This is one of my favorite conferences!

Relatively small, great discussions and a variety of topics studied with the same methodology - field experiments.

Thank you so much for organizing it, @henninghermes.com @lergetporer.bsky.social @fpeter.bsky.social @simonwiederhold.bsky.social! 🙏🏼

Back to teaching or studying economics at university this September?

@voxdev.bsky.social has tons of useful resources for university economics courses - I have included some examples in this thread. 1/n

Excited to share that during my most recent conference trip, I realized my French is not sufficient to discuss the digital euro. With a cab driver. After midnight.

Why LLMs are not a substitute for humans in research on human behavior:

Human participants were responsive to semantic nuances that LLMs didn't pick up.

Example: Cut their beard to shame someone vs cut their beard to shave someone.

#Econsky

What a surprise. Not.

I present to you the ultimate filing cabinet for old and resting (let's be honest: abandoned) projects, well hidden under a staircase in the back entrance of a local government office.

Important read for everyone who collects their own data on online platforms

#econsky

#Econsky 🚀 Call for Presenters for our 2025–26 Seminar Series at the 21st Century India Center, UCSD.

Nominate yourself 👉

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Bad: being on leave the week before the exam.

Even worse: being on leave the week before going to the field for data collection (at the same time that the exam takes place).

Booking vacation half a year in advance may not be ideal.

Have a research idea related to philanthropy, particularly measuring the impact of our work? Get in touch! Perhaps we could partner to implement it at Arnold Ventures. You know I love a good causal study.

🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share.

Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*.

I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind.

github.com/bretthollenb...

We're hiring! I'm looking for a PhD student in Economics (75%, E13) to join my team at TUM Campus Heilbronn starting Oct 2025. Work on field & survey experiments in applied micro, behavioral econ & econ of education. Deadline: June 30. Please share!
Call for applications: tinyurl.com/msdsrhv6

Surprises from other disciplines:

Someone emails their new publication in which they cite one of my publications.

Undecided how to feel about this: a nice gesture, but I also appreciate the +300 other author teams citing this publication and not sending one email each.

Thanks to all, I guess?!

Zu Semesterbeginn bin ich manchmal versucht, mich mit in die Stuhlreihen zu setzen und zu sehen was passiert...

For those who teach Behavioral Econ, what textbook/s do you use?

#econsky

👏 Fischer-Lescano points out that the AfD learns from 🇺🇲 attacks on academia, and so should we.

"One is inclined to underestimate the danger posed by far-right hostility toward science. The [...] self-exposing ridiculousness [...] is not deserving of a place in discourse."

Indeed highly dangerous.

Please enjoy these delightful images from a 1993 paper on walrus vision, showing estimated visual fields in different poses (I especially love how they look like alternate covers for a scifi novel about space walruses with ray-shooting eyeballs)

Source: www.aquaticmammalsjournal.org/wp-content/u...

I guess the same as with the papers showing gender bias in the publication process and teaching evaluations: nothing.

When I pointed out this research on teaching evaluations at the start of my tenure track, it was just ignored. I still have a target score above which I need to be evaluated.

Good that they didn't apply the "the result is not surprising" heuristic to reject the paper in this case.
It's important to document issues with the publication process given that it's the main evaluation criterion.
But also: now what?

Also today: Interdisciplinary event at the uni.

An older professor is interested in experimental economics and tries to find out the name of the professor I work with.

Plot twist: it's me, assistant prof of experimental econ, with my own group.

Call with the president of a student association.
They reached out because they want to increase the number of female members.

I asked why. Answer: Mainly because firms have told them so.
Turns out it's not really a priority for the current members (for now).

I asked them to reflect on this...

"We'll just terraform Mars," they insist, unable to terraform Earth, a planet that is already perfect except it's like 2° too warm.

I heard this discussion and pretty much the same arguments very recently...