Matt Pierson

Wait, did Trump get his uncle mixed up with Jeffrey Epstein the other day?

14th annual Municipal Finance Conference | Brookings

It’s Day 2 of the Brookings Muni Finance Conference (livestream: www.brookings.edu/events/14th-...)! I will be live tweeting a lot less today but the papers—including my own paper on green muni bonds—will hopefully be just as good as yesterday

Call for papers for the Opportunity Insights conference this fall is now open!

opportunityinsights.org/updates/2025...

Volunteering is a great way to be involved with the association and another way to engage with your colleagues!

Apply to be a Discussant or a Session Chair at the 118th NTA Annual Conference 👉 nta.memberclicks.net/annual_confe...

The deadline to apply to be a chair or discussant is August 15.

The Brookings Municipal Finance Conference is today (available livestream: www.brookings.edu/events/14th-...) and the lineup of papers is excellent! I’m not much of a live tweeter but I’ll try to share a few highlights

Historical Housing Prices Project The Historical Housing Prices (HHP) Project at the Philadelphia Fed provides new data on the price of housing for sale and for rent over the 20th century using the real estate sections of historical n...

New release for the HHP project. We now have rent and sales price indexes for 30 cities along with rental yields, capital gains, and housing returns for the years 1890-2006. Online data viz tools and download here:

www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-...

“We believe this satisfies our statutory obligations” are the most famous of last words

A reminder that as far as we can tell, literally everyone who was born in, e.g. 1971 (really anytime in the 1970s) was lead poisoned as a child (via the great McFarland, Hauer and Reuben PNAS paper)

CoL and housing supply discussions often omit that over-supply is also bad for homeowners (at least in the U.S. where housing is seen as a dual consumption & investment asset). Seems to me the the balance between consumption & investment is also the balance between CoL and price appreciation.

Ah yes. A third party for centrists. My God it’s exhausting watching Elon Musk go through college

Excellent article by German Lopez for the NYT about a big, important problem in the US:

Most crimes aren’t solved. If you murder someone, it’s essentially a coin flip whether you’ll be arrested for it. If you steal a car, you’ll almost certainly get away with it.

@socratesjohnson.bsky.social

Dan Garodnick style zoning reform - moderate density increases everywhere - contrasts with prior efforts to stuff the building in a concentrated area.

This satisfies @jeffrlin.bsky.social’s idea of zoning based on changes; rather than levels

www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

If you've tuned into CSPAN anytime in the last 2 hours and found yourself slapping the side of the TV, wondering why the screen isn't changing, here's what's happening...

Ice cold

Line item misreporting estimates from the NRP, estimates by Guyton and Langetieg (2025).

Leading a series of several papers on under-reporting at IRS/TPC today, NRP data suggests tax under-reporting primarily comes from, you guessed it, sole proprietorships. More incidental evidence for the @omzidar.bsky.social Country of Car Dealerships hypothesis.

Ahh proper maintenance, how does that work

Adding or removing that patio?

EXTREMELY BAD NEWS for economic research, per former BLS Commissioner @ericagroshen.bsky.social on LinkedIn.

BLS is suspending access to its restricted data "for the forseeable future." Applies to projects through the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers & onsite projects with BLS.
#EconSky

IIRC, there are some issues that some economists (who work with gender and surveys) noted at the time the time the original article came out. Can't recall precisely the details, but I believe there's some oddness about definitions of terms and cross-country comparisons going on.

New research w/ @kirabojackson.bsky.social & @julia-turner.bsky.social on NBER homepage

“Universal Pre-K across 9 states & cities increased LFP by 0.8 pp, employment by 0.9 pp, & weekly hours worked by 0.42, with strongest effects for moms. Each $1 spent on UPK generated >$3 in additional earnings”

Maybe we can add another Matt as a coauthor

oh, that's. oh. oh no.

At least £64bn of property in England and Wales hidden behind opaque trusts Campaigners say secretive ownership structures are becoming the ‘go-to vehicle for kleptocrats’

Guardian coverage here of new analysis by @transparencyuk.bsky.social on the use of trusts to hide the ownership of property. Our research found £2.5bn worth of real estate bought with suspicious wealth and held by trusts. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

I Don'T Know What I Expected GIF ALT: I Don'T Know What I Expected GIF

Requested data from TSA. Sent back a link describing the program I’m requesting data about.

What's wrong with them is that even someone, like me, who wants to see slower, controlled reform and the status quo of American institutions preserved recognizes that, in the iterated Prisoner's dilemma, you have to punish repeatedly and harshly if you have any hope of them cooperating again

When the tribe has spokens the tribe has spoken, what can I say?

Immortality. They tried voting one off on Survivor and *that* didn’t even work

Just saw @mattcollin.bsky.social falling to his knees in a Carrefour

🚀 We've kicked off our annual high-level event, “Competition or Cooperation: EU Tax Policies for Tomorrow! 🇪🇺

“The EU Tax Observatory has been instrumental in bringing evidence to the tax policy conversation.” 💬 Gerassimos Thomas, DG for Taxation and Customs Union

📢 Stay tuned!