Malik A. Hussain

Just wanted to say clearly that Gautam Gambhir's comments to the Oval groundsman (heard over the mic) were arrogant, obnoxious and unacceptable. It represents the upper caste privileged Indian mentality.

If anybody is heading to Lund for WEHC next week, come see me present new research with @malikaltaf.bsky.social on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine
Hesitancy in Colonial India". www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/om1q6...

✨Did markets make Americans more cooperative❓🔍

✅YES‼️

Between 1850 and 1920, the US became the largest and most integrated economy in the world 📶🌎

We show that this shift didn’t just move goods and affect prices—it fundamentally changed culture and behavior

🧵 👇 1/17

YouTube video by CEPR & VideoVox Economics The Demographic Future of Humanity

The keynote recordings from the 7th EBRD–CEPR Symposium on the Economics of Demographic Change are now online!
Talks by:
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (@upenn.edu): www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e...
@mdoepke.bsky.social (LSE): www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FRE...

How culture and policy shape each other—and why paying attention to local context is key for development policies' success, from Natalie Bau, Sara Lowes, and Eduardo Montero https://www.nber.org/papers/w33947

Miasma Theory: A Primer I recently received an unusual request—could I explain miasma theory to an NPR reporter? Miasma theory is suddenly newsworthy, roughly 150 years after germ theory displaced this explanation for the…

Read this, bookmark it, download it (& print it, too, if you want to go all out). But make sure you & yours know that medical history ( #histmed) has a solid response to the nonsense our HHS secretary is spouting. nursingclio.org/2025/06/30/m... 🧪🗃️ And follow @nursingclio.bsky.social. #MiasmaTheory

Barriers to Global Capital Allocation* Abstract. Observed international investment positions and cross-country heterogeneity in rates of return to capital are hard to reconcile with frictionless

Delighted that after many years of hard work, Barriers to Global Capital Allocation (written jointly with Bruno Pellegrino and Enrico Spolaore), will be coming out in the QJE. academic.oup.com/qje/article-...

Residential Training Course for Postgraduate Students - Economic History Society University of Warwick Radcliffe Conference Centre 3 – 6 December 2025 The Economic History Society offers 12 part-funded places on an intensive residential course designed to raise the quality and ana...

The annual EHS Residential Training Course for Postgraduate Students will be held 3-6 December 2025.
12 part-funded places are available on this course, primarily designed to raise the quality of dissertations.
Deadline for applications: 16:00 (UK) Friday 12 September
ehs.org.uk/society/stud...

Some personal/professional news: I am excited to be joining the Economics Department @upenn.bsky.social and the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets as a Postdoc in Fall 2025!

Maps showing the proportion of deaths from the infectious diseases investigated in this study

This is intriguing -- Language Dialect boundaries block the transmission of Pertussis, but not Measles or Smallpox.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

#linguistics

“Effects of Communal Violence on Women’s Marital Outcomes”: Ghose & Pandey show that following the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat, the prob. of child marriage increased relative to the rest of India while women’s age at marriage, employment & autonomy dropped. read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

The image presents a line graph showing the number of countries where smallpox was endemic from 1920 to 1980. There are five colored lines representing different regions: Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. The y-axis indicates the number of countries, ranging from 0 to 50, while the x-axis marks the years from 1920 to 1980. Each region's line trends downward, reflecting a decline in endemic countries over the years. Significant events are marked with dashed vertical lines: in 1959, the WHO resolved to aim for eradication; in 1967, an intensified eradication campaign began; 1977 marks the last recorded case; and in 1980, smallpox was declared eradicated. A note at the bottom specifies that the precise year of elimination in Oceania is only known for Australia (1917) and New Zealand (1914). Additionally, data sources are cited as Fenner, Henderson, Arita, Jezek, and Ladnyi (1988) and the graph is attributed to Saloni Dattani, licensed under CC-BY.

Smallpox declined gradually, until the WHO coordinated the global effort to eradicate it

❕New WP from Eric Schneider and Romola Davenport❕
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐩𝐨𝐱?
⬇️

Animal Behaviour Collective - Open Collective We are a collective of animal behaviour researchers organising microgrants and mentorship for undergraduate & graduate students in animal behaviour.

Hey #EconSky

I would like to set up a microgrants for phd-students and postdocs in econ. I.e. microgrants for submission fees, conf fees etc.

Q: Does something like that already exist?

@climent.bsky.social @joshua-goodman.com @dynarski.bsky.social @ckronenberg.bsky.social

Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection 30 Pages Posted: 19 May 2025 Simon Quach University of Southern California Zhengyi Yu University of Southern California - Department of Economics Date Written: May 15, 2025 Abstract This paper examines the labor market effects of Florida's 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a differencein-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Virtual contact improves intergroup relations between non-Muslim American and Muslim students from the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia in a field quasi-experiment - Communications Psychol... Virtual contact between U.S. non-Muslim and Muslim students from MENA and SE Asia regions demonstrates that online interactions can effectively reduce prejudice and dehumanization, offering a scalable...

Up next, a tremendous paper led by @shirahebelsela.bsky.social

finding that a semester-long virtual contact intervention improved attitudes, reduced dehumanization, and increased self-outgroup overlap among non-Muslim and Muslim students

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Taking a break from American and British politics on this site? Here is a new blog post on Broadstreet about what we can learn about state capacity reversal from a historic episode of ideologically motivated bureaucratic decline in China. If you haven’t subscribed, Broadstreet is now on substack.

Unheard Voices: The Importance of Intersectionality in Responsiveness and the Systematic Ignoring of Black Men by Elected Officials - Political Behavior All citizens are not listened to equally, despite the importance of responsiveness and listening to different theories of democracy. We take an ‌intersectional‌ ‌approach‌ ‌to‌ make several novel pred...

“Extending‌ ‌previous‌ ‌work,‌ ‌we‌ ‌vary‌ ‌the‌ ‌race,‌ ‌gender,‌ ‌and‌ ‌topic‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌constituent’s‌ ‌message, and we‌ observe ‌if elected‌ ‌officials ‌both open‌ ‌and‌ ‌reply‌ ‌to‌ ‌constituents’ messages‌.‌ ‌ We ‌find‌ ‌that‌ ‌Black‌ ‌men‌ ‌are systematically ignored, regardless of the message they send.‌” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 Bottom line: The oft-cited 20–30% CFR for Variola major doesn't hold up across time and place.

We argue for a more nuanced, historically grounded view—context matters.

📄 Read the full paper here: www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

6/6

So why is the consensus CFR (20-30%) for endemic smallpox too high?

Three factors likely biased estimates of CFRs upwards:

1) Under-reporting of smallpox cases

2) Positive selection into vaccination after 1796

3) Selection of severe smallpox cases into hospital samples used to estimate CFRs

5/6

Picture of the title and abstract of the paper.

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜

What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox?

My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%.

🧵👇

1/6

@vincentdelabastita.bsky.social, Spike Gibbs and I have a new working paper out! We explore the dynamics of wage inequality in medieval England, which allows us to better understand the commercialization of labour markets in the Middle Ages.

www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

The Public Choice Outreach Conference

The Public Choice Outreach Conference

This summer, @histparl.bsky.social will be joining forces with the University of Worcester hosting a conference to reassess Hastings 230 years on.
@royalhistsoc.org @bsecs.bsky.social #skystorians
royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the...

'The Cow-Pock or the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!' by James Gillray, 1802. A cartoon-style print of a crowded room. In the centre of the image a seated woman holds out her arm to a professional-looking man who makes a cut on her arm with a small blade. Next to him a small, ragged boy holds a container labelled 'Vaccine pock hot from the cow.' Behind the woman and to her right are six people who have apparently already undergone the procedure: they all have small cows growing out of their bodies. On the left of the image a man ladles an 'opening mixture' into the mouth of a nervous-looking man. A queue is formed behind him.

#QueenCharlotte gave royal support to Edward Jenner's ground-breaking #smallpox vaccine, which used cowpox to build resistance. Opponents argued that the procedure would give people bovine features 🐮 an idea mocked in this #caricature by James Gillray.
#18thcentury #historysky

Historical and religious influences on the stigma of cutaneous disease: The Black Death as a case study Pathology of the skin can affect self-perception and inclusion. Recently, a multivariate regression analysis looking at wellness in acne patients demonstrated that patient-perceived stigma explained 2...

People who follow me know I maintain a scholarly, multidisciplinary bibliography on the #2ndPlaguePandemic. What I don't include there are popularizations. Or #BadPlagueHistory. I'm flagging this one b/c it (& others) disgrace the medical journals that publish such crap. www.jaad.org/article/S019...

YouTube video by FBE UniMelb Cultures in Crisis? Cultural Evolution and the Potential for Global Mismatch

Best video to watch during the Easter break 🥚🐣 youtu.be/lmIABocWBHI?...

Please apply! Send your applications directly to us ☺️

The Making of America: migration in colonial times By Leticia Arroyo-Abad (CUNY) and Jose-Antonio Espin-Sanchez (Yale)

New post on @broadstreetblog.bsky.social by yours truly and co-author José Antonio Espín-Sánchez. Check it out! #econhistory #colonialism #migration

www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-making...