Valentin Lang

Herzlichen Glückwunsch Thomas!

Don’t say you weren’t warned.
New poll suggests Jordan Bardella would win second round of 🇫🇷 presidential election against any other of four tested candidates ⬇️

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

abstract

Happy to share that our paper on the ideological biases of international organizations is now out in the current issue of the AJPS (@ajpseditor.bsky.social):

dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps...

@the-peio.bsky.social @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social @akentikelenis.bsky.social

Congrats! I really like this paper.

Latest projection suggests that more than 505,000 adults and kids have died due to USAID's illegal dismantling by Musk, Rubio, and Lewin

Source: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...

Genau! Und dieses Muster wiederholt sich in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik in unterschiedlichen Kontexten immer wieder – wie unser Paper zum Thema zeigt: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? GPT-5, a new release from OpenAI, is the latest product to suggest that progress on large language models has stalled.

Last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. But it is just the latest product to suggest that A.I. might not get much better.

Media, Spillovers and Social Norms: The Electoral Impact of Anti-Far-Right Protests in the 2002 French Election Abstract. We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential el

Our paper with @nicolaslagios.bsky.social & @ilantojerow.bsky.social is now out in the Economic Journal ( @resmedia.bsky.social). It shows that demonstrating against the far-right in France had the intended effect. 1/18
academic.oup.com/ej/article-a...
1/18

Freue mich drauf!

Important and interesting work on EU regional cohesion policies and how they need to be reformed.

Yesterday, the Commission proposed piling a whole heap of new goals—from competitiveness to defense—onto the EU’s regional policy.

Since that’s pretty much the opposite of what @valentinlang.bsky.social, @danbischof.bsky.social, and I argued in a recent paper, a quick recap of our main points:

sickening grotesque repugnant horrifying repugnant nauseating shameful shame shame shame shame shame

Rubio’s position seems to be:

- We get to say who is a terrorist. Our decision is final. It can’t be challenged. Just trust us.
- Once we decide you are a terrorist, we can immediately deport you. No judges.
- After we deport you, we can make you rot in a foreign prison. No criminal charges needed.

This is exactly what the Erdogan regime used to do (before it got all the compliant courts it needed): remove judges that rule against it.

🚨 Updated paper alert! 🚨

Switzerland, the world’s most infamous tax haven, has seen a strong shift in tax compliance. How? A global crackdown on offshore tax evasion: the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI). 🌍💰

Here’s what I found 👇 (🧵)

How to defend Europe without risking another euro crisis Europe intends to rapidly and strongly increase its defense spending. It should do so without risking Europe’s fiscal sustainability and financial stability at a time of great danger.

Europe urgently needs to ramp up defense spending.

But it must do so without risking a repeat of the euro crisis.

@lucasguttenberg.bsky.social and I think the Commission’s current plan to use the flexibility built in the EU’s fiscal rules will not achieve this.

Short thread:
tinyurl.com/327u4ph6

Will the IMF survive Donald Trump’s presidency? Robert H. Wade examines what American disengagement and growing resentment among emerging market and developing countries mean for the future of the IMF. It is now widely recognised that the world …

💥 New: Will the IMF survive Donald Trump’s presidency?

✍️ Robert H. Wade @lseid.bsky.social writes ahead of tonight's @lseevents.bsky.social event on the "new Washington consensus" blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2...

I don't know if this is literally true. But it helps to clarify some arguments that @mcopelov.bsky.social and I are pulling together about the political economy of crypto and state power. If tech billionaires are massively overleveraged on two products that nobody wants, only the state can save them

Can the President Abolish, Move, or Consolidate USAID? Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID. The Secretary of State established USAID as directed by Executive Order 10973, signed on November 3, 1961. The agency was meant to implement components of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (FAA, P.L. 87-195), enacted on September 4, 1961. Section 1413 of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, Division G of P.L. 105-277, established USAID as an “independent establishment” outside of the State Department (22 U.S.C. 6563). In that act, Congress provided the President with temporary authority to reorganize the agency (22 U.S.C. 6601). President Clinton retained the status of USAID as an independent entity, and the authority to reorganize expired in 1999. Congress has not granted the President further authority to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID since. Congressional Research Service

Here is United States law regarding the President's attempts to close our development assistance agency in secret over the weekend.

It is illegal. No ambiguity.

Americans decide with their actions, today, if the US is a country of laws or—something else.

—> crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/...

Exclusive | Ex-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says World Bank should be key target for Elon Musk’s DOGE spending cuts US taxpayers are the biggest backers of the World Bank and are bankrolling economic growth in China.

1/8
The claim that "the World Bank is bankrolling economic growth in China" does not make any sense.

China is actually an important source of income for the World Bank.

A short thread
🧵

nypost.com/2025/01/29/b...

Party-Check Wie stark stimmen Sie mit den Parteien vor der Bundestagswahl überein? Finden Sie es mit Party-Check heraus!

Zur Bundestagswahl 2025 habe ich mit @pluggedchris.bsky.social, @annakurella.bsky.social
und @jocmuel.bsky.social das Tool #PartyCheck auf Basis der OES 2025 Parteipositionen entwickelt. Nach 15 Fragen bekommt ihr einen Match. Schaut doch mal rein! party-check.org

Admittedly, we are now much closer to an “illiberal nationalist chaos” than we were when we began working on this…

So sad I can't be there this time. Enjoy! @chrisvsteinert.bsky.social say hi from me when you present our paper ;-)

Also for the international crowd: #Instagram censors “Democrat” as a search term, while allowing “Republican” and seems to prioritize anti-leftwing content in search queries for alternative search terms. #DSA

Are you looking for this one? (Hilbig and Riaz 2024) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Congratulations Noah!

For the European Stability Mechanism, we wrote a new paper on inequality during the Euro Crisis in Greece and Portugal. www.esm.europa.eu/publications...
tl;dr: changing incomes from pensions and transfers have played a crucial role, especially for the most vulnerable.