David Baqaee

New paper with @arielburst on aggregate productivity in economies with discrete choice and household heterogeneity. In these settings, measures like real GDP, average utility (across agents), and sum of compensating variations have serious flaws. A brief summary below. 1/7

Mr. Mehdi, an Iranian woman here. It’s honestly frightening how similar your words sound to those of my interrogator in an Iranian prison. I was shot in the eye by the Islamic regime in Iran during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Then they arrested me, and my interrogator told me the same thing you are saying now: “This is Masih Alinejad’s fault that you are blind now.” Do you realize how that sounds? It sounds exactly like the members of the Revolutionary Guard in our prisons. Many of us are familiar with your loud words always blaming the victims. But you know what? She is not a victim, she is my hero. If Masih didn’t exist, no one would have heard my voice and people like me.

Erwin Diewert should win the Nobel in economics this year. His work on price indexes -- while some find it boring -- is basically the thing that is everywhere around us without us seeing it. It is like the air we breathe as economists. You go to the BLS website to get the price index? Diewert is there! You get a GDP series from the FRED database -- Diewert is there. You open your macro textbook to teach undergrads about inflation, Diewert is there. You open your micro textbook to teach undegrads about substitution effects, Diewert is there. Turn around, Diewert is there too! Yet, we never recognize that his work gave us powerful insights bridges to gap between theory and applications. Not giving it to him at this point is the same slight as not giving it to Harberger, Demsetz, Alchian, or McKenzie (or the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie)

"Well, I’m glad that the European Commission has a pre-prepared 'toolbox' of terrible ideas so that Member States don’t have to come up with terrible ideas all on their own."

Scoop: Two nurses working in a Tehran hospital who treated wounded protesters during the nationwide uprising in January were tortured and repeatedly gang raped by security agents while in custody, people familiar with the matter told Iran International. iranintl.com/en/202603102323

Iranian authority openly threatening to kill its critics on national television. I invite everyone to listen carefully to these threats broadcast on Iranian state TV. “Confiscating property is nothing… we will make your mothers mourn you.” For Iranian activists, journalists, and opposition figures, this is not rhetoric. It is a real and constant threat. Many of us have families inside Iran who are harassed and intimidated because we speak out. Those of us living abroad receive death threats regularly. Human rights organizations have documented years of intimidation, surveillance, and assassination plots targeting Iranian dissidents around the world. When a regime uses its own state media to threaten the lives of its critics, the international community should take notice.

Queste giovani ragazze iraniane costrette a indossare un velo e che si rifiutano di cantare l’inno in segno di dissenso, col rischio di finire in carcere o appese alle gru, rappresentano per me la vera lotta per l’emancipazione femminile. Le soldatesse ucraine che lottano contro un esercito invasore e criminale come quello russo, le soldatesse israeliane che lottano contro terroristi da diversi paesi, le donne in varie regioni africane che lottano contro l’infibulazione delle bambine, le donne in Afghanistan che nonostante i divieti istruiscono le bambine. Non sosterrò MAI le ridicole galline con tovaglia a quadretti che sostengono regimi fondamentalisti e si riempiono la bocca di contraddizioni e pacifismo, quelle che sputano contro l’occidente mentre godono di ogni libertà, diritti acquisiti da vere femministe che hanno realmente lottato, prima dello scempio attuale di questi pseudo partiti.

Thank you President @realDonaldTrump for urging Australia to protect these Iranian players. Also, thanks to @jk_rowling for using her voice to support these brave girls. We Iranians never forget those who stand with us in our darkest moments.

🇨🇭 Today Switzerland voted in favor of individual taxation. A good law that eliminates the marriage penalty and promotes female labor market participation. Excellent way to celebrate international women day

@mattyglesias Yeah. How horrible that Venezuelans and Iranians now have a chance at freedom. Disappointed by the fact that you turned out to be a political hack like all the rest of the pundits.

From Inside Iran: After a few days, I finally managed to connect. Last night, I went shopping and saw 15–20 people marching with Khamenei banners, holding mourning ceremonies, and causing heavy traffic. Armed men were around them. Some cars honked to clear the way, and in front of us, they pulled a man from his car and slammed his head repeatedly against the hood, with a gun right next to him. So should I be afraid of war? Honestly, I’m more afraid of these savages. #DigitalBlackOutIran

If someone told me a semiconductor shipment was late because it was the wrong phase of the moon, I would not have believed them before reading this paragraph!

As an Iranian living inside my country during war, I will say this plainly. The chance of me being killed by masked, armed men roaming the streets, or by gunmen standing on mosque rooftops behind machine guns, is far greater than the chance of dying in an airstrike. That is the truth of life under the Islamic Regime occupying Iran. The real fear here has never come from the sky. It has always come from the men the regime unleashes among its own people. #Irán #IranIsraelWar

Not pictured in this silly image of 1950s America: ☑️ That this house is probably 1000 square feet, lacks AC, and a washer/dryer. ☑️Those kids own 6 outfits and a small number of toys. ☑️ The family takes no vacations beyond the local lake and goes out to eat once every 2 months. ☑️ One gas-guzzling car, one black & white TV with 3 channels, no long-distance phone calls. ☑️ Ignore the suit, the husband probably does back-breaking work in a dirty factory with no health or disability benefits. ☑️ The wife's make-up covering bruises from her husband getting drunk and hitting her the night before. ☑️ The wife’s liquor stash to handle the stultifying boredom of being a housewife when she wanted a career. ☑️The female high school senior pressured to marry her jerk high school boyfriend because marriage is her only path out of her home. ☑️ The daughters having fewer education and career opportunities, no sports teams at school, and having to wear uncomfortable clothes. ☑️ The African American family on the other side of town stuck in a terrible, low-paying job, awful schools, and suffering vicious racism with few civil rights. ☑️ The (not too) local Asian, and Hispanic families also facing terrible discrimination and lack of opportunities. ☑️ The Jewish family taking their teenage son to the hospital after getting jumped after school by some antisemitic classmates. ☑️ The disabled child who just bikes around the block all day because there is no community infrastructure to help them thrive. ☑️The LGBT kids who stayed in the closet until age 17, when they were discovered, assaulted, and disowned by their parents. ☑️ Health & safety risks from polio, rampant smoking, pollution, more fatal cancers, and lack of seatbelts. And the Korean war. The 1950s were terrific for some – particularly suburban white male breadwinners – but not for a lot of other types of people who never appear in these idealized fake photos. We've some made progress on some of these variables since then. We should be celebrating that progress! (and working for more).

@e_gurkova @PSEinfo @itskhoki @arielburst Congrats! Very well-deserved.

I am happy to share that in Fall 2026 I’ll be joining @PSEinfo as an Assistant Professor! I’m deeply grateful to my advisors Lee Ohanian, @itskhoki, and @arielburst, and the amazing UCLA Econ community for their support and guidance. Huge thanks as well to my friends and family!

A 20 min presentation at the NBER EFG of my paper with @arielburst. How to measure aggregate productivity with heterogeneous agents. Our measure identifies when changes are "positive sum" without taking a stance on how resources should be distributed. dropbox.com/scl/fi/qxyver1…

How the Islamic Republic treats the Iranian people during wartime: There are no air raid sirens or shelters. Authorities also shut down the internet and are jamming satellite signals from diaspora news channels, preventing access to information.

@BrianCAlbrecht @Afinetheorem Touché!

@DBaqaee @Afinetheorem Fair. Do any papers find reallocation to be less than your 50%?

True for me as well. Let's put this as a minimal criteria: your org reallocated 5% of spending because of AI, or 10% of the tasks you do/products you make are ones you do now because they make sense given AI but didn't do before. Zero orgs I work with meet that criteria.

@Afinetheorem @BrianCAlbrecht If the model is perfectly competitive, and aggregates are smooth, eg a hopenhayn model, then envelope logic holds even with entry because of first welfare theorem. You can break this easily of course, but good benchmark nevertheless imo.

@DBaqaee @BrianCAlbrecht Maybe I'm missing something, David, but explain the dynamics (in any reasonable dynamic model of entry - so need some heterogeneity and some inframarginal firms) of how you would get that from envelope?

@BrianCAlbrecht @Afinetheorem Surprised to hear you say that so definitively. In a perfectly competitive world, the growth in TFP due to reallocation is zero because of the envelope theorem, so it all has to come from “within” firm growth!

@Afinetheorem As with all change, isn’t the real aggregate effect going to be reallocation across firms? That’s the biggest component of say TFP growth