Economists: we award Nobel Prizes for work on efficient institutions and minimizing transaction costs.
Also Economists: the review process at the American Economic Review.
Last chance to register for the publishing in economics workshop, #EconSky! (Registration closing Thursday)
Happening Mon, March 9, 12-1:30pm US EDT.
econ4ua.org/the-craft-of...
The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)
The richest man owns X.
The second and third richest men control Google.
The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.
And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.
See the problem here?
Das KOF Konjunkturbarometer steigt aktuell um 0.9 Punkte auf 104.2 Pkte. Die Indikatoren der Konsumnachfrage und der Auslandsnachfrage legen zu. Die des Verarbeitenden Gewerbes stecken dagegen zurück. Die positiven Aussichten für die Schweizer Konjunktur festigen sich.
kof.ethz.ch/news-und-ver...
cool paper!
Pretty clear message from Friedrich Merz on his China trip: curb overcapacity - or expect more EU protection in key sectors.
Unlikely to shift Beijing’s policy. But clarity about the problem is good diplomacy - and a useful signal to fellow EU member states too.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/w...
Danke fürs Versuchen!
Yes, its a log scale, fairly standard for plotting long-run growth
The scaling gap is real: The EU has only 20% of the scale-ups found in the US and hosts just 110 unicorns vs 687 in the States.
A major culprit is legal fragmentation. Founders still navigate 27 different labor, insolvency, and tax laws – adding massive costs and complexity.
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The figure shows the content of feeds, by self-declared partisanship. Average content shown to users in each feed setting: the chronological feed (grey) and the algorithmic feed (red). 95% confidence intervals reported. Algorithms curate what users of social media see, raising concerns that they may distort attitudes and affect social and political outcomes. This column reports on an experiment conducted on X in the US in 2023, in which users were randomly assigned to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed significantly shifted political opinions in a pro-Republican direction, while switching the algorithm off had no comparable effect. This asymmetry arose because the algorithm affected which accounts users chose to follow, leaving a lasting imprint on their information environment even after algorithmic curation was removed.
Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, @phinifa.bsky.social, & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya show that switching users from a chronological to an algorithmic feed on X significantly shifted political opinions in a pro-Republican direction.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...
#EconSky
EU demands Russia withdraw troops from Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Transnistria, pull nukes from Belarus, pay reparations, and hold free elections — all as conditions for a Ukraine deal.
"We pay back to Russian maximalist demands on Ukraine."
🔗 euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/19/e...
Alles, was man hintergründig zum China-Besuch des Kanzlers wissen muss, haben @tbenner.bsky.social und zwei Kollegen sehr konzentriert in ihrem Essay zum „China-Schock“ für die @internationalepolitik.de aufgeschrieben, dringende Empfehlung.
cc-ing @rbmyerson.bsky.social
New report outlining how we used text embeddings to categorize >30 million products of the ECB's daily price dataset in a cost-efficient manner. The goal is to turn billions of prices into snapshots of current inflation: www.bis.org/publ/othp109...
How did #Ukraine economy survive the RUS onslaught?
maybe a miracle but there are also fundamental factors :
1) defend skies, shipping lanes
2) fiscal stimulus ↑
3) vital int'l aid
4) play econ cards well
5) adaptability of private sector
#UkrainianView #EconSky
(w/ @tderyugina.bsky.social )
The EU as a safe haven, who would have thought
www.politico.eu/article/icel...
Important paper on X algorithm effect on political views. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An outstanding expert on international trade clarifies the key point: Tariffs as an instrument of arbitrary power have been dismantled.
Locations of new homes built in Switzerland in 2018
Country-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains, by Lukas Hauck and Frederic Kluser
Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...
If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.
This is exactly right. The Onion quietly left Twitter a month ago and... our weekly subscribers went up. It's because we're doing well here, on Instagram and on YouTube.
As a business, being on Twitter is somewhere between useless or detrimental, unless you're selling boner pills.
In the absence of AI access, higher-education participants outperform lower-education participants by 0.548 standard deviations; with AI access, this gap falls to 0.139 standard deviations, from Cruces, Fernández Meijide, Galiani, Gálvez, and Lombardi www.nber.org/papers/w34851
In der kommenden Nacht, um 04.00 Uhr am Morgen, gehen im historischen Herzen von #Basel die Lichter aus und der Morgenstraich begrüsst mit Trommeln, Piccolos und vielfarbig leuchtenden Laternen freudig die #Fasnacht 2026 🧡
Loosely related: In der Schweizer EE-Förderung wied immer zwischen sommerstrom und winterstrom differenziert. Wäre das nicht auch für D hilfreich?
Ein paar Beobachtungen aus dem @wifo.bsky.social zur SCOTUS-Entscheidung zu den IEPAA-Zöllen im Interview mit Nils Heisterhagen ThePioneer
www.thepioneer.de/originals/ot...
Hey #econsky we know of any economists that wrote on the commons as a potential positive (aside from ostrom, her books r on my list already) from economic lens
Working fron home is polluting, study finds:
Additional residential emissions > commuting emmissions
I built an alternative to all the big players that can run fully local, where people own their data. I get hate.
I picked OpenAI because they gave me better answers about encryption, responsibility and safety concerns for what I want to build next. I get hate.
European Union is planning to force EV manufacturers benefiting from state support to ensure that at least 70% of the components in their cars are made in the EU, as it seeks to protect the bloc’s industries from intense Chinese competition.
by @alicemhancock.bsky.social & Kana Inagaki
