Francesco Zezza

📢 Check our latest work with Jelena Reljic, now published in Economic Modelling! Breaking the divide: Can public spending on social infrastructure boost female employment in Italy? #econtwitter @reljic_ sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 1/

OECD 2026 Report on Italy A broken record: - more structural reforms - supply-side/managerial solutions for productivity growth - more capital markets development - more deregulation Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Levy Distinguished Scholar and member of the six wise men of the British Treasury, Wynne Godley developed the SFC model, a framework so effective it was cited by Goldman Sachs’ chief economist as generating "the most important chart in the world." 🧵

Read this.

This is a useful introduction to using Claude code for applied economists, including content on data analysis, web scraping and large datasets.

MIT's "Statistical Method in Economics" by Prof. Anna Mikusheva Lecture notes & more: ocw.mit.edu/courses/14-381…

ヴォルデモート、「名前を言ってはいけないあの人」じゃなくて、「やらかしたホグワーツOB」って呼ばれてたらそんなに恐れられてなさそう

An absolute banger of a paper. “A Gentle Introduction to Matrix Calculus” by econometrics legend Jan Magnus — one of the clearest explanations of matrix derivatives ever written. If you work in econometrics, machine learning, statistics, or optimisation, this paper is pure gold.

Tom and I have finally finished a draft of Dynamic Programming Vol 2! Exhausting but satisfying. New approach to DP theory, advanced material, many applications... dp.quantecon.org

I spent this morning reviewing returns to college for a paper on human capital. The FREOPP data: freopp.org/whitepapers/is… are useful because they do not compare college graduates to the average high-school graduate (as the media tends to do). Instead, they construct a counterfactual for the median student conditioning on demographics, family background, academic proxies, and geography. Also, their return-on-investment (ROI) estimates account for completion risk at the college-major cell level. Psychology is a good case to look at. I took courses in it myself and found them interesting and useful, so this is not a complaint about the subject. The problem is one of positioning. Psychology is not philosophy, where the value is largely intrinsic and everyone understands that. But it is not nursing or accounting either. Students and parents tend to view psychology as a practical, economically sensible career choice, but with real intellectual content. According to FREOPP, 59 percent of psychology programs have a negative ROI for the median student once completion risk is accounted for. One percent have an ROI above $500,000. These numbers use a 3 percent real discount rate, which is too low in my opinion. At a more sensible 5 or 6 percent, I suspect over 80 percent of psychology programs in the U.S. have a negative ROI for the median student. Let me repeat that: 80 percent. Psychology is not the main point. There appear to be many majors marketed as sensible economic investments that are not, for a large share of students, sensible investments at all. Programs that are cheap to run, attractive to applicants, and easy to scale are programs that colleges have every incentive to expand. The institution collects the tuition. The student bears the downside. Colleges and universities in the U.S. need to take a hard look at what we are selling (and, yes, I say “we”). This is borderline moral failure.

From the Minsky Archives to the works of influential thinkers like Wynne Godley, L. R. Wray, and Pavlina Tcherneva among many others–the Levy Institute is proud to have housed many stalwart pieces of economic scholarship over the years. Here are just 3 of our greatest hits 🧵

🚨6th Sailing the Macro Workshop 📣 New call out! You won’t macro w/o sailing anymore ⛵️ 🌊Where: Ortygia, Siracusa 🌊When: Sept 11-13, 2026 🌊Keynotes: Carlo Altavilla, Christiane Baumeister, Morten O. Ravn 🌊Deadline to submit: May 14, 2026 👉 Info: #call-for-papers" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">sailingthemacro.org/#call-for-pape…

The code to replicate the model and all simulation exercises is eviews is attached at the end of the wp. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Differently from the more complex 2-country models - where the exchange rate depend on financial market-clearing mechanisms - in OPENSIMPLEST the xr responds to lagged current account imbalances. Nevertheless, results are the same

New WP out 📢 Happy to share the first of a series of WP of a new project, which aims to make Stock-Flow Consistent models more accessible to students and young researchers, presenting toy models that can be easily extended or empirically estimated levyinstitute.org/publications/o…

@heimbergecon Congrats! Looks super interesting

The Austrian National Bank (OeNB) will fund our 3-year project “Understanding people’s views on fiscal policy.” We'll use survey experiments to study expectations about fiscal policy effects, views on propagation mechanisms, fiscal preferences shaped by trust and trade-offs etc.

I have posted the slides for my undergrad intermediate macroeconomics class on my webpage: eml.berkeley.edu/~jsteinsson/te… Hopefully some will find these useful. 1/n

Highly recommended! "Liquidity Traps: A Unified Theory of the Great Depression and the Great Recession" by Gauti B. Eggertsson and Sergei K. Egiev. "This review of liquidity traps unifies three landmark economic downturns—the US Great Depression, the Great Recession, and Japan's Long Recession—into a single analytical framework. We examine various forces that drive natural interest rates negative: temporarily (such as banking crises and debt overhangs) or permanently (such as demographic shifts and inequality). When policy rates hit the zero lower bound, conventional monetary tools lose traction. Under a standard monetary policy regime, counterintuitive paradoxes emerge: Greater price flexibility deepens recessions, and positive supply shocks become contractionary. We show how policy effects—including the size of fiscal multipliers, forward guidance, and these paradoxes—depend critically on the monetary-fiscal regime and on central bank credibility." Journal of Economic Literature: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10… Ungated version: nber.org/papers/w33195

@hexane360 @alz_zyd_ If Joshi is wrong, someone will prove it. He sent the proofs months ago, and it hasn't been challenged (yet). Until then, this debate remains, at best, unsettled

@hexane360 @alz_zyd_ math.columbia.edu/~woit/letterfr…

You want an example of slop? Inter-universal Teichmuller theory is slop. Hundreds, thousands of pages of slop disguised as high-level mathematics. Pure slop, which took two of the top mathematicians alive today weeks to unmask as slop. Its author still won't admit it is slop