Alex MacKay

New paper by Kalouptsidi, Kitamura, Lima, and Souza-Rodrigues: restud.com/counterfactual… #REStud #EconX #EconTwitter

This looks like a really useful piece of applied theory

@florianederer @TheStalwart Nah, I'd still make the goals bigger

@TheStalwart Is this @_amackay's burner account?

I think I’ve fully come around to soccer. If I could change once thing, it wouldn’t be making the goal bigger or anything like that. But just if it’s a tie game, rather than going to penalty kicks, the winner should be whichever team had the higher Attack Momentum implied score.

Some people are optimistic about stock returns, some are pessimistic. And, when presented with a similar menu of investment options, investors will make very different choices. In this paper, we try to make progress toward understanding why, using the actual decisions that investors make in their 401(k) retirement plans. We extend demand estimation techniques to portfolio choice using a new identification strategy. This allows us to recover varying expectations across investors for different assets.

The paper is now accepted at the RFS. A shout out to my great co-authors, Mark Egan and Hanbin Yang! academic.oup.com/rfs/advance-ar…

Our estimates indicate that investors vary widely in their expectations, and that expectations are predictable by the industry investors work in, local economic conditions, and the recent performance of investors’ employers. Heterogeneity in beliefs (or disagreement) is costly for investors, reducing risk adjusted returns by about 0.7 percent per year. However, the limited menu of choices offered by retirement plans may help insulate investors from larger mistakes they might if individual stocks and bonds were featured on the plan menu.

Congratulations to my colleague @JonathanColmer and co-authors for being recognized with an AEJ Best Paper award for their paper "Do Carbon Offsets Offset Carbon?" in AEJ: Applied! Paper is here: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

State-dependent pricing matters most when trend inflation is high... but that's also when menu cost models are least tractable. I make progress in a new paper, solving the mean field game analytically and deriving a tractable linear Phillips curve for menu cost models:🧵 1/12

@ksangani8 Congrats!

"Incomplete pass-through" (when costs rise 10%, prices rise <10%) is often "complete pass-through in levels" in disguise (costs rise 10 cents/unit, so prices rise 10 cents/unit). Turns out this simple pattern can explain several other features of the data.

Very happy to be joining @UVAEcon as an AP this fall! Thank you to all the amazing people I met on the job market, and to my advisors Florian & Kaspar (not on Twitter), @k_sonin and @evajanster.

They each have a series of papers that cover multiple fields. Check out their websites here: - davidvandijcke.com/research/ - francescoruggieri.github.io They will contribute to an exciting body of research by junior faculty at Virginia Econ! economics.virginia.edu/publications

I'm thrilled that David Van Dijcke (@packlesshepherd) and Francesco Ruggieri (@_FRuggieri) will be joining @UVAEcon this fall. You may know their work! David's JMP extends RDD to distributional outcomes. Francesco's quantifies the effects of taxes for *all* local US governments.

This afternoon: a session on market power on digital platforms.

Happening soon: a session on competition and markups in supply chains.

New NBER WP on algorithmic "coercion." Unlike collusion, coercion can be achieved by a single firm's pricing algorithm. It can be worse for consumers than collusion. @nberpubs

Several observations related to pricing, current technology, and consumer welfare, in this New York Times article.

Same product. Same store. Same time. But on Instacart, different customers may see different prices. My story on a fascinating new experiment from @Groundwork & @ConsumerReports, and on how the idea of a single price is breaking down in the digital age:

Tomorrow, I'm joining a panel of lawyers in NYC to talk about algorithmic collusion and coercion. If you are a interested in the current cases and law around pricing algorithms, you can sign up through the NYSBA website here: nysba.org/events/antitru…

The running list of IO job market candidates for 2025-2026 is live! Fill this out to add your info: forms.gle/SZU7zQGjMbMNRs… Running list here: shoshanavasserman.com/io-jmc/