Mike Powell

Some of us really appreciate your posts.

What do you think the equilibrium effects would be of grading assignments relative to how well an LLM does with minimal guidance? (Effectively replacing curves where we compare students to each other with ones where we compare them relative to AI.)

How Tariffs Affect Trade Deficits...

... a new paper with amazing trade economist Arnaud Costinot.

Many politicians and the general public expect tariffs to reduce imports lower imports and thus work to close a trade deficit.

Economists typically say "not so fast"...

🧵1/n

Danana?

It gets better. Just wait until Appendix E.

😱

At least it answered quckly.

PLEASE RT :)

Submit to the annual Network Science and Economics Conference, the largest US event for network theory and empirical research in and adjacent to economics

Deadline Jan 30 (soon!)

Conference Apr 11-13 at Stanford

NBER Innovation Boot Camp is back this summer for a 4th run (thanks open_phil!)! Lectures by Heidi Williams, Pierre Azoulay, Ina Ganguli, Ben Jones, Chad Jones, Kyle Myers, and me, a great policy panel and keynotes, plus attendance at Summer Institute innovation session. www.nber.org/calls-papers...

Congrats. That’s an excellent paper.

Ok, I finally managed to slog through this paragraph, and it turns out it’s just Smith being a crypto bro.

It definitely has pages of stuff like this in it. I’m sure he’s just describing an eigenvalue or something, but who can say?

Did someone say non-random sampling?

Not necessarily

Just the kind of enrollment problem that can be solved by covering a couple weeks of general equilibrium theory at the beginning of the term.

Is that a picture of applied theory?

The 10th edition of the Empirical Management Conference has just started! We have a great line up of presenters and papers:
www.hbs.edu/faculty/rese...

Just started a list of participants of current and past editions, ping me if you want to be added.

I like that when it stops working, it does so publicly, so coauthors know not to expect anything from me.

That explains why I didn’t get any emails this year!

In Fehr, Powell, and Wilkening (2021), we were worried about the complexity of subgame-perfect implementation mechanisms driving their poor performance, so we did something like this and found some improvements (but still inefficiencies consistent with preferences for retaliation).

You will then wish it was baby beluga.

I’m also willing to bet real money that people who write this kind of feedback begin their talks with “so…”.

I guess people in different fields use “not surprising” to mean entirely different things (I’m not even sure how to formulate what my prior is when reviewing a theory paper), but I would guess they use it because it’s easier to write than a specific and convincing criticism.

I usually interpret “these results are not surprising” as “these results tell us little that was not already known,” but it’s much less useful as feedback (and convincing as an argument) than “here is why the marginal contribution of the paper is limited given the state of the literature.”

Monitoring Team Members: Information Waste and the Transparency Trap (Forthcoming Article) - In a model of moral hazard in teams, we demonstrate that firms’ concerns about low trust among teammates can justify two common but otherwise puzzling patterns: information was...

Forthcoming in AEJ: Microeconomics: "Monitoring Team Members: Information Waste and the Transparency Trap" by Matteo Camboni and Michael Porcellacchia. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

I think Igor found the optimal dynamic contract, Itai.

But how will people know he will pay at the end of the seminar if no one has ever stayed until the end?

Today's edition of "📈📉 papers you should know" is Dezsö Szalay's @reveconstudies.bsky.social paper, "The Economics of Clear Advice and Extreme Options". The paper concerns itself with information acquisition choices under delegated decision making. Let's go through an example...

Today's edition of "📈📉 papers you should know" is Amanda Friedenberg's @econometric.bsky.social paper, "Bargaining Under Strategic Uncertainty: The Role of Second-Order Optimism". It's a wonderful example of a paper that delivers new insights from studying an old game.

My guy Walker Hanlon has a cool new book: