Pierre Biscaye

Excited to see my #JMP in the @WorldBank DIME Blog today! Many studies show short-run effects of agricultural shocks on violent conflict. My JMP asks: what about the long-run? I find that desert locust swarm exposure persistently ↗️s conflict over the next 14 yrs. A 🧵 1/13

Apply to do a PhD in economics @cerdi! We are offering four full PhD scholarships. Apply online by April 30. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, and please share with your networks. cerdi.uca.fr/english-versio…

Took my daughter to the park today. We rode bikes, went on the swings, snacked, and looked at little ducklings in the pond. She told me "I'm so happy today papa!" What more could I possibly want from life?

Explaining mechanisms be like xkcd.com/3210/

Just used @RefineInk's free preview. Comments mainly focused on text in intro/conc not matching nuance of specific table results. Useful! But not likely to change a ref/editor decision. Missed bigger issues caught by me/other AI tools. Limits of free preview, or a general issue?

How I feel every time I read about other economists starting to use Claude code

@Josh_Merfeld Oh Josh I’m so sorry to hear this. I hope you can be reunited with your daughter soon.

It’s stressful and it makes it very hard to work. It also requires a lot of time and money, which further saps my ability to get things done. So sincere apologies to all of those waiting on me, but please understand.

For anyone to whom I owe work, including coauthors, editors, etc: I have been having relationship problems for a while and now my daughter is being wrongfully retained in a country that has a horrible track record of returning abducted children.

Home Alone is perfectly cast. Every role is 👌

@nickgebbia Couldn’t have asked for that to go much better! #COYG

Unreasonably amped for tomorrow. COYG!! 🔴⚪️

@MU_Econ @cerdi It was my pleasure to come present. Thank you for the welcome and the great discussion!

We were delighted to welcome @pbiscaye of @cerdi to MU Economics today buff.ly/Qg1PlBC

🚨 Hiring Tenure-Track APs in Econ at the University of Copenhagen! 🚨 Join a great group in an exciting (and friendly) city 😀! Details will follow. PLS REPOST AND GET IN TOUCH to hear more. All fields, and I’m esp. interested in hearing from DEV candidates 😀! #econtwitter

@Josh_Merfeld It’s a similar situation here in France. The deodorant available just isn’t doing it.

There’s a lot of BO in Australia and I’m pretty sure it’s because the deodorant here sucks.

@oliverwkim So we were gods? 😂 nice piece, Oliver. To one of your last points, my reaction to prospective PhDs asking for my thoughts has changed drastically since we went through the market 😬

🚨 New blog post: Twilight of the Econs? 🚨 Why is the Econ job market faltering—and what does it mean for the place of Economists in society? global-developments.org/p/twilight-of-…

I was in Ouagadougou when MJ died and one of the first things anyone would ask when they found out I was American was how I felt now that the “king” was dead.

Important null results in development economics Despite the bias against publishing null results, they are important for policy, helping to kill bad ideas. I've highlighted some key examples we have featured on @vox_dev: voxdev.org/topic/importan…

Thank you @leightjessica for including me in this great series!

"Ending USAID: What America—and the World—Stands to Lose" - Just me and Anne Fitzpatrick, shouting a bit of background and reality into the disinformation void about USAID. u.osu.edu/aede/2025/03/0…

@J_LuengoCabrera @ACLEDINFO This is a great visualization. What approach did you use to categorize ACLED events as attributed to jihadist groups?

Sahel: jihadist group activity Data: @ACLEDINFO

@Josh_Merfeld 💯 agree. Giving the first lecture of my new masters data science for economics class today! The skills are very in demand and broadly applicable so it’s a great service to the students.

Data cleaning/wrangling, data visualization, big data, you name it. My honest opinion is that more Econ departments should embrace this and have more data classes. I get pushback when I bring this up in casual conversation, but I think it’s a good idea for students.

I wouldn’t have put it this way because I think it’s too strong, but I very much agree with the underlying sentiment. I think many other fields would be shocked at how good many economists are when it comes to “data science.”

This is generally how I’ve been thinking about the rapid spread of mobile sports betting in the US. And the supposed safeguards are being used for adverse selection. So it was jarring to see @TheEconomist’s cover this week extolling it. Not a good call. tinyurl.com/2bt58pxt

Abdou Cissé is on the market from Berkeley. His job market paper measures the value of energy reliability a key part of growth and development. A great laboratory for his question is a natural experiment in Senegal: the staggered roll-out of a large-scale -national- electricity reliability technology that allows him to causally measure the real effects of improved electricity reliability and households and firms' willingness to pay for such reliability. He combines great empirics, sufficient statistics modeling, and quantification all in one paper. In addition, he has a great pipeline (JME pub, JDE R&R, other R&Rs, and strong works in progress). Last but not least, he is humble and a great dude. He will do well on the market. If you wanna know about Abdou Cissé, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to share my recommendation letter. [His website is in the first response to this post.] ps: We are not related.