Cesar Chavez

Why is causality harder to find than you think? People see a correlation chart, or a time-series with an arrow marking a policy launch, and read it as causal evidence. But it almost never is. New essay on the Transportation Problem in Causal Inference: carloschavezp29.substack.com/p/the-transpor…

1/ ¿Por qué algunos países logran evitar un “sudden stop” (frenazo abrupto de flujos netos de capital) cuando se corta el financiamiento externo… y otros no? En nuestro nuevo paper, examinamos un mecanismo clave: los inversores domésticos.

Why do richer economies have more very large firms? This paper shows that the upper tail of the firm size distribution thickens as economies grow. A model of idea search explains why, showing how growth itself can produce rising concentration. econometricsociety.org/publications/e…

Mathematics is now an experimental science.

@PINTO03091 @skalskip92 Flow state. Congrats, man. This is amazing.

@skalskip92 You might not believe it, but I simply manually annotated over 2,000,000 human body parts with ultra-precise detail. Probably no one else could do that.

物体検出だけでこういうのができるのはかなり凄いことだと思うけど、ほぼ良さは伝わらないだろうな。

I would like more time to read all papers that I see in my feed.

I haven't followed the Stiglitz controversy, but: Dixit Stiglitz Grossman Stiglitz Shapiro Stiglitz Greenwald Stiglitz Stiglitz Weiss Rothschild Stiglitz Atkinson Stiglitz Braverman Stiglitz etc. (+ Sen-Stiglitz report). Hard to think of a more creative and impactful economist.

**TARGETED PERSUASION** Who should you target when others observe only the target’s action—not what you told them? And how much should you customize the information you send? 1/. gratton.org/papers/Targete…

Video of LACEA Calvo Lecture here: youtube.com/watch?v=RTjGtZ…

@alexolegimas Too kind. We’re working on the generalization since the basic idea applies across a whole class of models that haven’t always been in communication

This is just the economics of scarcity. Here is agriculture—same graph. Once something becomes plentiful (eg through automation), value reallocated to something that is scarce. We don’t eat less than before, if anything we eat way more. We don’t use computers less, we use them more. But neither is scarce, so their share of GDP decreases.

@ JoshCon 2026

Recien salido del horno (de la airfryer, en realidad). Con la genia de Magdalena Cornejo

New @I4Replication DP: We replicated the seminal Lipsomb et al. paper on electrification in Brazil - and found consequential coding errors. Turns out the paper is based on a fragile IV. After many years, the replication is forthcoming in AEJ:Applied. econstor.eu/bitstream/1041…

New working paper with @AmolRaswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps." A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

Super interesting! "Nowcasting Country-Level Trade Estimates Using IMF PortWatch" by Serkan Arslanalp, Oliver Exton, Chang Gao, Parisa Kamali, Mario Saraiva, Alessandra Sozzi, and Jasper Verschuur. "This paper develops high frequency trade estimates at the country level by applying nowcasting methodologies to satellite-based big data on vessel movements sourced from IMF PortWatch. The approach provides a timely estimate of monthly trade at the country level that can be produced and released within 7 working days. The paper validates the nowcasting trade estimates against official data for an initial wave of countries representing advanced economies, emerging markets and small island developing states: Brazil, Jamaica, Japan, Samoa, and the United States. The nowcasting methodology produces trade estimates that perform well compared to the official statistics, with the best fit for advanced economies and large emerging markets. The paper identifies key complimentary information to improve the presented nowcasting methodology to develop country trade estimates. The paper also considers an application to estimates of U.S. imports during a period of elevated trade tensions." elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/…

Hagedorn's results on price level determination are incredibly important. They are a true third theory of the price level to go along with the active monetary policy approach and the FTPL. (No, Hagedorn's theory is not a special case of FTPL.) It's a tragedy that he isn't around to see them published. Of course, none of the three approaches are perfect, but showing that options A and B are not the only possibilities is a massive contribution, deserving of a top 5.

Peruvian journalist Geraldine Santos is only 30 years old, and she is already preparing for her funeral because she has received so many threats while reporting on cocaine trafficking and environmental crimes in the Amazon jungle. trib.al/Nl8JjXW

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman...you cannot become a German or a Turk... But anyone from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American." -Ronald Reagan on one of our greatest strengths, which we seem eager to destroy