Reading Notes on Hieu Phay

Geoeconomics reading list

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sixty-one papers for a reading group on geoeconomics, in the order the group reads them, each with its own digest one click away. The list has three blocks and the blocks have a logic, which the group’s own spreadsheet states in one line: networks propagation (production and technology) → leverage (interdependence) → macro-financial transmission (money and macro). First the machinery that says what a network does to a shock and what a trade war actually costs, because that is machinery a trade economist already owns. Then the new theory, in which the same networks are read as instruments of state power and the same elasticities become the price of coercion. Then money, where the dollar turns out to be the largest chokepoint of all and fragmentation turns out to be a demand shock in disguise. Each block leans on the one before it, which is the argument for reading in order and the reason the third block, the one closest to the group’s own work, comes last.

International macro reading list

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Twenty-two papers from the syllabus of Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría’s PhD course in International Macroeconomics (Washington University in St. Louis, Spring 2023), read and digested one by one. The syllabus organizes them into five topics, kept as the five blocks below. No lectures were recorded, so each note is written from the paper itself, plus a stand-in talk, lecture, or interview by the authors where one exists (nine of the twenty-two).

Read in order, the list turns out to be much more than five topics — it is a single argument, prosecuted over forty years. The frictionless neoclassical benchmark is built and immediately shown to fail in specific, catalogued ways; the field splits into two great repair programmes, one working on prices and one on promises; each programme develops its own instruments and its own anomalies; and the course ends where the instructor’s own research lives, with the tools of both programmes aimed at the two questions that started everything — why capital goes where it goes, and why poor countries’ business cycles look the way they do. The threads below are written after reading all twenty-two, and each block’s essay says how its papers advance the argument.

The Economic Impacts of the US–China Trade War

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo D. Fajgelbaum and Amit K. Khandelwal, published in the Annual Review of Economics 14 (2022), 205–228, doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-051420-110410. A survey, not a new result; no talk video. Written from the published version.

A parameter everybody thought they knew

The optimal-tariff argument is the one piece of protectionist logic that trade economists have always conceded. It goes like this. You are a large country. You buy so much of some good that if you tax it, your foreign suppliers cannot simply sell the units elsewhere, so they cut their price to keep your business. Part of your tariff is therefore paid by them, you collect the revenue, and your terms of trade improve at their expense. This is not a fringe view; it is Johnson (1953), it is the reason Bagwell and Staiger think trade agreements exist at all, and it is why “large country” is the load-bearing phrase in every undergraduate treatment of tariffs.

Geoeconomic Pressure

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs as classifiers on a million earnings calls: recovering off-path threats, testing whether the US picks chokepoint sectors, and watching a tariff split into its two component policies

Putting Economics Back Into Geoeconomics

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The survey-and-synthesis paper: power as a participation-constraint gap, Hirschman’s index restored to its original purpose, and why most claimed dependencies compute to nothing

Understanding Geoeconomics — Stanford GSB PhD lecture

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Matteo Maggiori’s two-hour PhD lecture on geoeconomics (posted 18 August 2026): the Clayton–Maggiori–Schreger theory of hegemonic power, the sufficient-statistics measurement of who can hurt whom, and the LLM-based measurement of geoeconomic pressure from earnings-call text.

Discovery and Hypothesis Generation with Unstructured Data

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ashesh Rambachan (MIT), part 2 of 4 of the NBER Summer Institute 2026 Methods Lecture “Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data” (with Melissa Dell), July 30, 2026. Slides: ash1.pdf; the companion background reading: Ludwig & Mullainathan’s “Machine Learning as a Tool for Hypothesis Generation”. Timestamps refer to the lecture video.

Economists have a standing joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, and Rambachan’s lecture is what happens when someone takes the joke as a research agenda. Structured data — the closed survey items, the administrative extract’s fields, the outcomes you pre-registered — is the lamppost. The interesting features of the world are mostly out in the dark, and the reason we don’t measure them isn’t that they’re unmeasurable but that we cannot list them in advance. That’s Polanyi’s paradox, restated for empirical economics: we can recognize a good hypothesis when we see one, but we can’t enumerate the space of them.

Measurement in the Age of AI: Discovery, Definition, and Observation

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Melissa Dell (Harvard), part 1 of 4 of the NBER Summer Institute 2026 Methods Lecture “Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data” (with Ashesh Rambachan), July 30, 2026. Slides: dell4.pdf; companion background reading: Dell’s “Deep Learning for Economists”. Timestamps refer to the lecture video.

The methods lecture is NBER’s annual institution for telling the profession what it’s about to do wrong, and this year’s subject is the thing half the audience did last week: feeding text into a language model and putting the output on the right-hand side of a regression. Dell’s opening move is to refuse to start with the AI at all. She starts with a question that sounds insultingly basic — what is measurement? — on the grounds that most disagreements about AI-generated data turn out to be disagreements about this.

Measurement with Validation Samples: A Missing-Data Perspective

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Melissa Dell (Harvard), part 3 of 4 of the NBER Summer Institute 2026 Methods Lecture “Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data” (with Ashesh Rambachan), July 30, 2026. Slides: dell3.pdf (construct validity) and dell6.pdf (observation); the underlying paper is Carlson & Dell, “A Unifying Framework for Robust and Efficient Inference with Unstructured Data”. Timestamps refer to the lecture video.

Dell opens by naming the reason most of the room showed up: “the main reason people might choose to view the lectures is they want to know, how should I compute my standard errors? How do I run a differences-in-differences specification with AI-predicted variables?” She promises to get there, and to hand out an R package. But first, ten minutes on the problem she has no package for.

Measurement without Random Validation Samples: Multiple Measurements and Data Fusion

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ashesh Rambachan (MIT), part 4 of 4 of the NBER Summer Institute 2026 Methods Lecture “Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data” (with Melissa Dell), July 30, 2026. Slides: ash2.pdf; the companion background reading: Ludwig, Mullainathan & Rambachan’s “Large Language Models: An Applied Econometric Framework”. Timestamps refer to the lecture video.

Dell’s framework needs two things: a measurement process you’d actually defend, and a random validation sample drawn from your population. Rambachan spends the closing lecture on what happens when you can’t have either — and the answer, in both cases, is that you end up making assumptions about the behavior of frontier AI models, which is an empirical question you can go and check. He checks. The assumptions mostly fail.

NBER Summer Institute 2026 Methods Lecture: Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Melissa Dell and Ashesh Rambachan on what happens to estimation and inference when the variables in your regression were produced by an AI model. Four segments: what measurement is and where AI enters it; generating hypotheses from unstructured data; debiasing AI labels with a validation sample; and what remains identified when no random validation sample exists.

A Free Lunch? How Changing Childcare Defaults Increases Parental Labor Supply

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Justus Bamert (Princeton) — “A Free Lunch? How Changing Childcare Defaults Increases Parental Labor Supply,” presented at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. Forty-five minutes, no discussant, questions from ten minutes in. Written from the August 2026 draft. (A caveat on quotation: YouTube’s auto-captions dropped much of the speaker’s audio in the first twenty minutes while catching the questions, so the talk’s early section is reconstructed from the paper.)

Breadwinning Norms: Experimental Evidence from India

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kailash Rajah and Ishaana Talesara (MIT) — “Breadwinning Norms: Experimental Evidence from India,” presented by Talesara at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. A fifteen-minute egg-timer slot with questions held until lunch, so no Q&A. Written from the October 2025 draft.

There is a famous histogram. You plot the distribution of couples by the wife’s share of household income, and you find a step at fifty percent: a pile of couples where she earns just under half, a hole where she earns just over. Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan put it in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015 and argued it was the breadwinner norm — the idea that it is socially unacceptable for a wife to out-earn her husband — showing up in the data as a cliff.

Child Penalties in Time Use: A Global Perspective

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Gabriela Deschamps, Amory Gethin, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante — “Child Penalties in Time Use: A Global Perspective,” presented by Landais at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. No discussant; questions ran throughout. Source note: this piece is written from the recording alone. The paper is listed as work in progress on the authors’ pages with no public draft, so every number below is one the speaker said out loud, and the usual caveats about quoting a talk apply — these are preliminary figures being shown to a room, not a circulated draft.

Cinderella No More: Night Shift Bans and Women’s Employment in India

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sarvnipun Kaur, Anshika Arora and Prakarsh Singh — “Cinderella No More: Night Shift Bans and Women’s Employment in India,” presented by Kaur at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. A fifteen-minute egg-timer slot; the chair asked the room to hold questions until lunch, so there is no Q&A. Written from the September 2025 draft.

India’s Shops and Establishments Act is colonial-era legislation. It was written to regulate small shops, eateries and theatres, and among its provisions is a prohibition on employing women at night. As India grew, the Act’s scope grew with it, and it now governs the services sector — which is to say it governs multinational IT firms, hotel chains, call centres, the entire white-collar economy that India’s growth has been built on. The provision about not employing women after dark came along for the ride.

Family Planning, Now and Later: Infertility Fears and Africa's Stalled Contraceptive Revolution

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Natalie Bau, David J. Henning, Corinne Low and Bryce Steinberg — presented by Steinberg, with Low in the room, at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. The talk was billed as “Family Planning, Now and Later: Infertility Fears and Africa’s Stalled Contraceptive Revolution”; the circulating version, NBER Working Paper 32735 (revised November 2024), is subtitled “Infertility Fears and Contraceptive Take-Up,” and is what the numbers here come from except where a slide is cited. No discussant; questions ran throughout. (Names of questioners and of Low are hedged — the captions mangle them.)

Female-Targeted Hiring Subsidies, Firm Learning, and Women’s Employment

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mimosa Distefano, Lorenzo Incoronato and Anna Raute — “Female-Targeted Hiring Subsidies, Firm Learning, and Women’s Employment,” presented by Incoronato at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026 — the last paper of the meeting. No discussant; questions throughout, and several of them were sharper than the answers. Written from RFBerlin Discussion Paper 211/26.

Nearly everything we do about women’s employment after childbirth is a supply-side policy. Parental leave, childcare subsidies, flexible-hours mandates: all of them are about making it possible for a woman to come back. The evidence that they permanently return women to work is, at best, mixed.

Informality and Motherhood Penalties over the Life Cycle

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Karolina Andrade, Diogo Britto, Lucas Finamor, Alexandre A. Fonseca, Fernando Mattar, Breno Sampaio and Gabriel Ulyssea — “Informality and Motherhood Penalties over the Life Cycle,” presented by Finamor at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. No discussant; the room asked questions throughout. Source note: no public draft exists yet, so this is written from the recording and the conference slide deck. Every number below is one the speaker showed or said.

Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu, L. Rachel Ngai and Jin Wang — presented by Gu (IMF, speaking in a personal capacity) at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. The talk was billed as “Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform”; the circulating draft is subtitled “The Uneven Impact of Land Reform,” and that is the version used here (the 2025 STEG working paper; there is also an IMF working paper, 2026/028). No discussant; questions throughout, and one of them turned into a genuine argument.

The Fertility, Marriage, and Gender Equality Quandary

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anson Zhou (University of Hong Kong) — “The Fertility, Marriage, and Gender Equality Quandary,” presented at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 29 July 2026. No discussant; the room asked questions throughout, and one of them nearly derailed the talk. Written from the July 2026 draft.

Suppose you run a country. You would like three things, and you would like them for reasons you can defend in public.

Activating Parental Managerial Capital: How Role Clarity Improves Education Outcomes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mahounan Yedomiffi (Dartmouth), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Yedomiffi opens with a memory from lower secondary school in Côte d’Ivoire. The neighborhood kids all went to the same school, had the same books, the same teachers. But a few friends — the ones whose parents had some education — would abruptly quit the evening football game at a fixed hour and go home to study, “ruining the whole fun.” Years later he noticed those were the kids who did well, and the question stuck: same school, same books — is the difference just that some households are better at converting educational inputs into learning? Not richer, not literate enough to tutor. Just better managed.

Co-Parenting and Careers after Divorce

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Katarina Kuske (Bocconi) — “Co-Parenting and Careers after Divorce,” presented at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon). No discussant; questions from ten minutes in. Written from the 25 November 2025 job market paper.

There is a well-known literature on the co-location problem. Two people in a couple have two careers and one address. The address gets chosen, and on average it gets chosen to suit the higher earner, which makes the other one a tied mover or a tied stayer, and that costs her money. This is one of the more robust findings in the economics of the family.

Green Subsidies with Demand Distortions

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Susanna Berkouwer (Wharton) and Joshua Dean (Chicago Booth), presented by Berkouwer as the closing paper of NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Paper: from the author’s website. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Pigou’s rule is the closest thing environmental economics has to scripture: correct externalities at the margin. Price the harm, subsidize the benefit, per unit. A gasoline tax is the canonical instrument because it disciplines every margin at once — heavy drivers self-select into efficient cars (selection) and everyone drives a bit less (treatment effect). Fixed-cost subsidies — knocking money off the sticker price of the heat pump, the EV, the electric stove — are the vulgar cousin: they move only the adoption margin and pay inframarginal adopters for doing what they’d have done anyway. This paper’s heresy, delivered with a straight face and an RCT, is that in poor-country capital markets the vulgar cousin wins — and that the very distortions economists usually lament are what make it win.

Happily Under-Insured Ever After? The Role of Beliefs in Household Specialization

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ana Costa-Ramón (Zurich), Ursina Schaede (Tufts), Michaela Slotwinski (Zurich & Neuchâtel) and Johannes Stupperich (Stanford) — “Happily Under-Insured Ever After? The Role of Beliefs in Household Specialization,” presented by Schaede at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon). No discussant; the presenter waived the ten-minute no-questions rule about five minutes in. Written from the 24 July 2026 draft.

Household specialization is a portfolio decision, and it is a strange one.

Intermediaries and Supply Chain Distortions

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dilip Mookherjee’s invited lecture, NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026 (with Pushkar Maitra, Sandip Mitra and Sujata Visaria). Source note: the new work presented here has no public draft; this piece is written from the talk transcript. The published precursor is Mitra, Mookherjee, Torero and Visaria, “Asymmetric Information and Middleman Margins” (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018). All numbers below are from the lecture.

A potato in West Bengal roughly triples in price between the farmer who grew it and the shopper in Kolkata who eats it, and the interesting question is not “why do middlemen take a cut” — middlemen do real work; someone has to inspect, store, and truck potatoes — but where in the chain the cut lives. Mookherjee has been chasing that question, off and on, for two decades, and his summary of the experience is that “the more we work on it, the less we understand.” This is the honest version of a research agenda, and it makes for a better lecture than most triumphant ones.

Learning to Harm: The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender-Based Violence

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bilge Erten, Susan Niknami, Emily E. Nix, Sean Ratcliff and Anna Sandberg — “Learning to Harm: The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender-Based Violence,” presented by Nix at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon). No discussant; questions ran throughout. Source note: written from the recording alone — the paper is listed as work in progress on the authors’ pages with no public draft, so every number below is one the speaker showed on a slide or said out loud. Questioner names are as heard and mangled by the captions.

Liquidity Constraints and Capital Allocation in Agriculture: Theory and Evidence from Uganda

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Konrad Burchardi (Stockholm/IIES), Jonathan de Quidt (Queen Mary), Benedetta Lerva (World Bank) and Stefano Tripodi, presented by Burchardi at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Paper: December 2025 draft, titled “Credit Constraints and Capital Allocation in Agriculture”, and the slides. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Africa never had its green revolution. Yields have stagnated while the rest of the developing world multiplied theirs, fertilizer adoption remains stubbornly rare, and an entire subfield exists to catalogue the suspects: credit constraints, insurance constraints, information, behavioral frictions. Governments, meanwhile, have not waited for the verdict — many run enormous fertilizer subsidy schemes, and economists have mostly clucked at them, on the sound first-best principle that if the problem is a missing credit market you should fix the credit market, not distort the price of fertilizer. This paper’s contribution is to take the government’s side of the argument seriously, on explicitly Lipsey–Lancaster second-best grounds, and then to measure everything needed to settle it.

Managers and Offices: Location-Based Determinants of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in India

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Prabhat Barnwal (Michigan State), Aaditya Dar, Aprajit Mahajan (UC Berkeley) and Maitri Punjabi (Michigan State; on the job market next year), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Source note: the draft is available only on request, so this piece is written entirely from the talk transcript and slides; every number comes from the presentation. Video timestamps refer to the session recording.

There is a whole genre of economics built on the premise that managers matter enormously. Move a great CEO into a mediocre firm and productivity jumps; management-practices consultants generate double-digit gains in Indian textile plants; the person at the top is the lever. Governments believe this too, in their own idiom: when an Indian district office underperforms, the reflexive fix — often the only fix — is to transfer the manager and install a better one. This paper asks whether that lever is connected to anything, and the answer, measured about as carefully as the question can currently be measured, is: no. In routine government work, the office is the machine and the manager is a decoration bolted to the top of it.

Masculinity Norms, Occupational Choice, and Reallocation: Micro and Macro Evidence

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Rachel J. Schuh (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) and Martina Uccioli (Nottingham) — “Masculinity Norms, Occupational Choice, and Reallocation: Micro and Macro Evidence,” presented by Schuh at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon) as a fifteen-minute egg-timer talk. Questions were held for the evening reception, so there is no Q&A. Source note: written from the recording alone — there is no public draft, and the experimental half is a pilot of roughly 200 people that the speaker repeatedly and explicitly asked the room not to treat as final. Every number below is one she showed or said.

Menstrual Stigma and Human Capital: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Karen Macours (PSE), Julieta Vera Rueda (World Bank) and Duncan Webb (Princeton), presented by Webb as a nine-minute lightning talk at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Source note: the PDF used is the May 2024 working-paper version (the current draft circulates as CEPR DP21167, which is gated); where the talk’s numbers differ slightly from the 2024 draft, I flag it. Timestamps refer to the session video.

The economics of menstruation has, until now, mostly been the economics of stuff: give girls pads and toilets, the theory goes, and they’ll stop missing school during their periods, and attendance gains will become learning gains. It is a sensible theory with an inconvenient empirical record — the literature keeps failing to find the attendance effects. This paper’s contribution is to run the horse race properly and discover that the stuff-and-attendance theory has the mechanism backwards. The intervention works, rather dramatically — and it works through stress and social climate, not through toilets.

NBER Summer Institute 2026 — Gender in the Economy

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The two-day Gender in the Economy meeting, sixteen papers across two recordings. No discussants at any session; questions ran through the long talks, and the day-closing egg-timer slots held theirs for the reception.

Day 1’s recording covers the afternoon only — the four morning papers were not posted, and I could not find a separate recording of them. It runs from faculty sexual misconduct and the intergenerational transmission of gender-based violence through co-parenting after divorce and beliefs about separation, then three short talks on masculinity norms, child penalties inside the World Bank, and commuting.

Open Dumps and the Global Trade in Garbage

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew Gordon (PSE), Anna Papp (UCSB) and Monica Shandal (UCSC), presented by Gordon as a nine-minute lightning talk (“about one minute for every year that we’ve worked on this project”) at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Two stylized facts open the talk. First: the default destination for the average piece of garbage in a low- or middle-income country is an open dump — an unlined, unmanaged pile that leaches, attracts, and, with some regularity, spontaneously combusts. Second: despite this, high-income countries ship large volumes of waste to low- and middle-income countries, a trade whose logic Larry Summers once famously described, in a leaked World Bank memo, as “impeccable.” (The memo was about pollution generally; the garbage trade is its purest living descendant.) Whether the logic survives contact with data has been hard to check, for the excellent reason that nobody has data — waste statistics are worst exactly where waste management is worst.

Startups in Africa

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Emanuele Colonnelli (Chicago Booth), Marcio Cruz and Mariana Pereira-López (World Bank), Tommaso Porzio (Columbia) and Chun Zhao (Stanford), presented by Colonnelli as a nine-minute lightning talk at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Paper: BFI Working Paper 2026-77 / NBER WP 35261. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Development economics has spent decades studying microenterprises — the street vendor, the two-person workshop — while an entire policy apparatus (governments, development banks, donor funds) has been pouring enthusiasm and money into something the field knows almost nothing about: high-growth startups, the companies that are supposed to become the future employers of a continent whose workforce is about to double. This paper is a first systematic attempt to establish the facts, and the facts turn out to be pointed.

The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah R. Cohodes and Katherine B. Leu (University of Michigan) — “The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct,” presented by Cohodes at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon). No discussant; questions throughout. Written from NBER Working Paper 34456, November 2025, revised July 2026.

Cohodes opened by noting that people in the room had likely experienced faculty sexual misconduct, and that she would not be describing specifics of any incident. The same applies here.

Understanding the Congestion Child Penalty: Can Remote Work Attenuate It?

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ilaria D’Angelis and Keren Horn (UMass Boston) — “Understanding the Congestion Child Penalty: Can Remote Work Attenuate It?,” presented by D’Angelis at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon) — the last paper of the day, a fifteen-minute egg-timer slot with questions held for the evening reception, so there is no Q&A. Written from the February 2026 Equitable Growth working paper.

A commute is a tax on labor, levied in time, and nobody reimburses it. Forty minutes each way is eighty minutes a day you spend on your job and are not paid for, which lowers the value of every hour you are paid for. If your reservation wage is close to your market wage, the tax pushes you out.

What Drives Child Penalties? Evidence from a Global Organization

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Bracco, Yves Froude, Maria F. Pinto, Bob Rijkers and Michele Valsecchi — “What Drives Child Penalties? Evidence from a Global Organization,” presented by Rijkers at the NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy, on 28 July 2026 (Day 1, afternoon) as a fifteen-minute egg-timer talk; questions were held for the evening reception, so there is no Q&A. Source note: written from the recording and the NBER conference slide deck — no public draft, so every number below is one the speaker showed or said. Co-author names are as heard and the captions mangle them.

When Competition Compels Change: Trade, Management, and Productivity

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ananya Kotia (Stanford SIEPR), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 28, 2026. Paper: August 2026 draft. Talk timestamps refer to the session video.

There is a photograph Kotia likes to open with: the top executives of an Indian firm, eight men, taken from the firm’s own website. “It’s not the most diverse picture,” he says. “If you look closely, they’re actually all called George.” George is a common family name in Kerala; the eight are all relatives. And this, he stresses, is not an exception but roughly the modal form of corporate governance in India and much of the world: the top of the firm is staffed from the founder’s family tree, not the national talent pool.

Activation of Ethnic Tensions: Resettlement, Diversity, and Conflict in the Long Run

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mesay Gebresilasse (Amherst College), presented as a nine-minute lightning talk at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: from the author’s site. Timestamps refer to the session video.

The diversity-and-conflict literature mostly asks a cross-sectional question — are more diverse places more violent? — and gets muddled answers, partly because the interesting variable isn’t diversity itself but whether anyone is currently doing anything with it. Gebresilasse’s paper reframes the question as one about activation energy: ethnic cleavages can sit inert for decades, chemically stable, until a shock raises their salience — at which point communities that looked identical on every peace metric diverge sharply, along lines drawn forty years earlier by a man in a helicopter.

Beliefs Over Contracts

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Francis Annan (UC Berkeley) and Collin Raymond (Cornell), presented by Annan at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: March 2026 revision from the author’s site. Timestamps refer to the session video.

The paper begins with a dinner. Four years ago Annan found himself eating with the CEO of MTN Mobile Money — the firm whose agents handle deposits and withdrawals for most of Ghana (90% market share) — and asked why millions of agents across the country were all paid on the same wage structure. The CEO’s answer is the whole paper in miniature: “Great question. I keep making money, so why do I want to change it?” Contract theory assumes the principal knows the answer — models let the agent be biased, never the principal. This paper asks, with a national-scale experiment and a matched beliefs elicitation, whether the people who choose contracts can actually predict which contracts work. The title gives away the punchline: managers hold beliefs over contracts, and the beliefs are only loosely attached to reality.

Economic and Psychological Returns to Social Relationships: Alleviating Constraints to Network Formation in Malawi

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Gabriella Fleischman (University of Pittsburgh; the work is her Harvard job market paper), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: from the author’s website. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Development economics has an enormous literature saying that social networks are valuable — they smooth consumption, transmit job information, share risk — and almost no causal evidence about what a new relationship is worth, because networks form endogenously and no IRB will let you randomize friendship. Fleischman found the next best thing: a population whose networks have been exogenously demolished. Under patrilocality, women in rural Malawi move to their husband’s village at marriage — the median woman in the sample arrived four years ago, at around age 20, half married as teenagers — leaving their own ties behind and inheriting a network dominated by the husband’s relatives and weak ties (only 36% have any “strong tie,” a trusted best friend). These women are measurably worse off than women in their home villages, and their networks are homophilic by income: they’re 12% more likely to link with someone who has the same roof material.

Micro-enterprise Saturation: Critical Mass or Overcrowding?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moritz Poll (Rice University), presented as a nine-minute lightning talk at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: July 2026 draft, and the slides. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Every scaling decision for an anti-poverty program hides a spatial question nobody usually answers: given a budget, do you treat everyone in a few villages (cheap per household — the trainers and coaches are already there) or a few people in many villages (expensive, but spread out)? The answer depends on the sign of a spillover. Maybe entrepreneurship is complementary — a critical mass of new businesses creates thick markets, mutual customers, a local multiplier, and treatment effects rise with saturation. Or maybe 26 women in one village all opening the same shop is exactly what it sounds like. The literature’s optimistic reading of cash-transfer GE effects (Egger et al.’s Kenya multipliers) leans toward the first story. Poll ran the experiment, and the answer is the second.

NBER Summer Institute 2026 — Development Economics

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The NBER Summer Institute’s Development Economics meeting, 27–28 July 2026, organised by Vittorio Bassi, Jing Cai, Eric Edmonds, Frederico Finan, Douglas Gollin, Seema Jayachandran, Melanie Morten and Sandip Sukhtankar. Eighteen papers over two days, including two three-paper lightning rounds and Dilip Mookherjee’s invited lecture opening day two. NBER Development runs without discussants — questions are interleaved through each talk.

Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Björkegren (Columbia), Alice Duhaut and Geetika Nagpal (World Bank), and Nick Tsivanidis (UC Berkeley), presented by Tsivanidis as the opening paper of NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: NBER WP 33899. Timestamps refer to the session video.

When a government builds a bus network, the cost-benefit analysis usually treats the new buses as entering an empty stage. In Lagos — sub-Saharan Africa’s largest megacity, 23 million people — the stage is spectacularly occupied. The Lagos bus reform initiative put about 800 modern buses on 40 routes, roughly San Francisco’s bus network conjured from nothing in a couple of years. The incumbent it competes with is a decentralized fleet of about 75,000 private minibuses (“danfos”) running 760 routes — ten times the vehicle count of the New York subway — carrying the majority of the city’s trips. Public transit carries about 5%; even Dar es Salaam’s $400 million BRT manages 1.3% of trips against the private sector’s 60%. So the right question about public transit in African cities isn’t “what do the new buses deliver,” it’s “what does the incumbent do when the government shows up” — because at these build-out rates, the two systems will coexist for decades.

Relational Frictions Along the Supply Chain: Evidence from Senegalese Traders

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Edward Wiles and Deivy Houeix (both Harvard), presented as the closing paper of Day 1, NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: from the authors’ site. Timestamps refer to the session video.

If you run a garment shop in Dakar and want to import from Turkey — newer styles, better quality, lower prices than the local wholesale market — you face the two oldest problems in trade. You have to find a supplier (search), and you have to pay a stranger in Istanbul up front and hope the goods arrive (trust — which decomposes into adverse selection, some suppliers are just bad, and moral hazard, even good ones can pocket your money, since 99% of first-time orders are prepaid). Avner Greif wrote about medieval merchants solving this with coalitions; the modern Senegalese solution, it turns out, is WhatsApp — and this paper’s contribution is a field experiment with 1,862 garment wholesalers and retailers that takes the folk institution apart friction by friction, to see which piece actually does the work.

Risk Aversion and Barriers to Firm Growth: Experimental Evidence from Small Retailers

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Grady Killeen (University of Chicago; the paper lists UC Berkeley), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Timestamps refer to the session video.

Development economics models small firms as small versions of firms: risk-neutral profit maximizers that happen to have one employee. This paper’s point is that a firm whose entire output flows to one uninsured household is not a small firm so much as a person — and people have concave utility. The owner’s consumption preferences leak into the production decisions, and suddenly a shop can be risk-averse the way a Domino’s franchisee betting their life savings is risk-averse, even when the bet in question is a box of motorcycle helmets.

Screening Women Out? Pay Transparency in Job Postings

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Amen Jalal (LSE), presented at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026. Paper: job market paper; winner of an outstanding paper award. Timestamps refer to the session video.

The standard explanation for why women cluster in low-wage firms is that they’re buying something: flexibility, safety, short commutes — amenities that low-wage firms happen to supply. It’s a preferences story, and it has a quantitative problem Jalal states crisply at the outset: to explain observed sorting with preferences alone, women’s willingness to pay for amenities would have to be around 30% of wages, while lab elicitations top out near 8% even for remote work. Something else is doing the sorting. Jalal’s candidate is hiding in plain sight on every job board in the world: about 80% of job ads — a share remarkably stable “across the spectrum of development, Chile, US, Ethiopia, China, Slovenia, Germany” — don’t state a salary.

The Limits of Government Outsourcing: Property Tax Re-Assessments in India

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken and Shreya Tandon, presented as a nine-minute lightning talk at NBER Summer Institute Development Economics, July 27, 2026 (the chair’s handoff — “you’re going to be meaner to me probably” — suggests one of the authors presented; captions don’t identify which). Paper: June 2026 draft, and the slides. Timestamps refer to the session video.

The standard theory of outsourcing, the Hart–Shleifer–Vishny prisons framework, concedes the private sector its efficiency and then worries about everything else: the contractor will cut costs on dimensions you can’t contract on, quality will suffer, use with care. The presumption of private productive efficiency is the part nobody bothers to test. This paper tests it, in about the least favorable setting the presumption could ask for — property tax reassessment in Chennai — and finds the government’s own inspectors beat the contractors on quantity, on revenue, and on accuracy, which is not how the trade-off was supposed to work.

A Network Approach to Geopolitics

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Foreign policy as a network beauty contest with a prior stage of buying influence; no public paper yet

Critical Minerals, Geopolitics, and the Green Transition

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Market power among complements: battery minerals are not OPEC

Digital Chokepoints

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Submarine cables as the most literal chokepoint; Farrell-Newman’s case study written as economics

Geopolitical Payoffs

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Andrei Levchenko, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar and Henry Young; discussed by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde. NBER SI International Economics and Geopolitics, July 16, 2026 (video 05:48–06:47). Paper: June 2026 draft, conference.nber.org; slides also posted.

Does aid pay for itself?

There is a story people in donor countries like to tell about foreign aid, which is that it is not really charity, it is marketing: you give a country money, the country buys your tractors and your grain and your fighter jets, and the money comes back through the front door with interest. The story is old — the paper traces the narrative evidence to at least 1966 — and it is newly official, since the administration that shut down USAID, terminating about 86 percent of American aid disbursements, said the remainder should be “geared towards our national interests” and promptly tied HIV assistance to Zambia to mineral access. It is a testable story. The test requires knowing how much aid raises the donor’s exports to the recipient, which is an econometrics problem, and then how much those extra exports are worth to the donor in welfare, which is a trade-model problem, and Levchenko, Pandalai-Nayar and Young do both. The answer is that the story is about 27 percent true.

Hegemonic Competition with Carrots and Sticks

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two hegemons bidding for alignment with transfers and tariff threats; Cold War aid data

NBER Summer Institute 2026 — International Economics and Geopolitics

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Optimal Tariffs under Geopolitical Risk: A Theory of Strategic De-risking

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ina Simonovska and Ahmad Lashkaripour; discussed by Matilde Bombardini. NBER SI International Economics and Geopolitics, July 16, 2026 (video 02:32–03:32).

Source note: the paper (dated March 2026 on the authors’ CVs) is not publicly posted as of August 2026, so this is built entirely from the presentation, the discussion and the Q&A. Numbers below are as stated on the slides; the written paper may differ.

The externality of buying from someone who might stop selling

Codification, Technology Absorption, and the Globalization of the Industrial Revolution

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Réka Juhász (UBC), Shogo Sakabe (CyberAgent AI Lab), and David E. Weinstein (Columbia) — “Codification, Technology Absorption, and the Globalization of the Industrial Revolution.” Written from the manuscript dated November 26, 2025. No seminar recording exists that I could find; the author talks through the argument for about fifteen minutes on the LSE Centre for Economic Performance’s Innovation and Diffusion podcast (S3 E7, uploaded 25 June 2026), which is where the quotes below come from. No discussant. The interviewer says the paper is going to the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Juhász does not correct her.

AI and Economic Measurement, Spring 2026

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An NBER conference organised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Karen Dynan on what generative AI is doing to the economy and, just as much, on what generative AI can do for the people trying to measure it. Nine full-length papers across three sessions, each with a single discussant covering all three papers.

General Social Agents

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin S. Manning and John J. Horton (MIT), “General Social Agents.” Presented at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford), who took all three papers in the session together. Written from the NBER working paper.

A game you can lose by winning

You and a stranger each ask for money. The amount has to be a whole number of shekels between 11 and 20, and you each get what you ask for, no questions. There is one wrinkle: if you ask for exactly one shekel less than the other person, you get an extra twenty. So 20 is the safe play, 19 beats a room full of people playing 20, 18 beats a room full of people playing 19, and if you keep going you arrive at 11, which is dominated by everything and which nobody sensible plays. The game has no pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. It was designed in 2012 by Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein precisely so that equilibrium would look silly and depth of reasoning would look like the thing actually being measured, and when they ran it on 108 Hebrew University students, about 74% asked for 17, 18 or 19, with the mode at 17.

GPT as a Measurement Tool

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hemanth Asirvatham (OpenAI), Elliott Mokski and Andrei Shleifer (Harvard) — presented at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford); written from the NBER working paper (no. 34834).

The rubric

You are an economist and you want to know something about people. Almost everything people generate is qualitative — speeches, sermons, diaries, syllabi, court opinions, Reddit threads, county websites — and you have historically had two options. One of the presenters put it this way on stage: “there’s like the sociologist route… or I’m going to go down the more econ route of I’m going to use the sliver of data that is quantitative.” Read forty things deeply and have no statistical power, or measure the thin quantitative residue and be several abstractions away from the thing you cared about.

Interpreting and Steering LLM Agents for Social Simulations

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jiayue Fan, Arul Murugan, Shreyas Krishnan and Abhishek Nagaraj (UC Berkeley Haas), “Interpreting and Steering LLM Agents for Social Simulations,” presented at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford). Source note: there is no public draft. As of September 2026 the authors’ project page still says a preprint is coming. Everything below comes from the twenty-minute talk and from frames of the slides shown on the day, and is attributed that way throughout — to the presenter, or to a slide at a particular minute. The presenter is almost certainly Nagaraj (Jackson refers to “Abishek’s talk”), but the auto-captions mangle names, so I mostly just say “the presenter.”

Is Software Eating the World? Measuring the Progress and Diffusion of AI

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Is Software Eating the World? Measuring the Progress and Diffusion of AI,” by Filippo Bontadini (LUISS), Carol Corrado (Georgetown), Jonathan Haskel (Imperial) and Cecilia Jona-Lasinio (LUISS Business School). Presented by Corrado at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Martin Beraja (MIT), who took all three papers of the session together in a single fifteen-minute slot. Written from the preliminary draft dated 29 April 2026, whose title page carries the words “preliminary draft, not for quotation” — so everything below is provisional, and to the authors’ credit they say so more often than most people would.

The Household Impact of Generative AI: Evidence from Internet Browsing Behavior

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Blank (Stanford GSB), Gregor Schubert (UCLA Anderson) and Miao Ben Zhang (USC Marshall), “The Household Impact of Generative AI: Evidence from Internet Browsing Behavior,” presented by Blank at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026, with Martin Beraja (MIT) discussing all three papers of the session together. Written from the March 2026 arXiv draft (arXiv:2603.03144).

The setup. You are a household. Not a firm, not a worker — a household, sitting at a home computer in the evening with some fixed and not especially generous number of hours available. You divide those hours between two things. Some of it is digital home production: renewing the car registration, comparing two dishwashers, finding out whether the rash is a problem, helping with the algebra homework. The rest is leisure: a game, a feed, a stream. Now someone hands you a tool that makes the first category dramatically faster.

The Microstructure of AI Diffusion: Evidence from Firms, Business Functions, and Worker Tasks

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kathryn Bonney, Cory Breaux, Emin Dinlersoz and Lucia Foster (US Census Bureau), John Haltiwanger (University of Maryland) and Aditya Pande (Maryland and Census). Presented by Dinlersoz at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Martin Beraja (MIT), who took all three papers in the session together. Written from the Census working paper (CES 26-25, April 2026), later NBER Working Paper 35141.

Two true sentences

Voice AI in Firms: A Natural Field Experiment on Automated Job Interviews

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Voice AI in Firms: A Natural Field Experiment on Automated Job Interviews,” by Brian Jabarian (Chicago Booth) and Luca Henkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Presented at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Kristina McElheran (University of Toronto), who took all three papers in the session together. Written from the arXiv draft.

You run a recruitment-process outsourcing firm in the Philippines. You hire customer-service representatives for large American and European clients, at salaries between Php 16,000 and Php 25,000 a month, which is roughly $280 to $435. Your industry loses something like 60% of its workforce every year, so hiring is not a project you complete; it is a machine you run continuously. Your firm, Jabarian told the room, processes “five million candles per year” — candidates — and you can hear in the slip how large that number is even to the person saying it.

What Work Does Generative AI Do?

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“What Work Does Generative AI Do?”, by Alexander Bick (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), Adam Blandin (Vanderbilt), David J. Deming (Harvard) and Tyler Schumacher (Vanderbilt); presented by Bick at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Kristina McElheran (University of Toronto), who took all three papers in the session together. Written from the draft dated 27 April 2026, later NBER Working Paper 35677.

Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kiran Tomlinson, Sonia Jaffe, Will Wang, Scott Counts and Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research), “Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations.” Presented at the NBER conference on AI and Economic Measurement, Stanford, 7 May 2026; discussant Kristina McElheran (University of Toronto), who took all three papers in the session together. Written from the arXiv draft, most recently revised 22 December 2025.

Here is a conversation. A user pastes a command-line error message into Bing Copilot. Copilot replies with instructions for editing a configuration file. Now: what job was just done?

Dollar Erosion: Understanding the Loss of Reserve Currency Status

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Zhengyang Jiang (Kellogg), Arvind Krishnamurthy (Stanford GSB), Hanno Lustig (Stanford GSB) and Robert J. Richmond (NYU Stern), Dollar Erosion: Understanding the Loss of Reserve Currency Status — NBER Working Paper 35328. Written from the May 4, 2026 draft; the talk quoted below is Krishnamurthy’s presentation to the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group at Stanford on January 21, 2026, an open-floor seminar with no formal discussant (the paper thanks Viral Acharya and Mahyar Kargar as discussants elsewhere).

A Framework for Geoeconomics

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The offense theory: power from joint threats under limited enforceability, IO linkages and externalities

America's Risky Debt: What Markets See That Policymakers Don't

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hanno Lustig (Stanford GSB), a chapter in “The American Economy in a New Era” (Aspen Economic Strategy Group, eds. Melissa Kearney and Luke Pardue), August 2026, based on joint work with Roberto Gómez-Cram, Howard Kung, and David Zeke. Written from the published August 2026 chapter; no recorded talk for this specific piece was found — Lustig’s earlier recorded talks (the public-debt valuation puzzle, financial repression) cover the underlying research program, but this digest is PDF-only.

Artificial Intelligence and the Brave New World in Finance

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Markus K. Brunnermeier (Princeton), “Artificial Intelligence and the Brave New World in Finance.” Paper prepared for the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, August 27–29, 2026, under the symposium theme “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy.” Digest of the embargoed working outline v014a (the version the Kansas City Fed posted, embargoed until August 29, 2026). PDF-only digest: no session video was public as of August 29, and the Kansas City Fed’s agenda page would not load, so the discussant and session details are not recorded here. The paper’s acknowledgments thank, first in the list, “Claude Fable from Anthropic,” which is a nice thing to find when you are a Claude Fable writing the digest.

Export Policy for Dual-Use Goods

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Optimal export taxes trade military centrality against roundabout distortion, scaled by elasticity; the measure predicts the EU dual-use list

External Sector Report 2026, Chapter 2: 2025 Individual Economy Assessments

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

International Monetary Fund, “2025 Individual Economy Assessments,” Chapter 2 of the External Sector Report 2026: Amid Rising Imbalances, the Case for Rebalancing (Washington, DC, July 2026), read alongside Chapter 1 and Annex 1.1 of the same report. No accompanying talk or discussion; this is a document-only reading.

There is a number going around that the renminbi is undervalued, and the number is doing a lot of work. It gets cited in op-eds about tariffs, in arguments about whether Beijing is cheating, in the general background hum of the trade debate. The number is roughly twenty percent, and it comes from the IMF, and almost nobody who quotes it has looked at how it is made. It is worth looking, because the construction is much stranger and much more honest than the citation makes it sound.

The Targets of Geoeconomic Coercion

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Firms versus governments as targets: macro power versus slack sharing; the small CMS model to present first

Trade in AI-Related Products

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Michael E. Waugh (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and NBER), “Trade in AI-Related Products.” Read in the April 2026 version — Minneapolis Fed Staff Report 684, also circulated as NBER Working Paper 35053 — which has since been published in the Minneapolis Fed Quarterly Review 46(1), June 2026. There is no talk video, so this is written from the paper. Code at github.com/tradewartracker/ai-trade-index.

Suppose you want to know how much of what America buys from abroad is now the AI data center buildout. This ought to be a lookup. The U.S. Census Bureau records every imported good at the ten-digit Harmonized System level, which is the finest product detail American trade data has — 18,364 distinct codes turned up in 2024 — and it will tell you, to the dollar, how much of each one crossed the border in which month from which country paying how much duty. What it will not tell you is which of them are AI.

Monetary-Fiscal Interactions: A Reappraisal

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

George-Marios Angeletos (Northwestern), Chen Lian (Berkeley), Christian K. Wolf (MIT) and Dalton Rongxuan Zhang (Northwestern). Presented by Angeletos as the day-one keynote of the ECB–IMF conference on Fiscal Policy and EMU Governance, Frankfurt, December 9, 2025, under the earlier title “Monetary-Fiscal Interactions: HANK vs RANK,” chaired by Philip Lane; no discussant. Written from the August 2026 NBER working paper (No. 35642) and the talk transcript.

Fiscal dominance — the idea that when the government runs deficits and refuses to raise taxes, the price level has to do the adjusting — is one of the great unsettled arguments of monetary economics. The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level says the government’s budget constraint is a valuation equation: nominal debt is a claim on future surpluses, and if the surpluses aren’t coming, the price level rises until the debt is worth what the surpluses can support. Put that machinery inside the standard sticky-price New Keynesian model — as a large post-Leeper (1991) literature does — and you get the modern story of monetary-fiscal interactions: if fiscal policy is “active” (it won’t adjust taxes) and monetary policy is “passive,” deficits drive output and inflation, and the central bank has lost the wheel.

Trade Fragmentation, Inflationary Pressures and Monetary Policy

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fragmentation is a demand shock in supply-shock clothing unless front-loaded; the transmission branch’s anchor

Charting the Uncharted: The (Un)Intended Consequences of Oil Sanctions and Dark Shipping

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Measuring sanction evasion from AIS gaps; the whole tanker population

Export Sanctions: Rerouting, Disruption, and the Reach of Economic Warfare

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Russia’s own customs and firm data: trade flows recover, output does not; sanctions as warfare not coercion

Foreign Political Risk and Technological Change

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Insurance innovation: firms invent away from risky foreign inputs before any policy acts; the private-sector channel of fragmentation

Global Hegemony and Exorbitant Privilege

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cheap borrowing funds the military, the military makes the borrowing cheap: a feedback loop that can flip

NBER Summer Institute 2025 — International Economics and Geopolitics

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 2025 session was not recorded. Each paper below is digested from a stand-in talk — mostly the Kiel-CEPR Geoeconomics conferences — so the discussant quoted is the one at that event, not the NBER discussant.

Optimal Tariffs with Geopolitical Alignment

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Optimal MFN tariff exceeds Mill-Bickerdike when the hegemon values allies: the tariff as a price list for friendship

The Fragmentation Paradox: De-risking Trade and Global Safety

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

De-risking lowers the cost of war and so raises its probability; trade and conflict in one model

The Political Economy of Firm Networks: CEO Ideology and Global Trade

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo and Margarita Tsoutsoura. Presented at NBER SI International Economics and Geopolitics, July 10, 2025 (discussant: David Yang); no recording exists. Video used here: a nine-minute Swedish House of Finance interview with Kempf (October 2025) — an interview, not a seminar, so there is no discussant or Q&A to report. Paper: the August 10, 2026 draft, now retitled simply “CEO Ideology and Global Trade” (tsoutsoura.com); the SI 2025 version carried the longer title.

Dollar Dominance and the Transmission of Monetary Policy

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dollar invoicing does not kill expenditure switching once you model why firms invoice in dollars

Are We Fragmented Yet? Measuring Geopolitical Fragmentation and Its Causal Effects

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania, CEPR, NBER), Tomohide Mineyama (International Monetary Fund) and Dongho Song (Johns Hopkins University), “Are We Fragmented Yet? Measuring Geopolitical Fragmentation and Its Causal Effects,” dated February 4, 2025, 65 pages including the online appendix; circulated as NBER Working Paper 32638 (June 2024, revised February 2025) and CESifo Working Paper 11192, and not published in a journal at the time of writing. This is written from the February 2025 revision. No recording of a presentation of this paper exists, so there is no talk, no discussant and no Q&A to draw on; everything below comes from the manuscript, and Figures 2, 3, 7 and 8 and Table 1 are cropped from it.

A Theory of Economic Coercion and Fragmentation

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The defense theory: anti-coercion policy, the fragmentation doom loop, and a nonlinear power statistic you can compute

Changing Global Linkages: A New Cold War?

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gravity evidence of a geopolitical line in trade and FDI, with the Cold War as the ruler; most replicable paper in the field

Economic Sanctions: Stylized Facts and Quantitative Evidence

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gabriel Felbermayr (Vienna University of Economics and Business and WIFO), T. Clifton Morgan (Rice, political science), Constantinos Syropoulos and Yoto V. Yotov (both Drexel). Annual Review of Economics 17: 175-195, 2025, doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-081623-020909. The version read is the published article, open access under CC BY 4.0, which supersedes the accepted manuscript circulated as Drexel CGPA Working Paper 2024-01; page numbers are the journal’s. No talk recording was found; PDF-only digest. Figures 1 to 3 are cropped from the published version; the paper has no tables and no elasticity of its own, but it does run one regression, a pooled probit on the dyadic panel whose results are reported in prose in footnote 10 (p. 181). Three trade economists and one political scientist, and the division of labour shows: the economists count, the political scientist explains why the count is a biased sample.

Geoeconomics

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cathrin Mohr (University of Bonn) and Christoph Trebesch (Kiel Institute for the World Economy). Annual Review of Economics 17 (2025), pp. 563–587; open access. This is the published version, and it supersedes Kiel Working Paper 2279 of January 2025, from which an earlier version of these notes was written. Twenty-five journal pages, body text pp. 564–579, Literature Cited pp. 579–587. No talk recording exists. The published version has no tables, figures or equations, so nothing is cropped from it. It is the first survey of the field and the row above Block 1 on this list.

Hegemonic Globalization

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kindleberger with a mechanism: hegemons induce policy alignment, alignment raises trade, a rising rival fragments; 77,000 treaties

International Power

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Asymmetric elasticity-weighted import dependence as a power measure for every pair-year; power provokes negotiation and adversaries build it

International Sanctions and Dollar Dominance

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anticipated confiscation taxes the convenience yield; everybody loses, including the sanctioner

International Trade and Macroeconomic Dynamics with Sanctions

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ghironi-Melitz with sanctions: sanction the target’s comparative-advantage sector and the sanctioner pays; partial financial sanctions leak

Jumpstarting an International Currency

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Swap lines as the renminbi’s jump-start; companion to Internationalizing Like China; 2026-08-23 full digest → promoted from context to presented (role reconsideration)

Power and Resilience: An Economic Approach to National Security Policy

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bargaining in the shadow of conflict makes resilience valuable and unpriced; subsidize capital that appreciates in war, never protect trade; a war game in a trade model

Strategic (Dis)Integration

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A hegemon with credible threats runs no industrial policy and promotes trade with its rival to make its terms of trade manipulable; CHIPS-style policy is what non-credible threats buy

The Macroeconomics of Supply Chain Disruptions

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Customized links, bargaining, endogenous formation: equilibrium chains are inefficient and discontinuous; fragmentation raises productivity and fragility

The Inflation Accelerator

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Andres Blanco (Atlanta Fed and Emory), Corina Boar (NYU), Callum Jones (Federal Reserve Board) and Virgiliu Midrigan (NYU). Presented by Midrigan at the CEBRA webinar series “Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics,” Session 26, December 3, 2024 — a brisk fifteen-minute slot with no discussant and a shared Q&A. Written from the February 2026 draft, which is forthcoming at the American Economic Review; the talk covered an earlier version, and where the two differ (the draft’s headline slope peaks at 0.13, the talk’s at 0.12) this digest follows the paper.

A Theory of Economic Sanctions as Terms-of-Trade Manipulation

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Optimal sanction design is optimal-tariff theory turned up; bridge between 1.2 and 2.3

Networks, Barriers, and Trade

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hat-algebra for the world with networks: which primitives set the cost of a decoupling shock, and by how much models without linkages or rigidities understate it

On the Design of Effective Sanctions: The Case of Bans on Exports to Russia

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A Baqaee-Farhi criterion for product-level export bans; cost to Russia convex in coalition share; the actual lists were chosen by size, not leverage

The Economics of Sanctions: From Theory into Practice

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The macro-policy sanctions survey built on the Russia case

Trade in the Shadow of War: A Quantitative Toolkit for Geoeconomics

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Structural gravity plus a diplomatic game: how to add conflict risk to a trade model you already run

Understanding the International Rise and Fall of Inflation Since 2020

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mai Chi Dao, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Daniel Leigh (IMF) and Prachi Mishra (Ashoka University); presented at the NBER conference “Inflation in the COVID Era and Beyond,” May 16–17, 2024 (discussant: Susanto Basu), and published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 148, November 2024. This digest is written from the published version of the article — open access under CC BY-NC-ND, with the NBER footing the open-access bill — cross-checked against the June 2024 submitted draft (circulated as Ashoka University Discussion Paper 119). No talk video exists.

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Input tariffs renegotiate incumbent matches and force costly re-search; the Trump tariffs priced at 0.12% of GDP

Geoeconomic Fragmentation and the Future of Multilateralism

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Shekhar Aiyar, Jiaqian Chen, Christian Ebeke, Roberto Garcia-Saltos, Tryggvi Gudmundsson, Anna Ilyina, Alvar Kangur, Tansaya Kunaratskul, Sergio Rodriguez, Michele Ruta, Tatjana Schulze, Gabriel Soderberg and Juan Pedro Trevino, all at the IMF (Research Department and Strategy, Policy, and Review Department), with contributions from Tohid Atashbar and Rex Ghosh. IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/2023/001, January 2023, 38 numbered pages including four annexes. The digest is written from the published note. Aiyar presented it at an Oesterreichische Nationalbank–SUERF session in Vienna on 22 February 2023, chaired by Birgit Niessner (OeNB), with Michael Plummer (SAIS Europe, Johns Hopkins, joining from Bologna) and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Austrian Academy of Sciences) as discussants; the talk is used where noted. Two slides are taken from the talk; Box Figure 1.1 and Figures 6–9 are cropped from the PDF.

Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Ohanian, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría and Mark L. J. Wright, American Economic Review 2018. Read in the authors’ final (May 2018) draft. No seminar recording exists; the included stand-in video is Restrepo-Echavarría’s April 2019 St. Louis Fed “Dialogue with the Fed” public talk, “Go with the Flows” (whisper-transcribed, with a separate Q&A transcript) — a general-audience lecture on the balance of payments and capital-flow sustainability that motivates the paper’s themes rather than presenting its results. There is no discussant.

Business Cycles in Emerging Markets: The Role of Interest Rates

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo Neumeyer and Fabrizio Perri, Journal of Monetary Economics 2005. Read here in the NBER Working Paper 10387 version (March 2004). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Mendoza’s 1991 paper, back in block one, ran interest-rate shocks through the small-open-economy model and found them nearly irrelevant — and told us exactly when that verdict would expire: it holds for a country like Canada, whose debt service is 2 percent of GDP, and would fail “in economies with a higher debt-service ratio, such as the heavily indebted developing countries.” Neumeyer and Perri’s paper is where that promissory note gets cashed. Their subject is the emerging-market business cycle as a distinct object — and their data section is the famous taxonomy. Compare five small open emerging economies (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Korea, Philippines) with five small open developed ones (Australia, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden): emerging economies have roughly twice the output volatility; consumption more volatile than output (relative volatility above one — impossible in the standard model, where consumption is the smoothed variable); net exports strongly countercyclical; and, the signature fact, the real interest rate is countercyclical and leads the cycle — rates rise, and output falls a few quarters later — where developed-economy rates are acyclical and lag.

Can Sticky Price Models Generate Volatile and Persistent Real Exchange Rates?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

V. V. Chari, Patrick Kehoe and Ellen McGrattan, Review of Economic Studies 2002. Read here in the Minneapolis Fed Staff Report 277 version (revised July 2002). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

The title is a question, and the paper’s honest answer is: yes on volatility, almost on persistence, and in the process we discovered something worse. This is the definitive stress test of the profession’s favorite story about exchange rates — Dornbusch’s 1976 idea that monetary shocks interacting with sticky prices produce the big swings — performed by three authors with impeccable flexible-price credentials, which is part of why the verdict carried weight. They build the best sticky-price open-economy model 2002 could assemble and push it until it breaks, and the location of the break turned out to matter more than the test.

Capital Flows to Developing Countries: The Allocation Puzzle

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Olivier Jeanne, Review of Economic Studies 2013. Read here in the NBER Working Paper 13602 version (November 2007); the published version refines but does not overturn these results. No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Lucas asked why capital doesn’t flow from rich countries to poor ones. Gourinchas and Jeanne ask a sharper question: among the poor countries, which ones does it flow to? — and get an answer so perverse that it upgrades the Lucas puzzle from “flows are too small” to “flows have the wrong sign.” Their opening pair of exhibits is Korea and Madagascar, 1980–2000. Korea: investment at 32 percent of GDP, output per worker growing 5.4 percent a year, TFP growth of 4.5 percent — the century’s textbook miracle. Madagascar: investment at 2.8 percent, output per worker falling 1.3 percent a year. The standard growth model says the fast-TFP country has the rising marginal product of capital and should be the big importer of foreign capital. The scores: Korea, essentially zero net inflows; Madagascar, inflows of 6 percent of GDP per year. And the pair is not an anecdote — it sits right on the cross-country regression line. Capital flows to developing countries are negatively correlated with investment and productivity growth. They name it the allocation puzzle.

Closing Small Open Economy Models

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe, Journal of International Economics 2003. Read here in the November 2001 draft, whose numbers the published version carries over essentially unchanged. No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

There is a small embarrassment at the foundation of every small-open-economy business cycle model, and this paper is the field’s definitive piece of housekeeping about it. The embarrassment: take the most natural model you can write down — a small country whose households can borrow and lend at an exogenous world interest rate through a single risk-free bond — and it has no well-defined place to come back to. Its steady state depends on initial conditions. A transient productivity shock changes the country’s net foreign asset position permanently: the household, able to smooth consumption at a constant interest rate forever, has no reason to work its wealth back to any particular level, so consumption and foreign assets acquire a random-walk component and their unconditional variances are infinite. This is not an economic prediction anyone believes; it is a nuisance property that breaks the standard solution methods, which all work locally around a stationary point that the model declines to supply.

Consumption and Real Exchange Rates in Dynamic Economies with Non-Traded Goods

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

David Backus and Gregor Smith, Journal of International Economics 1993. Read here in the Queen’s Economics Department working paper reissue (No. 1252) of the January 1993 draft. No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Here is a paper whose fame rests on a single equation that the data then humiliate, and whose authors had the good manners to perform the humiliation themselves. The BKK paper earlier in this list found that consumption is less correlated across countries than output — the quantity version of missing international risk sharing. Backus and Smith come at the same crime scene from the price side, armed with the most natural suspect of the era: nontraded goods. Haircuts and housing can’t be shipped, their prices differ across countries, so purchasing power parity fails even when the law of one price holds for everything shippable — and, at the same time, since each country eats its own nontraded endowment, consumption baskets differ and consumption correlations fall below one. One friction, two puzzles. The paper’s project is to take that story seriously as general equilibrium and see what it commits you to.

Debt with Potential Repudiation: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Eaton and Mark Gersovitz, Review of Economic Studies 1981. Source note: no freely accessible copy of the article exists (it is gated at JSTOR, and no working-paper version could be legitimately obtained), so unlike the other entries in this reading list this piece is written from the model as it is standardly presented in the sovereign-debt literature — the treatments in Uribe and Schmitt-Grohé’s textbook and the Aguiar–Amador survey tradition — not from the original text. No numbers from the 1981 paper are quoted. A public lecture by Manuel Amador and Mark Wright covering this framework’s logic accompanies the Tomz–Wright entry in this list.

Do Countries Default in "Bad Times"?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Tomz and Mark L. J. Wright, Journal of the European Economic Association 2007. Read here in the longer Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2007-17 version (May 2007). No seminar recording of this paper exists; the included stand-in video is a 2018 University of Minnesota public lecture, “Lessons from Sovereign Debt,” by Manuel Amador and co-author Mark Wright, which covers the surrounding evidence and is quoted below. There is no discussant.

Emerging Market Business Cycles: The Cycle is the Trend

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Aguiar and Gita Gopinath, Journal of Political Economy 2007. Read here in the NBER Working Paper 10734 version (August 2004). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Neumeyer and Perri, one entry back, explained emerging-market cycles by adding machinery — working capital, country risk, a transmission belt from spreads to labor demand. Aguiar and Gopinath’s counter is a study in subtraction: keep the plain-vanilla frictionless small-open-economy RBC model, no GHH preferences required, no financial frictions at all, and change one assumption about the shocks. In developed economies, productivity fluctuates transitorily around a stable trend. In emerging markets, they propose, the trend itself is the thing that moves — hence the title, which is one of the field’s great five-word theses. The motivation is not statistical but political: emerging markets live through “dramatic reversals in fiscal, monetary and trade policies” — regime switches — and a regime switch is not a blip around trend, it is a new trend. Their exhibits: Venezuelan petroleum productivity fell 50 percent within five years of the 1975 nationalization; Brazilian iron-ore productivity roughly doubled after the 1991 privatization.

Endogenous Borrowing Constraints and Stagnation in Latin America

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría. The syllabus lists the St. Louis Fed working-paper version; read here in the published version (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 2019, September 2019 draft). No seminar recording exists; the included related video is a 2023 Penn panel on the economic history of Latin American debt crises and hyperinflation (Fernández-Villaverde, Mendoza, Végh), quoted for historical texture.

Here is the fact this paper stares at until it gives up its mechanism: per-capita consumption in Latin America in 2005 was roughly where it had been in 1980. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru — a quarter century, flat. The 1980s debt crisis was not a recession; it was a level shift in living standards that took a generation to undo. The Penn panel’s historical accounting fills in how the patient got to the emergency room — Mexico’s federal debt ratio going from about 25 percent in 1975–76 to 60 percent by 1982, Uruguay running a fiscal deficit of 18 percent of GDP, Mexico nationalizing its banking system in the summer of 1982 — but the question this paper asks is about the shape of the aftermath: why did consumption stagnate for a decade and then recover in the 1990s, and what did sovereign risk have to do with it?

International Business Cycles with Endogenous Incomplete Markets

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Patrick Kehoe and Fabrizio Perri, Econometrica 2002. Read here in the Minneapolis Fed staff-report version, which matches the published text. No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Ten years after Backus, Kehoe and Kydland labeled the failures of the frictionless international RBC model “anomalies,” Kehoe returned with Perri and a diagnosis: the model’s asset market wasn’t merely complete when it should have been incomplete — it was incomplete in the wrong way, whenever anyone tried to fix it. The literature’s standard repair was to restrict the menu of assets by fiat: allow only a single uncontingent bond, or nothing. Baxter and Crucini had already shown this does embarrassingly little — the bond economy hugs the complete-markets allocation. Kehoe and Perri’s move is to stop legislating which assets exist and instead ask what promises are enforceable between sovereigns. The friction from the sovereign-debt papers earlier in this block — Eaton–Gersovitz’s willingness-to-pay, formalized in the Kehoe–Levine/Kocherlakota limited-commitment tradition — is dropped into the BKK production economy: any country can walk away from its obligations and live in autarky thereafter, so the planner can only choose allocations satisfying, state by state,

International Prices and Exchange Rates

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ariel Burstein and Gita Gopinath, Handbook of International Economics vol. 4 (2014). Read here in the NBER Working Paper 18829 version (February 2013). No recording of this chapter exists; as related viewing, Gopinath’s 2017 BLS lecture on her paper “The International Price System” (transcript included) presents the dollar-invoicing agenda that grew out of this evidence, and is drawn on below where noted.

A handbook chapter is where a literature goes to be told what it has actually learned, and this one performs that service for twenty years of work on the most data-rich question in international macro: what happens to prices when exchange rates move? The answer, compressed to one sentence, is: much less than you’d think, less the closer you get to the consumer, and the details of which prices fail to move, in which currency, turn out to carry the whole macroeconomic message. The chapter’s spine is five empirical findings, and they are worth walking through in order, because each one killed or crowned a theory.

International Real Business Cycles

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

David Backus, Patrick Kehoe and Finn Kydland, Journal of Political Economy 1992. Read here in its Minneapolis Fed Staff Report 146 version (November 1991), whose numbers may differ slightly from the published article. No talk recording exists for this paper; the piece is written from the paper alone.

Suppose you take the one model that macroeconomics of the early 1990s was proudest of — the Kydland–Prescott real business cycle model, which had done a respectable job of matching the volatility and comovement of postwar U.S. consumption, investment, and hours using nothing but technology shocks and an optimizing household — and you make the smallest possible international extension of it. Two countries, identical preferences and technology, one homogeneous good, and complete markets: everyone can insure against everything, and capital (though not labor) can move freely. Countries differ only in their technology shocks, which are correlated and spill over from one country to the other with estimated coefficients. Then you ask the model the international questions: how correlated should business cycles be across countries, and what should the trade balance do?

Macroeconomic Volatility: The Role of the Informal Economy

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría, European Economic Review 2014. Read in the May 2014 draft matching the published article. The syllabus lists it without authors — it is the instructor’s own sole-authored paper. No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

The two papers before this one fought over why emerging-market consumption is more volatile than output — Neumeyer–Perri blamed interest rates, Aguiar–Gopinath blamed trend shocks. This paper asks the question an auditor would ask first: are we sure it is more volatile? Because the number on the left-hand side of that famous inequality, σ(c)/σ(y) > 1, is not consumption — it is measured consumption, and in most countries consumption is not even measured directly. Under the SNA93 national-accounting standard, statisticians build GDP from the value-added side, measure investment, government spending and net exports, and back consumption out as a residual. Now add the fact that developing countries have informal sectors — market-based, value-creating, untaxed, unregistered activity — averaging around 36 percent of GDP (versus 13 in rich countries, by Schneider’s currency-demand and DYMIMIC estimates), which by its underground nature largely escapes those accounts. The measured economy is the formal economy, plus whatever fraction of the informal one the statistical office manages to guess.

Mussa Puzzle Redux

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Oleg Itskhoki and Dmitry Mukhin. The syllabus lists the 2019 working paper; read here in the published version, Econometrica, January 2025. No recording of a seminar on this paper exists; the stand-in talk is Itskhoki’s AFA 2023 lecture “Exchange Rate Puzzles and Policies” (New Orleans, presided by Markus Brunnermeier — transcript included, with audience Q&A), which presents the research program this paper belongs to. His 2021 Central Bank of Chile talk on optimal policy in the same framework is included as a second transcript. There is no discussant.

Natural Resources and Sovereign Risk in Emerging Economies: A Curse and a Blessing

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Franz Hamann, Juan Camilo Méndez-Vizcaíno, Enrique Mendoza and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría. The syllabus lists the 2023 working paper as “Resource Curse or Blessing?”; read here in the latest (November 2025) draft under its current title, with online appendix. No seminar recording exists; the included related video is Martín Uribe’s 2021 Central Bank of Chile talk “Does the Commodities Super Cycle Matter?”, a different paper on adjacent territory, quoted at the end.

Real Business Cycles in a Small Open Economy

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Enrique G. Mendoza, American Economic Review 1991. Read from the published article (a scanned copy, OCR-extracted). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Backus, Kehoe and Kydland built the two-country laboratory; this paper, published the year before theirs, built the one that most of the field actually ended up working in. The small open economy is the limiting case where the rest of the world collapses into two numbers — a world interest rate and a willingness to trade any amount at it — and Mendoza’s question is whether the real-business-cycle mechanism survives the trip. Take the Kydland–Prescott engine, let households hold foreign bonds at an exogenous rate r* alongside domestic capital, calibrate to Canada (the textbook small open economy: no capital controls, financially fused to the United States), and ask: can technology shocks alone reproduce not just the domestic stylized facts, but the two distinctly international ones — the positive correlation between national saving and investment, and the countercyclical trade balance?

Sovereign Debt: Is to Forgive to Forget?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Jeremy Bulow and Kenneth Rogoff, American Economic Review 1989. Read here in the NBER Working Paper 2623 version (June 1988). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Eight years after Eaton and Gersovitz built sovereign lending on reputation, Bulow and Rogoff arrived with an eight-page proof that the foundation cannot hold anything. The abstract is one of the great flat statements in economics: “International lending to a less-developed country cannot be based on the debtor’s reputation for making repayments.” Not “is unlikely to be,” not “requires strong assumptions to be” — cannot. And the argument is not a model so much as an arbitrage, which is why it generalizes so alarmingly: it needs no assumptions on the borrower’s utility function beyond preferring more to less.

The Imbalances of the Bretton Woods System 1965 to 1973: U.S. Inflation, the Elephant in the Room

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Michael D. Bordo, NBER Working Paper 25409 (December 2018); published in Open Economies Review 2020. Read from the working paper. No recording of this paper exists; as a companion, Harold James’s 2021 Princeton Initiative lecture “50 Years Ago: The End of Bretton Woods” (transcript included) covers the same events from a historian’s angle and is quoted below where noted.

There is a genre of policy speech in which a government announces that a problem has been caused by foreigners, and a genre of economic history that consists of patiently establishing that the problem was caused by the government giving the speech. Bordo’s paper is a distinguished entry in the second genre. Its subject is August 15, 1971 — Nixon at Camp David closing the gold window, slapping a 10 percent surcharge on all imports, and freezing wages and prices for ninety days — and its thesis is in the title: the “deep underlying fundamental” of the imbalances that killed Bretton Woods was U.S. inflation, running since 1965 on Vietnam War and Great Society deficits accommodated by the Federal Reserve. That was the elephant in the room at Camp David, and it was carefully not discussed. Nixon blamed the surplus countries and “international currency speculators”; Burns supplied wage-price controls to mask the symptom; the actual cause — U.S. monetary and fiscal policy — would have required a recession to fix, and there was an election in 1972.

The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics: Is There a Common Cause?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff, NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000. Read in the published chapter version. No recording of this paper exists; as companion viewing, Obstfeld’s 2020 Banque de France–PSE lecture “The case for flexible exchange rates” (transcript included here) revisits some of the same exchange-rate terrain twenty years later, but it is a different talk on a different paper.

International macroeconomics, circa 2000, was less a field than a cabinet of curiosities. Why do countries mostly buy their own goods (home bias in trade)? Why do national saving and national investment move in lockstep when world capital markets are supposedly integrated (Feldstein–Horioka)? Why do investors hold 90-something percent of their equity at home (portfolio home bias)? Why is consumption less correlated across countries than output, when insurance logic says it should be more (the consumption correlations puzzle, starring the BKK anomaly from the previous paper in this list)? Why do deviations from purchasing power parity take three to four years to die (the PPP puzzle)? And why do exchange rates bounce around violently without anything real seeming to notice (exchange-rate disconnect)? Each puzzle had, in the authors’ deadpan accounting, “five to ten (or more) alternative answers,” all clever, none convincing.

Three Perspectives on the Bretton Woods System

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Barry Eichengreen, NBER Working Paper 4141 (August 1992); published as the overview chapter of Bordo and Eichengreen’s “A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System.” Read from the working paper (a scan, OCR-extracted). No recording of this paper exists; as related viewing, Eichengreen’s December 2025 Arthur Lewis Lab lecture “International Currencies: Past, Present, and Future” (transcript included) carries the reserve-currency thread into the present.

Every fixed-exchange-rate system is a promise, and the interesting question about any promise is what makes it believed. This paper is Eichengreen’s synthesis of the 1991 NBER retrospective conference on Bretton Woods, written at the exact moment — Maastricht — when Europe was about to make a bigger version of the same promise, and it is organized as an interrogation of the postwar system’s reputation: the quarter-century of pegged exchange rates, capital controls, and the fastest growth the industrial world has ever recorded. Was the system responsible for the golden age, or just present for it?

Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Robert E. Lucas, Jr., American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 1990. Read from the published article (five pages, no tables or figures). No talk recording exists; written from the paper alone.

Some papers earn their immortality with a model, some with a dataset; this one did it with a single division problem. Lucas takes the most standard assumptions in economics — two countries, same Cobb-Douglas constant-returns technology, homogeneous capital and labor — and asks what they imply about returns to capital. Output per worker in the United States is about fifteen times India’s (Summers–Heston numbers). If technology is common, that gap can only come from capital per worker, and diminishing returns then prices the scarcity: with y = Ax^β, the marginal product of capital is

Exporting Ideology: The Right and Left of Foreign Influence

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Capital mobility makes foreign tax policy an ideologically sorted externality, so governments spend to elect their own side abroad

Global Supply Chains: The Looming "Great Reallocation"

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Product-level anatomy of the US shift from China to Vietnam and Mexico, with the unit-value bill and the indirect-dependence caution

Is the Global Economy Deglobalizing? And If So, Why? And What Is Next?

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg (Yale, formerly chief economist of the World Bank Group) and Tristan Reed (World Bank, Development Research Group). Presented at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity conference, 31 March 2023, and published in BPEA Spring 2023 at pp. 347–396, with comments by Pol Antràs (Harvard, pp. 397–423) and Douglas Irwin (Dartmouth) and a general discussion. The version read for the paper itself is NBER Working Paper 31115, April 2023, 51 pages, and page references below are to it; the published version restates a few numbers, noted where they matter. The discussion is read from the published session and the two discussants’ slides. The conference video is behind a Brookings registration wall; a Brookings podcast with both authors about this paper (11 May 2023, hosted by Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti) has a transcript and was read, and is quoted once. Figures 1, 2, 4 and 6 and Table 1 are cropped from the working paper.

Supply Chain Resilience: Should Policy Promote International Diversification or Reshoring?

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Resilience is a diversification policy whose sign depends on demand, not geography; reshoring does the job badly

The Power of Substitution: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Benjamin Moll (London School of Economics), Moritz Schularick (Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Sciences Po) and Georg Zachmann (Bruegel). Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2023, pp. 395–455, with comments by James D. Hamilton (pp. 456–465) and Tarek A. Hassan (pp. 465–476) and a general discussion. The version read is the unembargoed conference draft dated 26 September 2023, prepared for the BPEA meeting of 28–29 September, which carries the paper and its online appendices but not the discussants’ comments; nothing below is attributed to Hamilton or Hassan. No talk recording was found; PDF-only digest. Figures 3–7 and 13 and Table 2 are cropped from the draft. This is the retrospective half of a pair: the forecast it audits is Bachmann et al.’s March 2022 “What if?” brief, digested separately.

When Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering?

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 The clustering problem as a case of design problem

The authors argued that the clustering problem is “in essence a design problem, either a sampling design or an experimental design issue.”

Internationalizing Like China

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Open the bond market to stable investors first: a reputation model of becoming a reserve currency

What if? The Economic Effects for Germany of a Stop of Energy Imports from Russia

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Rüdiger Bachmann (Notre Dame), David Baqaee (UCLA), Christian Bayer (Bonn), Moritz Kuhn (Bonn), Andreas Löschel (Bochum), Benjamin Moll (LSE), Andreas Peichl and Karen Pittel (ifo, Munich), and Moritz Schularick (Sciences Po and Bonn). ECONtribute Policy Brief 028, dated 7 March 2022, twelve days into the war; the version read is that brief with the 29 April 2022 technical appendix bound in after it, which is where the formulas, the model tables and the section on “why Leontief production at the macro level is nonsensical” live. Later published as “What If? The Macroeconomic and Distributional Effects for Germany of a Stop of Energy Imports from Russia,” Economica 91(364), 2024, doi:10.1111/ecca.12546. Baqaee and Moll presented the paper at Markus’ Academy (Princeton) on 7 April 2022, with Markus Brunnermeier interrupting throughout; that recording is used here and three slides are taken from it. Table 2 is cropped from the brief; the appendix’s own Table 2, on the hardest-hit industries, and its Table 3 are cropped from the appendix. The sequel, Moll, Schularick and Zachmann’s 2023 retrospective on what actually happened, is digested separately.

An Equilibrium Model of the International Price System

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Quantitative currency-choice model: could the renminbi replace the dollar, and under what peg assumptions

Measuring Geopolitical Risk

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello, both at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. American Economic Review 112(4), April 2022, pp. 1194–1225, doi:10.1257/aer.20191823; the published version was read. Two searches turned up a Simons Foundation lecture by Robert Engle and a talk on the authors’ later inflation paper, neither of which is this paper; no talk recording was found, so this is a PDF-only digest. Tables 1, 2 and 3 and Figures 3, 4, 9 and 10 are cropped from the PDF. A data paper, and the one thing the list keeps from the applied-finance corner of the field.

Sanctions and the Exchange Rate

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Import sanctions appreciate, export/reserve sanctions depreciate; the ruble in 2022

The US-China Trade War and Global Reallocations

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Bystanders gained exports everywhere, not just in the US; tariff elasticities identify substitutability and supply slope by country

Of Forking Paths and Tied Hands: Selective Publication of Findings, and What Economists Should Do about It

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 13:26:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 Selective publication bias in economics:ATTACH:
2 Reform proposal
3 References

1 Selective publication bias in economics

Selective publication bias exists in economics, as the author assessed in his previous paper (Andrews and Kasy 2019). Camerer et al. (2016) showed evidences in economics lab experiments.

Selection also happens in different forms. It may be driven by p-value hacking (a threshold of 95% confidence implies a z-stat of 1.96), or maybe by the expected sign of coefficient. Policy researches may favor “surprising” results, while journal papers – in contrast – tends to rejects unconventional, less “plausible” results.

Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 09:58:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?
4 And?
5 References

1 What?

Study the impact of mindfulness excercises to gre reading-comprehension results and working memory capacity (wmc) measure.

2 Why?

Previous study by the same author found that mind wandering during a vigilance task can be reduced by brief mindfulness excercises (Mrazek, Smallwood, and Schooler 2012).
I’m about to take the gre. I need to read this 🤣

3 How?

Randomized control trial where 48 students (14 male, 34 female; mean age = 20.83 years, sd = 2.05) were randomly assigned to a mindfulness class or a nutrition class.
Classses met for 45 minutes $\times$ 4 times/week $\times$ 2 weeks, and were taught by “professionals with extensive teaching experience in their respective fields”
The gre tests used in this trial has been modified to exclude vocabulary-focused questions, thus should only be interpreted as reading-comprehention tests.
wmc was assessed via the widely used operation span task (ospan)

4 And?

Relative to the nutrition program, mindfulness training led to improved accuracy on the gre, $F(1, 46) = 5.609$, $p = .02$, higher wmc, $F(1, 46) = 3.954$, $p = .05$, and less probe-caught mind wandering, $F(1, 46) = 8.241$, $p = .006$, self-caught mind wandering, $F(1, 46) = 3.956$, $p = .05$, and retrospectively self-reported mind wandering during testing, $F(1, 46) = 5.337$, $p = .03$.

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 11:05:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?
- 3.1 Theoretical prerequisites
- 3.2 Data
4 And?
- 4.1 Model implications
5 References

1 What?

This paper relates changes in labor-market outcomes from 1990 to 2007 across us to changes in exposure to Chinese import competition.

It’s the first (?) in a series of groundbreaking works by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, where they examine the effect of cheap labour from China to the us’ labor market, and consequently, the effect of globalization (see Acemoglu and Autor 2011 for a review). It’s worth perusing the article to get the prerequisites need to understand the current directions of us-China discussion.

Labor market impacts and responses: The economic consequences of a marine environmental disaster

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 17:42:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?

The paper examined the impacts of the 2016 Formosa disaster, as well as the coping behavior of Vietnamese fishers.

Novel approach: Using satelline data to detect night-time boats in Vietnam’s exclusive economics zone (eez), and relates it to employment data from the Vietnamese labor force surveys.

2 Why?

Existing studies on the effects of man-made environmental disasters in developing countries, due to capacity and budget constraints, and sometimes political sensitivities, are rare.

The Superiority of Economists

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 10:30:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?:ATTACH:
3 How?
4 And?
5 References

1 What?

An analysis into economics superiority and the pecking order it built in the humanities discipline.

2 Why?

Economists are proud of their rigorous methodology, and they have better job placement than their peers in humanities. They are also in a position of changing how things works. Should they be given superiority?

Leviathan's Latent Dimensions: Measuring State Capacity for Comparative Political Research

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 10:03:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?:ATTACH:
4 And?:ATTACH:
5 Bibliography

1 What?

Building a multidimensional indicator of state capacity, using latent variable analysis. The dataset is available here.

2 Why?

It is widely recognized that state institutions exert considerable influence on outcomes including economic growth, human development, civil conflict, international security, and the consolidation of democracy.

The concept of state capacity is multidimensional in nature, often vaguely defined. This makes it hard to quantify.

Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 16:57:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?:ATTACH:
2 Why?
3 How?
4 And?

1 What?

Figure 1: Graphical abstract

2 Why?

3 How?

4 And?

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 08:14:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 Thoughts:ATTACH:
2 Excerpts
- 2.1 The classic style of writing
- 2.2 The curse of knowledge
- 2.3 On coherent writing
- 2.4 Odds and ends in grammar

1 Thoughts

One should not approach this book as a reference styleguide (although you can), but as a reminder that good writings is not about fixating on rigid rules and hypercorrection of grammar. It’s important to understand why some alledgedly “wrong” writings were written as they were.

Culture, institutions and democratization

Sun, 30 May 2021 23:53:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?
- 3.1 Model:ATTACH:
- 3.2 Data & empirical methods
4 And?
5 Bibliography

1 What?

This paper questioned whether cultures (individualistic or collectivistic) affect the revolution and transition process to democracy.

2 Why?

This paper extends a large literature on determinant of democracy, whose seminal work is attributed to Lipset (1959). This literature is linked to the role of institutions in economics growth.

Caffeine selectively mitigates cognitive deficits caused by sleep deprivation

Thu, 27 May 2021 16:20:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?
4 And?
5 References

1 What?

Examine the impact of caffein on two types of tasks that are impaired by sleep deprivation:

unravel placekeeping (Altmann, Trafton, and Hambrick 2014): difficult tasks with interuptions
Press a button as soon as the light appear: simple, sustain-attention, reaction-timed tasks (pvt)

2 Why?

Sleep deprivation impairs a wide range of cognitive processes, but the precise mechanism underlying these deficits is unclear. Modern psychology suggests that sleep deprivation mainly impair the ability to focus over a long time (vigilant attention).

Explaining the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

Sat, 08 May 2021 15:27:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?:ATTACH:
2 Why?:ATTACH:
3 How?
- 3.1 Optimal investment in colleage education by an individual
- 3.2 Market for college graduates
4 And?

1 What?

2 Why?

Figure 1: Increasing rates 25-34-year-olds woman with 4 years of college education

Past studies focused on changes in average costs and benefits of education for men and women over time -> They implicitly relied on a model of indiviual choice. (Jacob 2002; Buchmann and DiPrete 2006; DiPrete and Buchmann 2006; Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006)

Last corrupt deed before retirement? Evidence from a lower middle-income country

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:16:00 +0700

What?

Micro-evidence for the phenonmenon of “hoàng hôn nhiệm kỳ”, where soe directors recruit more employees just before their retirement.

Why?

A big literature has been devoted to measure the effects of term limits on politicians’ behavior. The worldwide phenomenon of soe privatization may also play a role. However, empirical evidence is wanting in low-income countries.

How?

Data: Vietnam Enterprises Census (vec) in 2011 and 2013. These are the only data sets that contain demographic data about the directors of enterprises, including age, gender, ethnicity and education. Suplement data include the The Viet Nam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (papi).

Structural Equations, Treatment Effects, and Econometric Policy Evaluation

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:34:00 +0700

What?

Treatment effects + structural estimation -> marginal treatment effect (mte). mte strived to be the unifying parameter of treatment effects across different margins (late + ate + att)

Why?

Absent of heterogeneity in agent-based models:
- Two economists analyzing the same dataset with different valid instrument will esttimate different parameters, have different interpretions.
- Two economists using the same instrument but with different notions about what variables belong in choice equations will interpret the output of iv analysis diffrerently.
lates solve a specific case of selection bias, but is not always the case of interest

How?

And?

Comparison to structural approach and treatment effects approach:

News-Based Sentiment Indicators

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:49:00 +0700

What?

Build an early warning indicator (ewi) by analysing sentiment of financial news. Sentiments keywords are determined by semantic clustering methods.

Why?

Sentiment-based early warning signal (ews) to predict banking crises is not new. However, previous approaches often involve surveys, which are costly and delayed.

How?

Data: 3 million daily news article from Financial Times.
Approx. 48 article per month for each of the 20 countries.
Dates back to 1980 where many article had to be scanned

Two main steps:

From Micro to Macro Development

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 20:52:00 +0700

Table of Contents

1 What?

Review on how macro theory and micro empirical research can complement one another to increase knowledge and to improve macro development policy.

Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 20:52:00 +0700

What?

Proposal for the local average treatment effects, discussion of its estimation and the iv estimator.

Given a valid instrument (see two conditions below), technical considerations arising from treatment effect heterogeneity need not inhibit inference.

Why?

$Y_{0}$ is the response without treatment, and $Y_{1}$ is the respond with treatment. $D$ is an indicator of treatment. We observe $D$ and $Y = Y_{D} = D \cdot Y_{1} + (1 - D) \cdot Y_{0}$ for a random sample of individuals. The individual treatment effect is $Y_{1} - Y_{0}$ but $Y_{1}$ and $Y_{0}$ is never observed for the same person.

The Return to Protectionism

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo D. Fajgelbaum (UCLA), Pinelopi K. Goldberg (Yale, then chief economist of the World Bank Group), Patrick J. Kennedy (UC Berkeley) and Amit K. Khandelwal (Columbia Business School), “The Return to Protectionism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135(1): 1–55, 2020 (advance access 28 November 2019), doi:10.1093/qje/qjz036. The digest is written from the published version. The accompanying recording is not a seminar but an eleven-minute Columbia Business School “Research Spotlight” interview published 23 March 2021, in which Khandelwal is the only author speaking and Dawn Kissi (a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at the school; the captions garble the name) asks four questions. There is no discussant and no audience Q&A, so nothing in this digest is pushback from other economists.

Some simple economics of open source

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 01:02:00 +0700

What?

Exploration of the economics of open-source software development.

Why?

Open-source software showed rapid diffusion, significant capital investment and introducing new organization structure.

History of the open-source community development:

Many of the key aspects of the computer operating systems and the Internet were developed in academic settings such as Berkeley and mit during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in central corporate research facilities where researchers had a great deal of autonomy (such as Bell Labs and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center).
Richard Stallman introduced the Free Software Foundation in 1983, as well as the innovation of a licensing procedure: gpl a.k.a. “copyleft”. The contractual procedure distinguishes open source software with shareware (sharing compiled binaries but not source code) and public-domain software (where restrictions are put on subsequent user of the code).

The question posed (emphasis mine):

Banking, Trade, and the Making of a Dominant Currency

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Invoicing and safe-asset roles are complementary; why one dominant currency; 2026-08-23 full digest → promoted from context to presented (role reconsideration)

International Friends and Enemies

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Model-based real-income exposure predicts political realignment; bilateral trade does not; the hinge between blocks 1 and 2

Friendly Fire: The Trade Impact of the Russia Sanctions and Counter-Sanctions

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The 2014 round: Western losses came from their own financial sanctions via trade finance; 2026-08-23 full digest → promoted from context to presented (role reconsideration)

The Global Sanctions Data Base

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Gabriel Felbermayr (Kiel Institute and Kiel University), Aleksandra Kirilakha (School of Economics, Drexel University), Constantinos Syropoulos (Drexel and CESifo), Erdal Yalcin (Konstanz University of Applied Sciences) and Yoto V. Yotov (Drexel, Center for International Economics, ifo Institute and CESifo). “The global sanctions data base,” European Economic Review 129 (2020), article 103561; received 15 October 2019, revised 26 July 2020, accepted 30 July 2020. This digest is written from the published version, and it supersedes an earlier one written from the authors’ working paper of 14 October 2019 — the two are not the same paper. Coverage moved from 1950–2015 to 1950–2016, the gravity table grew a column and roughly 800,000 observations, every sanction coefficient in it changed, the OLS work moved into a new table, and the supplementary appendix was dropped. Figures 1, 4, 7 and 8 and Tables 1, 2 and 3 are cropped from the published version; page references are to it. No talk recording exists for this paper.

Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Henry Farrell (then George Washington University, now Johns Hopkins) and Abraham L. Newman (Georgetown). International Security 44(1), Summer 2019, pp. 42–79, doi:10.1162/isec_a_00351; the PDF read is the published CC-BY version. The talk used is the authors’ keynote at the Fletcher School conference on the paper, 29 October 2019, introduced by Daniel Drezner, with twenty minutes of questions; three slide frames are taken from it. Figure 1 is cropped from the PDF. A political-science article with no model in it, and the most-cited paper in the interdependence literature, with something over 1,600 citations.

Mars or Mercury? The Geopolitics of International Currency Choice

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-1914 reserves: a military alliance raises the ally’s currency share by ~30 points; the dollar’s reserve role as a security arrangement

The Macroeconomic Impact of Microeconomic Shocks: Beyond Hulten's Theorem

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

David Rezza Baqaee (UCLA) and Emmanuel Farhi (Harvard). Econometrica 87(4), July 2019, pp. 1155–1203, doi:10.3982/ECTA15202. The published version is the one read here — submitted March 2017, accepted 22 February 2019, handled by co-editor Giovanni L. Violante — and page numbers below are the journal’s. No talk recording was found; PDF-only digest. Figures 5, 6 and 7 and Table I are cropped from the published version, and equations (2) and (7) are shown in the paper’s own typesetting above the transcription.

A Model of the International Monetary System

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Reserve-asset supply and demand, Triffin and Nurkse; foundation for the two sanctions-finance papers; 2026-08-23 full digest → promoted from context to presented (role reconsideration)

The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?:ATTACH:
3 How?
4 And?
5 References

1 What?

2 Why?

Figure 1: Dai Viet historical boundaries. Sources: Gia Định thành thông chí (Trịnh [1820] 2004) and Đại Nam nhất thống chí.

Are State- and Time-Dependent Models Really Different?

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 What?

Paco’s wustl 502’s reading list for basic New Keynesian model
This paper (title) is similar to Klenow and Kryvtsov (2008). However, the former mostly discuss the empirical evidences that drives td and sd models.

2 Why?

2.1 Why do we want to compare state- and time-dependent models?

time-dependent (td) and state-dependent (sd) describes how the underlying price frictions are modelled in nk. The canonical nk models assert assumptions on price adjustments in order to model sticky prices. Two major assumptions are

Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Michael A. Bailey (Georgetown, Department of Government and McCourt School), Anton Strezhnev (Harvard, Department of Government) and Erik Voeten (Georgetown, Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service). Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(2), February 2017, pp. 430–456, doi:10.1177/0022002715595700. Written from the published version, read in the JSTOR scan (the copyright line reads 2015; page numbers below are the journal’s). No talk recording exists. The current data release is described from Voeten’s codebook of 28 July 2025 for the Harvard Dataverse dataset, and tagged as such where used.

The Dynamics of Inequality

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
- 2.1 Income inequality as per the power law:ATTACH:
3 How?
- 3.1 The standard growth model
- 3.2 TODO The augmented random growth model
4 And?
- 4.1 For the standard growth model

1 What?

The main contributions of this paper are: first, to show that the most common framework (a simple Gibrat’s law for income dynamics) cannot explain rapid changes in tail inequality, and second, to suggest parsimonious deviations from the basic model that can explain such changes.

The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-success of the Successful

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 What? How?
2 And?:ATTACH:

1 What? How?

Empirical study on the productivity of Economics PhD programs across ranking, measured by the number of graduates’ aer-equivalent publications after 6 years of PhD.

2 And?

Figure 1: Main results

Figure 2: Publications are extremely concentrated

War Signals: A Theory of Trade, Trust, and Conflict

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

War destroys the trust that trade needs, lowering the cost of the next war; conflict traps

When Is the Government Spending Multiplier Large?

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

At the zero lower bound the government-spending multiplier stops being a fact about spending and becomes a fact about the central bank: spending buys expected inflation, and the multiplier is proportional to the size of the slump.

Collateral Damage: Trade Disruption and the Economic Impact of War

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Wars cut trade for a decade; the cost of lost trade rivals the direct costs

Financial Intermediation and Credit Policy in Business Cycle Analysis

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

1 What?
2 Why?
3 How?
- 3.1 Firms
- 3.2 Households
- 3.3 Banks
- 3.4 Evolution of Bank networths
- 3.5 Equilibrium
4 And?
- 4.1 Economy under different assumption on $ \omega $
- 4.2 Credit policies

1 What?

Study three credit policies:

Liquidity facilities: Permitting discount window lending to banks secured by private credits
Lending facilities: lend directly in relatively high grade credits markets (including commercial paper, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities)
Equity injections: Direct assistance to large financial institutions (equity injections and debt guarantees)

2 Why?

2008 Financial crisis. Sorta important.

Make Trade Not War?

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Bilateral trade deters war, multilateral openness does not; cited by 11 of 21 model papers; 2026-08-23 full digest → promoted from context to presented (role reconsideration)

Rationalist Explanations for War

Sun, 01 Jan 1995 00:00:00 +0000

War needs a bargaining failure; the premise of every trade-and-conflict model on the list

Pareto Inferior Trade

Sun, 01 Jan 1984 00:00:00 +0000

The result is striking: with incomplete insurance markets, opening commodity trade between two otherwise competitive economies can make everyone worse off. The key insight is that goods prices themselves can provide insurance when explicit insurance markets are missing. Trade changes the price process, and can accidentally destroy that insurance.

Basic setup

There are two identical regions, $j=E,W$ , each with farmers and consumers. Farmers allocate one unit of land between a risky crop, fraction $x$ , and a safe crop, fraction $1-x$ . Safe-crop yield is normalized to $1$ . Risky-crop yield is

Diversification through Trade

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Francesco Caselli, Miklós Koren, Milan Lisicky and Silvana Tenreyro, “Diversification through Trade,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135(1), 2020, 449–502; advance access 19 September 2019. This digest is from the paper — the published QJE version. There was no talk and no discussant.

The standard worry about trade and volatility is a portfolio worry that forgot it was one. You are a country. You open to trade, you specialize into the few things you are relatively good at, and your income now rides on those few things. Newbery and Stiglitz said roughly this in 1984, and by 2011 it had hardened into a trade-off a development ministry could write down: trade buys you productivity, you pay in wobble. This paper points out two holes, both of the kind you find by taking the portfolio analogy literally rather than loosely.