Chris Karbownik

Miranda is one of my mentees this year and she's awesome. You should absolutely interview and hire her. The amount of legwork she did for her JMP is impressive.

Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on How Technology Drives Growth

This is so cool and so we'll deserved. I do economic history research primarily because of interactions with Joel!

That's a terrific workshop if you're rookie doing education work: www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/ev....

The medicine Nobel Prize goes to 3 scientists for work on peripheral immune tolerance Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were honored for research into how the body helps the immune system avoid attacking your own tissues instead of foreign invaders.

Congrats to the winners! Interesting and rare that 2/3 don't work at universities. And 2nd award in 2 years for Seattle affiliated researchers! It's not only tech in Seattle.

We're hiring in applied micro. Come be my colleague and if you don't like me then we have a ton of other great people in the department.
apply.interfolio.com/173387

We updated our paper on employment protection of older workers. It now includes estimates of both externalities as well as "deadwood labor" effects. Still no externalities but up to 4.8% separation effects once EPL is removed suggesting modest "deadwood labor" among workers 60+: tinyurl.com/4kh6tykr

If you don't like the numbers just make them up. I was born in a country that had "full employment". Based on experience I don't recommend going this way. Also it's ironic that he hates China so much but basically is turning US into China

Eliminating Fares to Expand Opportunities: Experimental Evidence on the Impacts of Free Public Transportation on Economic and Social Disparities (August 2025) - We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the employment effects of providing free public transportation to individuals with low incomes. A temporary subsidy that reduces the p...

Not great evidence for Mamdani idea: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=.... Sure maybe it's b/c it's temporary but we can probably all come up with better ROI public interventions.

State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings 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...

Been waiting for this to come out for a while now: www.nber.org/papers/w3397.... That's such a cool paper!!!

new fun AI hallucinations: Gemini keeps upgrading JOLE papers to JPE papers when creating references in bibtex. Since AI will be our new overlords, I wonder if I can also upgrade my CV :)

This is such sad news. I've personally interacted with Ghazala only a few times but loved her papers. Economics lost a brilliant researcher way too soon...

I find it really amusing when a journal that has been sitting on my submission for almost 9 months is sending me a reminder that I'm late with my referee report by two weeks...

If you think US politics is messed up then newsflash Poland just elected ex gang member and ex pimp as a president. Times of Israel also called him Holocaust revisionist and yet he was supported by the current US administration. So yeah, universities are not about antisemitism...

Civil rights protests and election outcomes: Exploring the effects of the poor people’s campaign The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968 was focused on highlighting, and ultimately reducing, poverty in the United States. As part of the campaign, …

New paper out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... We study (using DiD) effects of 1968 Poor People's Campaign on election outcomes. Overall these peaceful protests had no effects on elections (contrasting prior civil rights era findings) but they hurt Ds in the South and helped them in the West.

I'd be carful about drawing strong conclusions based on test scores. Earlier we found massive declines in test scores for these EdChoice students (like south of 1SD) but clearly for college they are doing fine. Private schools have no incentives to deliver on test scores - at least in most settings

Opinion | Ohio’s School Choice Success Story Voucher recipients saw substantially improved academic outcomes.

@wsj.com coverage of our latest voucher research: www.wsj.com/opinion/edch.... I wouldn't conclude with "But its results are consistent with a large and growing body of evidence that school choice can lift all students" but I think it'd be good to do more research on choice rather than demonizing it

New research out: positive participation and competitive effects of EdChoice vouchers for college attendance and graduation. Participation compared to remaining in underperforming public school. Competitive compared to schools that just missed voucher threat.

As someone who wrote multiple papers on consequences of childhood disability for families, I find this disgusting. That's why you should increase funds to these families rather than cutting them. A+ geniuses!!!

Lars is right. Especially those highways that go left ;)

Meritocracy in action ;)

That's kind of obvious but oh well. ROI in publicly funded research is something like 5 to 1 on average so basically you're killing a goose laying golden eggs... but let's be clear here, this was always about cutting people off information/services/anything that could make them vote D.

just imagine what would Republicans do if this mess was generated by Biden, Harris, Obama, ... [paste any other Democrat]. Also can someone explain to me why congress cannot end this? Aren't there enough Republicans worried about 2026? Or are we not planning the economy to survive to '26?

Here is a simple solution to this: pass the cuts onto your consumers and see how they and their families vote in '26. In the short-run issue bonds. It's not like demand for education and healthcare is very elastic. Maybe then the public will realize how much public goods these funds generate.

That about sums it up...

I mostly just feel sorry for the poor penguins... how are they going to survive the tariffs...

OMG this makes sense. That's how they will solve fentanyl/drug abuse crisis - just stop tracking it. Reminds me of Covid when they suggested that we just don't test and then Covid will vanish ;)

That's our fault though b/c we don't know how to talk to people. 20 points drop in confidence over 10 years is massive. It's kind of crazy that you have to sell the value added to people but maybe unis need strong PR departments.

This is very noble of NAS members but they are missing a big picture statistic: PEW reports that 45% of Americans believe that universities negatively affect US (up from 26% in 2012). Modal American doesn't care about higher education and science so I doubt we can avoid the destruction...

you mean like elected Democratic party politicians or university leaders -- would be nice but I don't think either have balls to do this. Frankly I blame Democrats for this mess. I personally am scared that they will revoke my green card for no good reason.

Maybe if you are a US citizen it's easy to say. Some of us can, you know, be deported....