@allisong.bsky.social is really testing my rusty french language skills with the announcement of an APCG colloquium in French!

Why Health Taxes Alone Won't Fix Malnutrition in Poor Countries Health taxes on sugar seem to have captured the zeitgeist: Mexico's soda tax, the UK's sugar levy, South Africa's Health Promotion Levy, a sugar tax in the Philippines, and so on. The evidence on thes...

Health taxes on sugar and ultra-processed foods are gaining traction worldwide.

But in many low-income settings, diets are shaped less by price than by what’s available.

@eeshani.bsky.social argues without access to nutritious food, taxes alone won’t fix malnutrition.

https://go.cgdev.org/4tlZLQP

When you read a paper with a DiD design & observational data, do you consider it causally-identified?

1️⃣ No, causality is only with RCTs
2️⃣ Only in rare cases (natural experiments)
3️⃣ Sometimes (depends on # of tests)
4️⃣ Usually (DiD works well IMO)

📊 Show results

This would have been useful to for anyone who imagined that a bombing campaign would result the spontaneous collapse of the Iranian regime to read

Great articulation of my main worry about AI use among researchers (including myself!)

Among current students, a hugely beneficial trait will be the ability to force oneself to sometimes do hard stuff on their own to really understand it even when AI is faster.

ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

🚨New paper alert🚨 What happens when a polarized democracy bans a social media platform? New work with @cbarrie.bsky.social, Molly Roberts, Chris Schwarz, and @jatucker.bsky.social. We study Brazil's 2024 ban on X and find it created what we define as a "partisan sorting ratchet ." 1/

Deadline is today!

From our FirstView articles: A Precolonial Paradox? Rethinking Political Centralization and Its Legacies by MARTHA WILFAHRT. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Looking for a postdoc to teach and develop Bayesian methods
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/31/l...

Did a series of videos with Markus Brunnermeier on Claude Code (more to come)

Video 1: Getting Started with CC

open.substack.com/pub/paulgp/p...

Congratulations, Avi!

New #OpenAccess Paper Alert! 🚨

In @apsrjournal.bsky.social, @gmcclendon.bsky.social and I present results from a collaborative field experiment with the Institute for Governance Reform around a switch from plurality rules to closed-list PR rules in Sierra Leone’s 2023 parliamentary elections. A🧵:

🚨Reminder that the application for the @epssnet.bsky.social mentoring program is March 31, details below👇

"Political Analysis" call for editors banner with a red background and white text, surrounded by yellow borders.

The Society for Political Methodology invites applications for the editorship of @polanalysis.bsky.social beginning on September 1, 2026.

Find out more - https://cup.org/4r50sgO

Proposals are due on May 1, 2026.

📣 New job at Oxford's Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM)! 📣

The Departments of Politics & IR (DPIR) and Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI) are hiring an Associate Professor of Causal and Experimental Methods.

Come work with me and amazing Oxford peeps! Deadline NOON April 27th.

From our FirstView article: Hidden Majoritarianism and Women’s Career Progression in Proportional Representation Systems DANIEL M. SMITH, @AliCirone.bsky.social, @teele.bsky.social, GARY W. COX and JON H. FIVA. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

One Year In, What Do We Know About Humanitarian and Development Spending Under Trump? With new data, we examined both obligations (commitments) and outlays (disbursements) for several of the core US international assistance accounts over the last calendar year. Across nearly every acco...

One year into the second Trump administration, new data shed light on development and humanitarian spending.

Obligations and outlays show declines across global health, migration & refugee assistance, and more:
https://go.cgdev.org/4ceD7ED

Today at 4pm GMT: Anna Clemente (@lsegovernment.bsky.social) is presenting “World War II Memories and Authoritarian Attitudes in Germany” at the Political Behaviour Seminar, organised with
@sarahobolt.bsky.social, @florianfoos.bsky.social, & @mathiaspoertner.bsky.social. Join us in London & online!

New paper with Stephanie Zonszein! Political news is more important than ever, but local papers are shuttering across the US. In recent years, innovative community-centered outlets led by journalists have taken to WhatsApp and social media to reach groups such as immigrants. What are their effects?

Good to Know: How composition effects can distort election narratives Composition effects can distort election narratives. Can elections reveal the public’s true opinions? It depends on who shows up to vote.

Can elections reveal the public’s true opinions? It depends on who shows up to vote.

In our latest "Good to Know," @egojunk.bsky.social explains how composition effects can distort election narratives.

Read now: goodauthority.org/news/good-to...

Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics “University as a Melting Pot: Long-term Effects of Internationalization”

Debates on international students often focus on capacity, funding, or competition.

My paper shows the main effects on natives are not academic or economic, but social.

"Where have the respondents gone? Perhaps we ate them all"

Absolutely incredible title, 10/10, no questions asked.

Four complex equations shown in a grid, with their LaTeX representation shown above and the rendered expression below

Some of the test cases for the native LaTeX math expression parser and renderer I've been working on for textshaping which will soon bring native math equation rendering to #rstats and marquee

Two weeks left to apply!

Public Financial Management, State Capacity, and Public Services in India Abstract. Despite well-funded and well-designed public programmes, service delivery often falls short of expectations. While existing research highlights v

My book with Santhosh Mathew and Devesh Sharma is out! We discuss how the architecture of public finance management works in India yields inefficient public service delivery, and the potential reforms. If you work on these issues and can't access the link, send me a DM:

academic.oup.com/book/62489

My book - “Purges” - has a release date (August 15) and a front cover. I started work on this as my PhD dissertation at the end of 2017 - excited for it to finally be coming out!

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

This is bleak.

I have a new VoxDev post out which discusses my forthcoming paper with James Robinson in the Annual Review of Economics. In it we put forward the idea that many African societies were organized around the goal of limiting centralization of authority. And they succeeded! 1/2

🚨My first preprint is out on @socarxiv.bsky.social!
How do AI-generated content labels shape what people see as authentic on social media — and do labels have unintended side effects? osf.io/preprints/so...

A thread 🧵