The Ukraine Greek Catholic Church always gave more festive vibes. Anyways, here's Alex Call.

RIP david lynch you would have loved a baseball stadium full of people slowly losing their minds