Takeshi Amemiya, my colleague and friend for many decades, has died at age 90. He made fundamental contributions to econometrics, having, as an empirical scholar, some gripes with the available toolkit. In retirement, he taught a course on the Economics of Ancient Greece. /1
Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv Sueyoul Kim, Ginger Zhe Jin, and Eungik Lee Abstract: Using a comprehensive dataset of posts from a major platform for anime- and manga-style artwork, we study the impact of the launch of a prominent text-to-image generative AI. Focusing on the majority of incumbent creators who do not adopt AI as a primary tool, we show that the AI launch led to a significant decline in post uploads by illustrators, whereas comic artists were less affected, reflecting the need for tight stylistic alignment across sequential images in comics. We present empirical evidence for two underlying mechanisms. First, illustration posts experience a loss of viewer attention, measured by bookmarks, following the AI launch, which can significantly harm creators’ business models. Second, direct competition from AI-generated content plays an important role: illustrators working on intellectual properties (IPs, such as Pokémon) that are more heavily invaded by AI reduce their uploads disproportionately more. We further examine creators’ responses and show that illustrators with greater exposure to AI avoid using tags favored by AI-generated content after the AI launch and broaden the range of IPs they work on, consistent with a risk-hedging response to AI invasion.
🚨 Coming up at #VIDEseminar: Ginger Zhe Jin (University of Maryland)
“Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv”
🔜 Wed, March 4, 11am New York, 5pm Berlin. Open to anyone!
Further information: www.digitalecon.org/seminar
Congratulations to Charles Manski on winning the BBVA Frontiers Award for his foundational contributions to partial identification, semiparametric methods, subjective expectations, social interactions and policy decision-making under uncertainty
www.premiosfronterasdelconocimiento.es/noticias/xvi...
Heute jährt sich der Beginn der russischen Vollinvasion der Ukraine zum vierten Mal. Unser Dossier bündelt die DIW-Forschung zu den sozialen, ökonomischen und energiepolitischen Auswirkungen des völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskriegs. www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.... #StandWithUkraine
Germany is just great at own goals. This here is an impressive bicycle kick into its own net.
www.handelsblatt.com/politik/konj...
Just to say the policymakers would be wise to always consider the scholarly level of their advisors. Among colleagues, Ulrike Malmendier is known to be a heavy hitter like very few on this planet.
Disappointing decision
www.handelsblatt.com/politik/konj...
Um es klar zu sagen: Hier macht die Bundesregierung einen schweren Fehler. #Malmendier
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs shows how easily pseudonymous users can now be re-identified from unstructured text alone.
When discussing our EJMR paper at NBER SI 2023 Catherine Tucker argued that rising compute would soon erode online anonymity. The future may already be here.
Nochmal zum Mitschreiben: Russische Angriffe auf die Ukraine zerstören Teile einer Pipeline, über die russisches Öl nach Ungarn und in die Slowakei geliefert wird. 1
The first and last lesson of history is that it has always been a garbage time to be alive. Nostalgia is a fine thing to indulge by the fire with friends, but institutionalized nostalgia for a bygone era is a sign of arrested development.
We won our tariff case!! Yay!! A 6-3 decision. Much more to come later. Here is the link to the decision:
www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
When I orginally said this in some interview, I was not intending to say anything deep (and did not know they would put this on a kitchen magnet). I do think it is interesting to reflect on the fact that in some fields there are well-defined questions that the field agrees on are important. (1/3)
Folks, some news. No, not that kind of news – what do you think this is, LinkedIn? It's this:
1. The applied causal graphs workshop deadline is 28th Feb. so get your abstracts in and hang out with us in Potsdam this May. Form and description is below
2. @dagophile.bsky.social is giving a keynote 🥳
Robynn Cox and I have a new paper! It's about the history of predictive algorithms in criminal justice, back in the 1920s-1950s. This paper is the result of five years of research and we're so happy to see it out. 🧵 1/
2/12 There is a reason why Putin, Musk, Trump, Vance, Thiel, and Xi all spend fortunes to attack Brussels.
They do not hate the EU because it fails.
They hate it because of its potential.
Our unity is their nightmare
📢 „Das wäre ein Durchbruch“
🗣 Interview zum geplanten Forschungsdatengesetz mit unserer Vorsitzenden Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schneider
core part of the ostensible economic justification for mass deportation was that Americans would rush in to take all the jobs immigrants left, but now unemployment rates for native born Americans are rising and the admin is sending people out to do damage control
Direkt zum Referentenentwurf, Stand 22.12.2025, geht es hier: www.bmftr.bund.de/SharedDocs/D...
Sehr wichtige Stellungnahme des @vfsecon.bsky.social zum #FDG Entwurf des #BMFTR: www.socialpolitik.de/de/referente...
Verdeutlicht, wieviel auch nach evtl. Beschluss noch zu tun bleibt und weitere Gesetzesänderungen in der nahen Zukunft wichtig sein werden.
Die Beantwortung dieser und vieler weiterer zentraler Fragen hängt entscheidend von der Verfügbarkeit und der Verknüpfung hochwertiger Forschungsdaten ab – in der Sozialversicherung und im Gesundheitswesen ist dies mitunter sogar lebenswichtig.
▶️ Wie wirksam ist Strafverfolgung?
▶️ Welche arbeitsmarktpolitischen Maßnahmen schützen tatsächlich vor Schwarzarbeit?
▶️ Und ist bessere Bildung ein Schlüssel zur Prävention von Gewalt in der Familie?
Little to add to Trump's Endangerment Finding move that hasn't already been said, but here's the key bit: Framing matters.
This isn't "economics" vs climate, or some kind of noble "cost-cutting" crusade.
It's a handout to narrow fossil interests, counter to economic forces.
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.
Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Russia continues to answer diplomacy with missiles.
We are determined to make that choice painfully expensive.
Today, we present our 20th sanctions package.
Sanctions severely hurt Russia’s economy.
And every sanction chips away at its capacity for war. (1/9)
My Op Ed in Today's Washington Post: "The long-lasting effects of viruses — and the anti-vaccine movement. For some people, a viral infection can have devastating long-term effects."
wapo.st/4qjFtWk
One of the most important scientific achievements of the last 50 years was making the causal links between prior viral infections (e.g. EBV) and subsequent serious diseases.
Paper title: Long or Short? Personalizing Ad Length and Frequency Authors: Ali Goli (University of Rochester), David Reiley (UC Berkeley), Wenfeng Qiu (Sirius XM Holdings Inc.), Jonas Tungodden (Norwegian School of Economics) Abstract We study the economics of advertising length using a large-scale randomized experiment on 18.3 million Pandora listeners. The experiment promoted a listening feature and randomly assigned users to advertising campaigns that varied in ad format (10 vs. 30 seconds) and frequency. For both users unfamiliar with the feature and those already familiar, we document that both ad formats generate incremental effects, with the relative advantage of long over short ads substantially larger among unfamiliar users. We then build a machine learning model to capture heterogeneity in both responsiveness to the campaign and realized exposure levels, and conduct off-policy evaluation of alternative campaign designs. We find that a personalized policy that optimally assigns users across the available experimental conditions, choosing the ad format and frequency for each user, increases incremental ad effects by about 30 percent. Two-thirds of this efficiency gain comes from leveraging heterogeneity in exposure rather than heterogeneity in responsiveness to the campaign.
🚨 Coming up at #VIDEseminar: David Reiley (University of California, Berkeley)
“Long or Short? Personalizing Ad Length and Frequency”
🔜 Wed, February 4, 11am New York, 5pm Berlin. Open to anyone!
Further information: www.digitalecon.org/seminar
Schedule - Spring 2026 Wednesday, February 4 - David Reiley (UC Berkeley) Long or Short? Personalizing Ad Length and Frequency (with Ali Goli, Jonas Tungodden and Wenfeng Qiu) Wednesday, March 4 - Ginger Zhe Jin (U of Maryland) TBD Wednesday, April 8 - Joshua Gans (U of Toronto Rotman) TBD Wednesday, May 6 - Dokyun Lee (Boston U) Take caution in using LLMs as human surrogates: Scylla Ex Machina
The Spring 2026 VIDE seminar schedule is up!
Further information and mailing list sign-up at: www.digitalecon.org
Thoughts from a newbie using Claude Code for the first time.
I don’t always use GitHub for my projects, but with Claude Code it feels like a must. Having a tool read and write files without version control is just too scary.
