Melanie

Weekly links October 17: statistical power, good descriptives, nice graphs, publishing metrics, and more…

This week's links include a mini-symposium on power calculations, what makes for good descriptive work, publishing tips for econometrics, making nice dot charts, and more... blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

I’m really feeling for the new PhDs hitting the market this year. 😭 I don’t have much good advice, but if it would be helpful to see my materials or chat, reach out!

Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history."
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Changing Income Risk across the US Skill Distribution: Evidence from a Generalized Kalman Filter (Forthcoming Article) - For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? We answer these questions by combining the Kalman filter and EM-algorithm to estimate persistent and temporary earnings for every i...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Changing Income Risk across the US Skill Distribution: Evidence from a Generalized Kalman Filter" by J. Carter Braxton, Kyle Herkenhoff, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Lawrence Schmidt. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Why do you appreciate unions?

I’ll start:

Weekends off
Paid vacations
Work breaks
Sick leave
Paid holidays
No child labor
Safer working conditions
Health care and retirement benefits

I'm just glad one of these men has the nuclear codes and the other has all our personal data.

Congratulations!!

When the moment came, Harvard didn’t hedge or flinch—it stood up. A reminder that integrity isn’t complicated, it’s just rare.

#statsmeme

Congratulations to Stefanie Stantcheva (@s-stantcheva.bsky.social) of @harvard.edu, winner of the 2025 John Bates Clark Medal! #econsky www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/ho...

Hop-portunity costs, tariffs, and bunny suit economics.

There is a traditional introduction at the econ seminars at Wesleyan: Educated at X, Trained at Y.

Proud of both my X and Y today. Keep fighting

I’ve gotten used to not knowing what tariffs are going to be in the near future, but not knowing what tariffs are *in the present* is an interesting plot twist

A serious question: Is Trump doing this just so politically-connected investors can profit from insider trading, or is that merely a side benefit?

Glad you are enjoying a peaceful moment with tea 🍵

EALE @eale-office.bsky.social is now on Bluesky. Let’s give it a warm welcome!
#EconSky 📉📈

They’re removing specific ADA guidelines because of “Cost of Living” concerns. This harkens back to some of the original arguments against the ADA and Section 504 when it was introduced - that accommodations and access were prohibitively expensive.

Veterans’ group unveils new ad targeting Musk and DOGE, raising 2026 stakes “I did not put my life on the line for some tech bro billionaire from South Africa to come in here and try to destroy our country,” one U.S. veteran said.

“I did not put my life on the line for some tech bro billionaire from South Africa to come in here and try to destroy our country...”

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

The New Concert of Powers

"What we are seeing at Columbia is unprecedented: the federal government forcing an academic institution to acquiesce to its ideological beliefs." ⁠
— Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom on CNN today.

Just received this from Yale. It would be useful for students to have a tutorial on what they are allowed to say, and what they're not allowed to say.

This is insane

If you have research dependent on these data here is my suggestion
1/N

Big picture:

Create a dataset of cell means (cells must be big enough to pass disclosure)

- load these cell means into many, many tables & put through review

-These cell means can then be used in OLS - which runs on means

Dofile and datasets to replicate our empirical applications in Chapters 3 and 4 are available from SSC:

ssc desc cc_xd_didtextbook
net get cc_xd_didtextbook

Households in counties that had high Liberty Bond participation during World War I had higher stock ownership and more favorable opinions towards retirement saving in later decades, from Gillian Brunet, Eric Hilt, and Matthew S. Jaremski https://www.nber.org/papers/w33541

And I assume the pay is also appropriate along German pay scales from the Middle Ages for such a role

If the term were a Mon-Fri 9am-5pm work week, it's Monday 10:17 am.

Dear US colleagues,
In response to the Trump administration, my university @univ-amu.fr is setting up a new program dedicated to welcoming American scientists wishing to pursue their work in France.
There are several M$ in the budget.
www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/ac...