François de Soyres

…but on a couple of readability indices, they became harder to read! Suggesting that word complexity has risen. This is, uh, not what I would expect from AI. But I can’t think of what else might have generated the shift below…

I wrote my dissertation on placebo effects. My advisors were Gary Becker and Steve Levitt. This was not a normal thesis topic for a Chicago economist. Here's why I did it — and why it changed how I think about economics.

Trade fragmentation is often framed as the world splitting into blocs—countries trade within blocs, but not across them, as presented in many IMF or ECB reports. This is wrong. In a new FEDS Note, we show this misses what’s actually happening in the data: fragmentation is uneven and asymmetric, not a clean decoupling. Chinese exports keep gaining share in advanced-economy markets, while China simultaneously becomes less open to imports from those same economies.