Kurt MIT-shock-man

Have falling labor market barriers to women led to a change in selection of high-skilled women away from education, leading to a decline in the quality of teachers, and human capital production? See my co-author Kieran present our paper at NBER SI youtube.com/live/mQbLtpkXU…

📢NBER SI 2026 Workshop on Micro Data & Macro Models organized by Erik Hurst, Greg Kaplan and Gianluca Violante July 20-23, Cambridge MA (in person + YouTube livestream) Submission deadline: March 26, 11:59pm EST Submit here: nber.org/conferences/si… #EconTwitter #NBER #Macroeconomics

Wordle 1,732 1/6* 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Well that finally happened. Luck of the Irish 🍀 I guess

🚨🚨 NEW WORKING PAPER 🚨🚨 "Barriers to Benefits: Unemployment Insurance Take-Up and Labor Market Effects (with @BrendanDMoore) ➡️We ran a large-scale field experiment among 50k likely eligible workers to study the role of information frictions in the incomplete take-up of UI

Exciting in many dimensions, and particularly happy about my longstanding coauthor and dear friend @KHarmenberg coming back to Sweden!

Very happy to join @IIES_Sthlm next academic year as an assistant professor!

Exciting times in Stockholm and @IIES_Sthlm this fall Four new hires for IIES: @KHarmenberg @RHelensdotter @caterina_vieira @ReichardtHugo And @RustamJamilov coming to CeMoF (joint IIES/SU/SBS center) for a year

Almost at the end of my PhD, and really excited and grateful to share that I'm joining @StanfordGSB as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2027, following a postdoc at Stanford @SIEPR! 🎉

Heartbreaking news for all of us at @PrincetonEcon and for the whole economics community. R.I.P. Chris.

Another thought/question on AI and scholarship. Over the past few days I had ChatGPT 5.4 write a paper for me on a topic I wanted to know more about. It's in an area of my expertise, so I'm comfortable saying it did a quite good job. I don't know how to categorize this paper. 1/

🚨 We’re hiring! 🚨 Want hands-on experience in cutting-edge economic research? We have several Research Assistant positions open. Excellent prep for a PhD or research career. More info on each position: su.se/english/divisi…

When oil prices spike, inequality rises. Recent research by @SorryToBeKurt & co-authors shows oil shocks hurt low-income workers the most, lowering earnings growth & job prospects while high-income workers are largely unaffected. Read more: bit.ly/4rRXNHw

@causalinf @ATabarrok @paulnovosad for sure I know that whenever Restud increased it's submission fees it didn't really have any impact on the trend increase in submissions...granted, those were increases from 0 to 100 to 150 to 200

@SorryToBeKurt @ATabarrok @paulnovosad What’s the optimal price without price discrimination on journal fees when you have a 5x increase in submissions and holding a portfolio is optimal? I really wonder what that elasticity is, and how under reported junior faculty handle it, particular globally.

One obvious policy response to @causalinf concerns is to implement penalties for submissions of desk-rejected papers. ERC, other agencies implement rules like this. If you submit a proposal judged as of sufficiently low quality, you cannot submit again the next year. 1/n

@ATabarrok @paulnovosad @causalinf That's not so different from what I've suggested - not all prices/costs need to be dominated in $.

@paulnovosad @SorryToBeKurt @causalinf Raise the price!

@captgouda24 @causalinf would it make it more cliquish than it already is?

@SorryToBeKurt @causalinf I fear that doing this would make things much more cliquish. You have to read what they want better.

@farmerrf It's all about tradeoffs. Clearly, there would be both type 1 and type 2 errors. There's a question of reasonable. There's also the question of how many eventual QJE papers would not be published because of such an embargo? My guess is the number would be small

Ok … then I misunderstood your intent. But even if it’s journal specific there are years when even without AI it would not be unreasonable to send two or more papers to the same top journal. A desk rejection should not close the submission process for a year. That’s if academic journals survive. IMO AI is the last nail in the coffin for the entire enterprise of publication in paper journals. And moving a step further, I don’t see how the concept of the university as we currently know it can survive the technological tsunami that is coming in the next two years.

That’s a terrible idea. The QJE, as just one example, routinely desk rejects papers that end up in other top journals.

@paulnovosad @causalinf Upon further reflection (and discussion with some friends) you're probably right. It might have to be all first round rejections get an author embargoed for 6 months or something

@SorryToBeKurt @causalinf I don’t think this helps at all—the AI papers are mostly above the desk bar. That’s the whole problem, if you could quickly desk reject them it would be easy.

@captgouda24 @causalinf in fact, that may be too low. perhaps all first round rejects would have to get the author(s) embargoed for 6-12months

@SorryToBeKurt @causalinf I would set the bar a fair bit lower than just a desk rejection.

...but they have to convince editors and referees to work for them. That gives editors additional powers (subject to all of the concerns Scott raises in his post). You could require 2 editors to sign off on a block. But maybe for new steady state that is what it will take /end

Obviously, that's not a perfect outcome, but one that has been used in practice in other contexts (even before the concerns about the rise in AI). Maybe that's not in the interest of journals who want to earn more and more fees... 3/n