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Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Department of Economics @Universität Zürich 🇨🇭 @econ.uzh.ch · May 21

Delighted to announce that Ingvild Almås will join the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich in June 2025 as the 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧-𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡. Welcome, Ingvild!

More information and official press release: www.econ.uzh.ch/en/news/insi...

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Josh Merfeld @merfeld.bsky.social · May 20

I am just a simple man, begging you not to include constants in your tables when you include a bunch of fixed effects.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · May 11

Is my own experience an outlier or is it a different mechanism? I always felt that once I did something, that thing was taken, so my younger brothers didn’t want to do that thing anymore and searched for something else to focus on

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Uma Karmarkar @umakarma.bsky.social · May 7

Unsolicited sci writing advice:

Writing that something always or never happens (e.g., Ɐ(x)) makes your claims vulnerable because it only takes one counterexample to break them.

The most dangerous version of this? "No prior research has addressed this question."

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · May 4

And don't forget the abundance of violent crime

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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · Apr 30

economists' creed

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 28

I guess the most space-saving way to pack 17 equally-sized squares into a single bigger square is a good example of such platonic horror

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 28

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In Poland, we know all about fighting illiberal regimes. Here are our lessons for the Trump age | Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

Our political history is one of catastrophe, communism, and developing powerful antibodies against oppression, say Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

www.theguardian.com

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 27

An Israeli friend once told me that they have an expression to describe a particular kind of person: “full throttle in neutral.” The jewish culture seems to great with such expressions

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 27

Econ is called the dismal science because it was anti-slavery early on, and some historian thought that was against the “natural order.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dis...

The dismal science - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 26

It's extremely useful -- for all tasks that can be independently checked (does the code work, does the cited paper actually make that point, etc.). Given the many errors the frontier versions still make on tasks that can be checked, I don't think it can be trusted on tasks that can't be checked yet

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 26

DeepResearch is helpful but you really can't trust it. A review I just had it do claims that "promise tactics" are a well-used influence strategy, but the paper it cites does not contain the word "promise" at all. For a different paper, DeepRes claims the opposite of what's in the paper's abstract

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 24

Same issue in switzerland. Bequests usually play the key role.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 23

Someone who graduated from Stanford only about 10 years earlier than me told me that at the time there was a saying: "There are 2 kinds of econ professors. Those who marry their students, and those who marry their secretaries." Hard to imagine from todays point of view.

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Daniele Girardi @dgirardi.bsky.social · Apr 23

Reviews of Economic Literature has been launched

True open access, managed by academics for academics, it follows our mass resignation from JES where the commercial publisher imposed very problematic conditions.

Submit your literature reviews in economics!

rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 21

Almost all of the Julia Donaldson / Axel Scheffler books are great! There are many more, highly recommended!

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Keenan Crane @keenancrane.bsky.social · Apr 17

Here's a nice "proof without words":

The sum of the squares of several positive values can never be bigger than the square of their sum.

This picture helps make sense of how ℓ₁ and ℓ₂ norms regularize and sparsify solutions (resp.). [1/n]

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 17

The behavioral/experimental economist named Werner that I’ve known for a while is actually this guy: sites.google.com/view/peterwe... Surprising accumulation of Werners in the field!

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 17

What do people think is the probability the SAVE act will get passed? Can't find anything on prediction markets, but the act seems to be an important (and scary) step to entrench the current admin (by making voting harder disproportionately for more liberal-leaning groups such as married women)

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 16

I think it's asymmetric. If there's a flaw in a paper, every selection of referees has a good chance to detect it. Also, there are only a small handful of journals at each level, so you can't dip as many times as you'd like. Redrawing detects flaws, but prevents vetos. Or, yes, editors deciding.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 16

If someone has some idiosyncratic beef with a paper (e.g. they don't like structural estimation in principle), but it keeps going to that person, that person acquires essentially a veto-right over the paper (I know some names). I think science works better if nobody has such a veto right.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 15

The currently most famous swiss person is probably Roger Federer. But the most important Swiss person to ever have lived is probably the guy below (Euler), besides the Bernoulli dynasty, perhaps. Remarkably, all of them came from the city of Basel.

John Mullahy @johnmullahy.bsky.social · Apr 15

At at time when artificial intelligence is so widely heralded it is perhaps particularly important to celebrate the highest echelons of real human intelligence.

Happy Birthday Leonhard Euler (318) and Leonardo da Vinci (573).

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 15

... don't forget the climate change deniers in the earth science departments

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 14

Not sure this is what you mean, but there's a literature on good vs. bad control variables. Here's a great and very short article on it coauthored by one of the spearleaders of that literature, Judea Pearl: ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser...

ftp.cs.ucla.edu

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · Apr 6

This is amazing!! Huge congrats! Great place for experimental economics!

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