Andre Gray

Fertility has fallen in the United States. At the same time, housing has gotten substantially more expensive. Are these related? How so? Benjamin Couillard attributes fully half of the fertility decline of the 2000s and 2010s to housing prices, a loss of 13 million children! 1/

El Niño raises the spatial correlation of agricultural yields, making the gains from trade more unequal. Just Accepted new paper by J. I. Dingel X: @TradeDiversion Bluesky: @tradediversion.bsky.social & K. C. Meng X: @kyle_c_meng Bluesky: @kylemeng.com zurl.co/8JdIE

Should monetary policy "look-through" the current energy price shock? ➡️Old debate: energy shocks are "temporary" in nature. Central banks should look them through ➡️We argue in our work that the look-through doctrine does not hold when *supply chain uncertainty * is elevated👇

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

Discussion of the BLS Current Employment Statistics, revision patterns, role of the birth-death model in payroll estimates and revisions, and potential methodology innovations, from Ryan A. Decker nber.org/papers/w34924

Kirill and I have revised this paper with the help of some nice referee comments. Big additions include: 1. Results on the general interpretation of recentered formula IV estimands with heterogeneous effects 2. Conditions for the asymptotic efficiency of a nonparametric split-sample estimator Enjoy!

New paper out w/ my excellent co-author (and friend) @gabrielpfritsch : “High-frequency fiscal shocks”. We use LLM’s to construct a daily time-series of expectations about US fiscal deficits (1947-2025) and thereby identify “fiscal shocks” in the historical record. Thread:

Social scientists working with materials requiring digitization can only study what machines can read. In practice, that means printed Latin-script documents from well-funded archives. In a new working paper, I show that Vision Language Models used zero-shot outperform every existing OCR system across every script evaluated, and I propose a pipeline for deploying them on new collections. I apply it to six archival collections spanning 1.8 million pages across six countries for under $1,900.

Now, into the weeds on the CPS population adjustment. The adjustment reflected: * lower immigration estimates from the last year * updates to the Census 2020 population base But pre-2026 CPS data don't get revised, so these adjustments all load onto January 2026.

New CEPR Discussion Paper - DP21244 Beyond Oil: The Origins of Commodity Price Fluctuations Alvin Lumbanraja @NorthwesternU @KelloggSchool, Sarah Mouabbi @banquedefrance, Evgenia Passari @evgenia_passari @Paris_Dauphine, Adrien Rousset Planat @LBS ow.ly/nFOE50You8l #CEPR_IMF #EconTwitter

New paper alert 🚨 🚨 Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England Together with co-authors @SdePleijt and @phwallis, we set out to solve one of the most intriguing puzzles of the Industrial Revolution

Read a copy of 'Quality Upgrading in Global Supply Chains: Evidence from Colombian Coffee' by Rocco Macchiavello, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Nicolás de Roux, @EricVerhoogen, Mario Bernasconi, Patrick Farrell currently available via tinyurl.com/5y7bsajw

Changing dollar share in official foreign exchange reserves is not just about preferences for US assets, from Linda S. Goldberg and Oliver Hannaoui nber.org/papers/w34888

Education inequality has declined in South Africa, but this has not translated into declines in earnings inequality, from David Lam, @MurrayLeibbrand, Arden J. Finn, and Nicola Branson nber.org/papers/w34869

Recently accepted by #QJE: “Monetary Policy and Sovereign Risk in Emerging Economies,” by Arellano, Bai, and Mihalache: doi.org/10.1093/qje/qj…

Spatial models calibrated to observed flows suffer overfitting problems in granular settings. @TradeDiversion & @FelixTintelnot diagnose the problem, show data smoothing performs better, and introduce a finite model to quantify counterfactual uncertainty. econometricsociety.org/publications/e…

Landlords have pricing power: they pass idiosyncratic costs onto rents in NYC, at odds with pure competition. Just Accepted new paper by C. Luke Watson @clwatsonecon and Oren Ziv (@zivoren @orenziv.bsky.social zurl.co/bUshZ

Oil price shocks raise the cost of using existing capital, while mineral price shocks raise the cost of new capital. Oil shocks are more contractionary overall, from Adrien Concordel, Phuong Ho, and @KnittelMIT nber.org/papers/w34847

A common misunderstanding is that supplying expensive new housing does not help the poor. No. Residents each move up a rung, freeing up housing at the bottom of the ladder. The latest, of many, papers to show this uses great data from Switzerland. 1/3 frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving_C…

I have a new IO/metrics paper out, with @borusyak, Kevin Chen, and @lihua_lei_stat. We have some new results on the nonparametric identification of demand counterfactuals with recentered IV We still doing tweet threads here? Ok, here goes...