Parag Mahajan

Check out our updated working paper on the H-2B visa program and its impact on firms! iza.org/publications/d…

Proud to be part of such a cool set of papers! Thanks @giov_peri, @JEEA_News, and the referees for an awesome experience that substantively improved the paper! Now ungated here: doi.org/10.1093/jeea/j…

@AshokaUniv @Prof_Nishith_P @kanmahajan Congratulations @kanmahajan !!

Ashoka University congratulates Kanika Mahajan (@kanmahajan), Associate Professor of Economics, on receiving the prestigious Elizabeth Adiseshiah Award 2026. Instituted by the Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust, the Elizabeth Adiseshiah Award is presented to a young scholar below the age of 45 for recognised contributions to Development Studies. The award includes a citation and a cash prize of ₹1 lakh. As part of the honour, Professor Mahajan will also deliver the Elizabeth Adiseshiah Memorial Lecture at the award presentation ceremony, scheduled to be held in August 2026. #AshokaUniversity

Menopause has real consequences for women. Glad to see our work “The #Menopause #Penalty” cited in today’s @nytimes Opinion piece by G. Goddard, which gets an important point exactly right: hormone therapy does not need to promise longevity to be worth it: nytimes.com/2026/04/05/opi…

The FY2027 President's Budget Request proposes cuts to science agencies, including cutting the NSF by 55% and eliminating NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate. I've seen people treating the budget request as if it's a final outcome. This is just the start for FY2027 budget cycle! Some facts for folks not as steeped in DC budget world -- 1 - The President's Budget Request is a request. It's the White House telling Congress what it would like to spend, reflecting the administration's policy priorities and the direction it would like to head. Congress will still decide on the actual appropriations level through its usual budget process. 2 - Last year, the FY2026 PBR proposed cutting NSF by 57% (from $9.1B to $3.9B) and NIH by 41% (from $47B to $27.9B). However, Congress enacted the FY2026 budget with a 3.4% cut to NSF and gave NIH a 1% increase. Congress did not implement the President's budget request. 3 - Congress wrote into last year's bill that no NSF directorate gets cut more than 5% relative to FY2024, and there's no reason to believe that appropriators in Congress have changed their position. 4 - Every Trump budget request, both in his first term and now in his second, has proposed deep cuts to civilian science agencies. Congress has rejected these proposals each time. The real impacts on the scientific ecosystem have come through different channels like cancelled grants, shifting to multi-year funding, indirect cost rate fights, and reducing agency staff capacity due to RIFs. 5 - The PBR may still have near-term effects. Historically, agencies begin planning around the PBR even when it's widely understood that Congress will not end up enacting the budget as the President proposed. If patterns from the current term are any guide, planning based on the request could mean slowdowns in new awards, staff reassignments, and early moves to wind down targeted programs. 6 - Based on historical appropriations cycles, FY2027 appropriations will almost certainly not be enacted before the November 2026 midterms. Agencies like NSF and NIH will likely operate under a continuing resolution at FY2026 levels. The final FY2027 budget will most likely be finalized after the midterms by a Congress with different political dynamics than the current one. For economists and social scientists seeing the President's Budget Request and reconsidering career plans: know that the PBR is not the budget for FY2027. It's a serious signal for the social sciences of where the administration would like to take science funding, but I would be very hesitant to make career decisions based on this.

New in @AEA_Journals' American Economic Review: migration doesn't hollow out the home economy — it builds it up. More than 75% of the long-run income gains from migration are domestic. The home economy itself grows. Here's what we found: 🧵

Applications for the summer school in the Economics of Migration" are open -- due April 5th. PhD students, postdocs, and early career faculty interested in immigration may apply. Hope to see you there! globalmigration.ucdavis.edu/summer_school3

Great pre-doc opportunities at @econ_uzh in Zurich for aspiring PhD candidates from low- & middle income countries or with a refugee/asylum seeker background. Predoctoral Program Global Talent Common Application: facultyhiring.oec.uzh.ch/auth/Apply/0/P… Please share widely in your networks!

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns,” by Rao (@nirupama_rao) and Risch: doi.org/10.1093/qje/qj…

Come work with me, and more importantly with all the much smarter and cooler people than I am, at the @InnovateEconomy: Full-time, entry-level research role for someone who wants to work directly with data, policy ideas, all while building strong quantitative and writing skills.

US fishing laws requiring the rebuilding of overfished stocks led to a 52 percent recovery in fish populations and higher long-term revenues for most fisheries compared to counterfactuals from the EU, from @Eyal_Frank and Kimberly Oremus nber.org/papers/w34237

In the next few days, the Trump administration is going to propose a new regulation changing the H-1B lottery. The big question I'm watching: will DHS prioritize the highest earners or so-called DOL "Wage Levels"? Here's why it matters: 🧵

A genre of tweets that I see surprisingly often: "BLS data is all fake. Also, here's a chart with BLS data to support a pet macro thesis I have."

It's "beyond comprehension" because it isn't true.

This prediction turned out to be all too accurate.

Meanwhile, tariffs are doing tariff things, with preregistered categories seeing prices increase, especially from trend. (Apparel is a notable exception.) We do have to balance these price increase against the <checks notes> 37,000 jobs lost in manufacturing since April. /6

Economist Stephen Moore claims BLS overestimated Biden job numbers by 1.5M. Unfortunately, he commits numerous errors. Over Biden's 4 yrs, the BLS initially underestimated jobs by 700k from the initial monthly estimate compare to the most recent benchmark.

Happy to see 'Skilled immigration frictions as a barrier for young firms' (with @FSMandel and @hewei_shen) published in the JME. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Amazing. Expects to find bias. Finds none. Which is what you would expect if BLS is doing their job well. Reverses course and claims BLS lack of bias means their forecasts have no “signal” and that is bad? Incoherent. Ends with gratuitous call for better methods.

I worked at BLS for years and can tell you that revisions are completely legitimate. Many field-reported stats simply come in *late* after the close of the month. Would you prefer that they just ignore the newer stats that come in? In fact, as a senior BLS economist I myself led a study to detect any systematic direction of post-publishing inflation revisions. It was a perfect bell curve (normal distribution) centered around the mean of 0% revision. Economists take their responsibility seriously. There is no political bias. Just the facts as well as they can be calculated.

It must be amazing to have this much confidence and this little worry about being wrong about something you know nothing about