@amineouazad
Prof HEC Montreal 🇨🇦. Trained in 🇫🇷 🇬🇧. Urban and Real Estate economist / Professorship de recherche en économie urbaine et immobilière. Cited NYT, WSJ, FT, Bloomberg. #Econsky GitHub 👉 https://github.com/aouazad/ Website 👉 https://www.ouazad.com
It was fun to discuss the evidence and its robustness, and the institutional details of these markets. Many acronyms! MBS, MSR, CRT, CAT, ILS, GSE, gfee, SFHA, mREIT, etc. I mentioned the work of First Street just around the corner from Tandon, Jupiter Intelligence and Moody's.
Biswas, Hossain, and Zink, 2023. California wildfires, property damage, and mortgage repayment.
Kahn, Ouazad, and Yönder, E., 2024. Climate risk diversification through securitization.
Keys, and Mulder, 2024. Property insurance and disaster risk: New evidence from mortgage escrow data.
Gave a 2-hour class on climate risk and mortgage finance at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. An engaging audience and I presented three papers. Link to the slides: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fxl0w...
Anti-fascism should have broad support across the American political spectrum. Elections need to be defended. Here's an open letter from retired professors at HBS in which we call for business leaders to address that need.
#econsky #academicsky
marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-a...
Better neighbors—not better neighborhood factors like job availability—are what help disadvantaged adults succeed in the labor market, from Stephen B. Billings, Mark Hoekstra, and Gabriel Pons Rotger www.nber.org/papers/w34872
Forthcoming in AEJ: Macroeconomics: "Environmental Subsidies to Mitigate Net-Zero Transition Costs" by Eric Jondeau, Gregory Levieuge, Jean-Guillaume Sahuc, and Gauthier Vermandel.
As a rare climate scientist working in Silicon Valley, I've been drinking from the AI firehose a lot more than my peers. I thought it would be helpful to lay out my experiences of both the promise and pitfalls of using AI to accelerate scientific research:
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...
The March 2026 issue of AER: Insights (8, 1) is now available online at aeaweb.org/issues/837
A great article on the adaptation of higher education to AI. We are having similar conversations about the appropriate measures of competence when homeworks are not a good signal.
Un bel article sur l'adaptation à l'IA. Nous avons des conversations similaires à HEC sur la mesure de la compétence.
Figure shows the average change in monthly payments upon internal refinancing: realised (red) vs passive counterfactual (blue). The passive counterfactual assumes borrowers roll over remaining debt at expiration without extra payments or contract adjustments. The surge in inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many central banks to raise interest rates sharply. This column combines data from a large German bank, a borrower survey, and a letter experiment to show that mortgage-holders’ actions substantially reduce the impact of higher rates on monthly payments when their fixed rate ends. Survey responses indicate high informedness and a strong propensity to prepare, while the letter increases awareness of available options and raises refinancing activity among borrowers close to expiration. Overall, financial strains on mortgagors appear limited despite much higher rates, and mortgagors’ anticipatory actions affect the transmission of monetary policy.
Mortgage-holders’ actions substantially reduce the impact of higher interest rates on monthly payments when their fixed rate ends. Financial strains on mortgagors appear limited despite much higher rates.
@fuster.bsky.social @gianiv.bsky.social et al.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...
#EconSky
Examining whether government funding influences the choice of research topics in the context of clean energy research, from David Popp, Myriam Gregoire-Zawilski, Lizhen Liang, and Daniel Acuna www.nber.org/papers/w34856
Today, Skimpy has hit 500 stars on GitHub! 🎉
Skimpy summarises info about datasets quickly and efficiently, either in Python or on the command line (for CSVs). Cool new features:
- export summary table to text, html, or svg
- cli tool now sniffs csv files
Docs here: aeturrell.github.io/skimpy/
An AER with 2 papers in urban economics. One on Bogota's public transport innovation that inspired cities across the world.
Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá's TransMilenio - Nick Tsivanidis
The other is on the office apocalypse.
www.aeaweb.org/issues/835
In parallel, the attention-information tradeoff is a subject of active research in urban economics. Why do we pay attention to specific dimensions of housing supply and not others?
I have been using Claude for a while but have grown increasingly skeptical of its ability to produce efficient high quality implementations of cutting-edge algorithms. This is an example.
www.reddit.com/r/programmin...
Interesting new paper on the cost of permitting. This is hard to measure, and these costs have long been thought to be significant. This paper confirms this, estimating permitting costs at roughly 30% of the wedge between construction cost and the price of housing.
(HT @michaelwiebe.bsky.social)
JUE insight: Floods & urban density
Pierre Magontier and Rodrigo Martinez-Mazza www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Here's a link to our JAE paper on LP-DiD.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Very pleased that our local projections dif-in-dif paper is now out in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Joint with @dgirardi.bsky.social, Jorda, and Taylor.
It's a tool that we think many applied economists will find useful (indeed many already have).
🧵
Spatial models calibrated to observed flows suffer overfitting problems in granular settings. @tradediversion.bsky.social & Felix Tintelnot diagnose the problem, show data smoothing performs better, and introduce a finite model to quantify counterfactual uncertainty. buff.ly/rJ8EE0J
Forthcoming in AEJ: Economic Policy: "The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts" by Renato Molina and Ivan Rudik.
Figure 1: income (in CHF) by migration round
Figure A7: Change in housing consumption per person, disaggregated into those initiated by construction of small units and those by large units.
Yet the findings are consistent with those from other contexts. New homes are occupied by those on relatively high incomes, but initiate moving chains that involve households with progressively lower incomes & homes at lower rents. Households generally move to larger homes.
Public service announcement: there is a number of submission deadlines for conferences in the next ~2 weeks. Get your papers ready.
"The price of productivity is not paid in wages alone. A large share is paid in rents." Our @bsoeberlin.bsky.social INSIGHTS piece summarizes why considering commercial rent capitalization is important to properly estimating agglomeration effects. berlinschoolofeconomics.de/insight/the-...
Ed Glaeser would approve the creation of universities in the North. Economic development in the 21st Century is more about human capital than about commodity extraction, as Ed Glaeser illustrates with the example of Pittsburgh.
The agglomeration elasticity may be larger than widely believed (if we account for capitalization in commercial floor space prices). And the first micro-geographic commercial rent index for Germany!!! 😎 @bsoeberlin.bsky.social DP: opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/f... Data: github.com/Ahlfeldt/AHS...
Evolution of inclusionary zoning policies in Montreal.
Discussion in the industry suggests that the 20-20-20 regulation was mostly a tax and had a marginal impact on the supply of affordable housing.
www.lesaffaires.com/mes-finances...
www.aeaweb.org/research/du-... W.E.B. Du Bois and the history of marginalism
Daniel Kuehn discusses key insights in marginalist wage theory developed by W. E. B. Du Bois when he was a Harvard graduate student.
