Pol Campos-Mercade

FDA rejects Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine application - for reasons with no basis in the law The move signals an escalation in the agency’s efforts to interfere with established procedures for testing and approving vaccines.

FDA rejects Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine application - for reasons with no basis in the law
theconversation.com/fda-rejects-...

"From a legal perspective, the FDA’s decision could potentially meet what’s called the 'arbitrary and capricious' standard..."

Conflicts with science, law & common sense.

Look at how being diagnosed with cancer impacts people's involvement in crime!

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

A line graph illustrating the estimated share of newborns in the Netherlands who die before reaching age five from 1840 to 2023. The y-axis represents the percentage of children dying before age five, ranging from 0% to 40%, while the x-axis shows the years from 1840 to 2023. The graph has a prominent downward trend, indicating a significant decline in child mortality rates over time. Key data points are highlighted: in 1840, around 40% of children died before age five, peaking around 1959, where 39% of Dutch children died before this age. A notable decrease begins after 1960, reaching about 10% in 1945, where 1 in 10 children died. In the latest data for 2023, this figure has improved to 1 in 250 children dying before reaching age five. Annotations on the graph provide contextual information, linking past statistics to present outcomes. The data sources listed at the bottom include Gapminder (2015) and UN IGME (2025). The design is attributed with a copyright notice indicating CC BY

Less than 200 years ago, one in three Dutch children died before the age of five

Just posted on SSRN, an experimental follow-up to my comment with Daniel Banki, @urisohn.bsky.social, and Robert Walatka.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Daughters of immigrants are more upwardly mobile than daughters of locals in most destinations. Sons of immigrants are only more upwardly mobile outside of continental Europe, from Boustan, Fjællegaard Jensen, Abramitzky, Jácome, et al https://www.nber.org/papers/w33558

Does Money Really Encourage People to Get Vaccinated? Researchers used a randomized controlled trial to isolate the incentive effects of payments.

Will people get vaccinated in exchange for money? A study via Booth’s Devin Pope, Lund University's @erikwengstrom.bsky.social @campos-mercade.bsky.social, @snsf-ch.bsky.social's Armando Meier, Columbia's @meierstephan.bsky.social, Copenhagen's Florian Schneider. www.chicagobooth.edu/review/does-...

Hi! I am a professor in Economics at @lunduniversity.bsky.social My main research interests are mechanism and market design, and I have designed and redesigned many markets (mainly in the Scandinavian countries). I Please follow me 🙂

Unfollowing toxic social media influencers makes people less hostile!
In 2 experiments, we found that unfollowing extreme influencers:
-Reduced partisan animosity by 24%
-Increased satisfaction with X
-Led people to share higher-quality news

Effects lasted for 6+ months.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam YouTube video by MegaLag

These allegations of massive fraud & theft by PayPal seem not to have really hit the mainstream news yet.

It’s a surprise given how blatant PayPal / Honey’s scam seems to be & given the PayPal mafia are not exactly the world’s favourite people. youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?...

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus.

As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees.

1/

New paper: We combine evidence from a survey (correlational), bank spending data, and online experiments to show that job loss increases risk taking.

Joint work with @abbysussman.bsky.social, Carlos Vazquez-Hernandez, Daniel O'Leary, and Jennifer Trueblood

Don't Let the Enemies of Truth Ruin Wikipedia Elon Musk and other reactionary liars hate the "last good website" because it won't go along with their distortions

Wikipedia is the last good website, the one staple of the early internet that hasn't been degraded by pursuit of profit.

It's not an acceptable academic source—it's subject to change—but it's a great first cut, and has citations to acceptable sources.

We can't let post-truth reactionaries ruin it.

Earnings of 12,000 (new) PhD #economists who completed their degrees between 2001 and 2017 & were employed in the US following graduation.

Many of us can save a child’s life, if we rely on the best data There are many ways to improve the world, but their cost-effectiveness varies immensely. You can achieve a lot more if you rely on the best data on where to donate.

What is an important fact about the world that you wish more people would know?

Here is my answer: If we rely on the best data, many of us can save a child's life.

And here is my article about it.
ourworldindata.org/cost-effecti...

Using the results shown below and others, we estimate that couples in Germany act as if they value women's earnings at 48 cents on the Euro, compared to men's earnings. In Sweden, it's 80 cents on the Euro. Full paper here: bit.ly/MTO-T

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA" (http://www.alldayta.com), a product @joshgans.bsky.social and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x

Kudos to the researchers for running important replications and kudos to you for disseminating their work! Out of curiosity, what were the design differences? Do you think they have any chance at explaining the differences in findings?

A group of researchers has attempted to replicate our work on self-control and asset market prices published in the Review of Financial Studies (doi.org/10.1093/rfs/...) and not been able confirm our findings. See doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

📣📣📣
#EconSky

Inspired by @tapiorasanen.bsky.social, here is a starter pack for economists conducting field experiments 🤓🫶

Please let me know who is missing – and share widely! 🚀

go.bsky.app/9hev4gN

Zero-sum thinking is a key mindset that shapes how we view the world. A little thread to highlight our work on its roots with @sahilchinoy.bsky.social,
@nathannunn.bsky.social, Sandra Sequeira.🧵1/23 scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantc...

#eeac Day 1: @benleoecon.bsky.social JMP "No Intention to Profit, yet Still Repugnant: Experimental Evidence for Outcome-Based Repugnance" How do people feel about prediction mkts for disasters or second-hand life ins where transactions profit from misfortunes without causing them? #econsky #econjmp

The Causal Effects of Income on Political Attitudes and Behavior: A Randomized Field Experiment Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

This paper is fascinating. A three-year field experiement in which a 1000 low income Americans get $1000 a month. The tl;dr conclusion is that it basically has zero effect on their political views or participation.

www.nber.org/papers/w33214

The image shows a bar chart titled "Number of lives saved by childhood vaccinations from 1974 to 2024," sourced from Shattock et al. (2024). A total of 93.71 million lives have been saved by measles vaccines since 1974. Other diseases include tetanus (27.95 million) and whooping cough (13.17 million). The data highlights the large impact of vaccination programs globally.

Measles vaccination has saved an estimated 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children.

To celebrate my moving to BlueSky I am giving away LaTeX goodies.

Always wanted to have a clean, nice-looking, readable, complete and supporting visual track changes reply to referees?

Look no more: the template you're looking for is here: github.com/paolocrosett...

Happy BlueSkying to everyone.

Totally agree with @shengwuli.bsky.social.
The broader point is that I think we need to directly address the elephant in the room: the *huge* impact of context--i.e., seemingly irrelevant factors--on choice and beliefs.

🧵 on the behavioral economics of context, with some new data at the end.

Inequality, Relative Deprivation and Financial Distress: Evidence from Swedish Register Data Abstract. Several studies have linked rising insolvency rates to increasing inequality and argued that this might be explained by individuals' desire to “Keep up with the Joneses”. Using unique ad...

Great JMP by Paula Roth on ‘Keeping Up with the Svenssons’ - now out in REStat! doi.org/10.1162/rest...

My guess is still #EconTwitter, but my feed there is just complete political nonsense. I think the more people who come here the more they'll realise this is much nicer :)

#EconSky #EconTwitter #Academia

Hi Bluesky!
I'm a refugee escaping from all the hatred in X. I hope I'll find some peace here 😁 I'm interested in politics, but not in "social-media politics". I hope I can use this platform for productive academic discussions.
Looking forward to it!