Steven Berry

👋We’re the Health Care Affordability Lab at @Yale — a new initiative that pairs rigorous academic scholarship with strategic policy engagement to curb rising health care spending at every level of government. Read more: healthcareaffordabilitylab.org/commentary-pre…

It will be interesting to see if George Borjas has answers to the many critical issues raised here. Or if he updates his estimates to, for example, compare people in the same year rather than very different years.

Chatted with a water resource economist at an event in California yesterday. The state’s water “shortage” really is one of the most unforced errors in policymaking. Key stats: - farmers use 80% of the developed water supply - residents use 20% - cities pay ~20x higher prices (!) for water than farmers (~$722/acre-foot vs ~$36/acre-foot) - some of the biggest agricultural districts in the state pay literally $0 for their water - meanwhile agriculture accounts for just ~2% of California’s economy It’s crazy that politicians tell residents to take shorter showers or get rid of their lawns instead of just charging farmers the market price for their water usage.

So nice to see this in print! My paper on green trade policy, deforestation, and palm oil. 🌲🌳

I don't know, some of these "year in review" notifications are going too far

One of the Harvard report’s most compelling findings is that students almost universally speak about grades in terms of how much effort they put in. If they spend a lot of time studying and do all of the work asked of them, they believe, they should get an A. chroni.cl/4iiaoA3

We're launching the Tobin-Cowles Health Economics & Policy Program, a hub for policy-relevant health economics research at @Yale. Co-directed by Janet Currie & Zack Cooper, the Program will catalyze rigorous economic scholarship to directly inform policy: tobin.yale.edu/news/251117/ya…

Jingyi Cui studies reputation investments on an online platform where workers bid for jobs. Using proprietary data and a dynamic model, she finds that workers’ forward-looking bidding, combined with a profitable platform subsidy, brings the market close to the social optimum. Website: jingyi-cui.github.io

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I’m going to try to more consistently retweet scholarly refutations of viral posts in an effort to redress the all-too-frequent imbalance in their reach.

We’re excited to introduce the @Yale Department of Economics 2025-26 Job Market Candidates! Look out for individual posts about their research interests and job market papers this week, and learn more about the candidates here: economics.yale.edu/phd-program/pl…

Obama: America has always had competing stories about who we are and what the nation stands for. The first story says that even though we got rid of a king, there is still a caste system in America, a pecking order of who makes decisions That if somebody doesn't look like or think like you or practice religion the same way you do, they must be a threat to your way of life, and they need to be put in their place. That is how Donald Trump thinks about America. Make America great again by putting the people in charge even if they don't know what the hell they are doing. But here is the thing. That story is not new. It is the oldest story in the book. It is not even uniquely American. For most of human history, that is the way society has worked. For somebody on top and somebody on bottom. There were lords and peasants. For a long time, that story of caste and privilege and concentrated power was the law of the land here in America. If you look like me, you were likely treated as property. If you were a woman, or a white man who did not own property, you could not vote. But from the very start, there was another story, born of this nation's true revolutionary spirit, a story that says, we the people means what it says, that all of us are included, that we are not subjects, but citizens, defined not by race or religion or gender or sexual orientation, but by our commitment to a common creed and a willingness to accept not just privileges, but responsibilities that come with that citizenship.

The @YaleEconomics Department and Tobin Center are hiring several Pre-Doctoral Fellows starting in Summer 2026. Come join our vibrant program! Learn more and apply here: tobin.yale.edu/programs/pre-d… #EconTwitter @econ_ra @predoc_org @Econ_jobs_ @weconpol

It's Nobel prediction time! My guess is Grossman/Helpman for showing how trade affects innovation and the political economy of trade, perhaps joint with Melitz or Kortum. A trade prize would fit the times, like institutions last year...

This is a really dramatic improvement. Any state that isn't using the same techniques to teach reading has to explain what they think they know that Mississippi doesn't.

Nothing would advance the Abundance movement more than inventing and popularizing a version of Monopoly where the more houses you build the more rents become affordable.

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ @cailin_slattery & @WNober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay

I'm hiring a predoc to work w/ me on empirical IO/applied micro projects starting in Fall '26! Details below and instructions here: shoshanavasserman.com/call_for_predo… International students (who need J1) are welcome & non-econ bgs are fine given interest + curiosity. Please apply :)