Thor Berger

@JohnHolbein1 Also: cognitive ability, leadership skills, and income :-)

There's one trait where economists clearly outperform the other social sciences: Hubris.

After a month with Codex, Leontief’s point feels more prescient than ever: as automation shifts to cognitive tasks, it may become clear that we are not that different from horses after all.

Before AI, I can only have about 5 unfinished papers and 1 polished paper. AI boosted my productivity so much that I now have 136 unfinished papers and 1 polished paper.

Many of us are trying to figure out where the AI labor market transition may be going. But that's fundamentally unknowable. So instead of trying to predict the future we can instead look back to try to figure out what may be coming...by reading 19th c english literature 1/

My research team (w/ Sam Bazzi, Eric Chyn, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson, and Pat Testa) is hiring a full-time economics pre-doc starting in May! If you know someone who might be interested, see the link below: workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/default…

@AlexanderDonges A top-down industrial policy in which the state invested in railroads etc. to spur development in rural areas. The figure comes from ongoing work on the savings bank movement, which appears to have been a bottom-up initiative that also helped catalyze rural growth.

@bergerthor Do you have any explanations?

A tight link between productivity and population density is one of the most robust associations in urban economics. In that light, Scandinavia’s economic transformation before World War I is remarkable, since it occurred in some of Europe’s least densely populated regions.

@akib_kn @kbburchardi Glad to hear that! Would be fun to hear what your are doing with the data. I'm at IFN quite a lot this spring if you want to grab a coffee some time!

@bergerthor @kbburchardi Ofc you have -- congrats! Have already hugely benefited from the data you guys put up on that website. Look forward to reading the banger papers that you guys are going to write!

A decade later and I’m still a sucker for a railroad map: this shows the chance that working-class sons attained a white-collar occupation in adulthood in the early 20th century.

@akib_kn I have decennial data for this project, but in a project with @kbburchardi we have digitized annual data of the entire transport network.

@bergerthor Railway to heaven (not really, but at least occupationally so). Are the railways measured at decennial or annual frequency, if I may ask?

@aniketapanjwani @karpathy Linking across multiple (non-census) sources is a huge bottleneck (e.g. firm data to patent records to census).

I am starting to brainstorm a video "Agentic Coding for Economic Historians" some exercises I have in mind: > @karpathy 's autoresearch for improving census matching > using vision models and/or Layout Parser to recover structure (and content) in historical documents > designing effective search systems across thousands of scanned archival documents If you're an economic historian and have other things you'd like added to this list, please let me know!

What are the effects of large human-capital shocks on innovation? In a new paper, we study how WWI military deaths across British communities affected local invention over the next decades. We find that places that lost more young men became persistently less innovative. (🧵1/11)

Now on Early View: 'Life-cycle living standards of male-headed households: Evidence from Stockholm, 1800–80'. By Anton Svensson. @LuEconHist onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eh… #EHS100

After having spent two weeks developing workflows with Codex and Claude this is spot on: AI will improve science immensely, partly by removing us from the loop.

There is a nice and growing literature on how automation affects income mobility across generations. The results are surprisingly conflicting. Sometimes, it helps. Sometimes it hurt. Why the difference?

@StefanFSchubert We should randomize the date that individuals get paid.

Assaults peak on the Friday and Saturday after payday in Sweden

New CEPR Discussion Paper - DP21158 Academic Human Capital in European Countries and Regions, 1200–1793 Matthew Curtis @EconMattCurtis @UniSouthDenmark, David De La Croix @LIDAM_UCLouvain @UCLouvain_be, Filippo Manfredini @LIDAM_UCLouvain @UCLouvain_be, Mara Vitale @LIDAM_UCLouvain @UCLouvain_be ow.ly/rNxE50Yf4LI #CEPR_EH #CEPR_MG #EconTwitter

Deadline is tomorrow!

@VincentGeloso I thought the most recent estimates account for sample selection and still find a pronounced decline in average heights in the US? cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Counter: largely selection bias resulting from economic growth Note: it speaks about US but applies to Britain and Canada too

Deadline for the 4th Workshop in Economic History in Uppsala is approaching fast. Apply by January 31!