A Causal Affair

• Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions

  November 6, 2024

  Economists love using linear regression to estimate treatment effects — it turns out that there are perils to this method, but also amazing perks. [-0-] [-0-] This post is a synthesis of a Twitter/Bluesky thread.

• Reader's Digest of Optimal Monetary Policy in Production Networks

  November 6, 2024

  Editors Note: This summmary was created using Claude AI. Please send me any comments or corrections.

• Reader's Digest of Spatial Unit Roots and Spurious Regression

  November 6, 2024

  Editors Note: This summmary was created using Claude AI. Please send me any comments or corrections.

• Testing out a new format: Reader's Digest of Econometrica Papers [Economic Theory Paper]

  November 6, 2024

  Ben Golub had the idea of summarizing technical papers (such as in Econometrica) using AI to be more easily approached by non-technical economists. These papers were selected from the list of the most prominent recent papers in Econometrica by Google Scholar. This is the second post, for an economic theory paper. I also posted one for an econometrics paper.

• Testing out a new format: Reader's Digest of Econometrica Papers [Econometrics Paper]

  November 6, 2024

  Ben Golub had the idea of summarizing technical papers (such as in Econometrica) using AI to be more easily approached by non-technical economists. These papers were selected from the list of the most prominent recent papers in Econometrica by Google Scholar. First, an econometrics paper. I will also post one for a theory paper.

• Using AI in Research and Teaching: A Practical Guide

  June 24, 2024

  [N.B. I gave a version of this post for an internal discussion at SOM. I’ve modified it for general consumption. Many of the examples I walked through live – I will try to add videos for those, in the future, but for now they will just sit as “examples” in the text.]

• Presidential Lectures

  November 23, 2023

  I wanted to put together a list of AEA (and other Economics groups) Presidential speeches for my own perusal. I thought I’d share it here in case it’s useful for others.

• Gary Chamberlain Lecture Notes from Harvard's Econ 2120 Course

  May 27, 2021

  Gary Chamberlain’s family granted approval for me to post the collected set of lecture notes from the late Gary Chamberlain’s 2010 Econometrics class (EC2120) that I took during my economics Ph.D. at Harvard University. Gary was a remarkable teacher and this class was an amazing experience for me as a young economist. I hope you find these lectures as enthralling as I did!

• Beamer Tips

  April 30, 2018

  I recently wrote up some tips and tricks for beamer. You can find the slides here and the source code on Github.

• Best Figures from Economics Papers

  March 12, 2018

  Matt Notowidigdo prompted a great thread of peoples’ suggestions of their favorite figures. I thought I would give a resting place for the nominees:

• Stata Maps

  July 9, 2017

  I recently put together a maptile geography to incorporate the NPR hex tile map for state maps to be used in Michael Stepner’s excellent Stata maptile ado program (which is a wrapper for spmap). It should be up soon on Michael’s website, but you can grab it here for now.

• Comparing tidyverse R to Stata

  July 9, 2017

  I spent some time this weekend learning tidyverse, a set of R libraries inspired by tidyr by Hadley Wickham. I have a lot of friends who swear by R – I used it in college quite a bit, but once I switched to Stata I never went back. The main reason for this was that the base R language (which is how I learned R) is quite clunky – it’s painful to do basic data cleaning. However, I recently read through a nice post by David Robinson on the values of tidyverse and I decided to give a shot.