Day 1
Foundations of causal inference

🎄 Still looking for a gift for your favourite social scientist?

How about a #preprint with 717 urban areas, 30 countries, and 16,164 models of #Immigrant #Segregation across Europe? Just published with @kasimirdederichs.bsky.social & David Kretschmer 🎅

🎁 Wrapped up here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.17037

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

INAS Conference 2026 - Nuffield College Oxford University

Since the first International Workshop on Analytical Sociology in 2008, INAS is returning to Oxford.

The 18th Annual INAS Conference will take place from 1 to 3 July 2026 at the University of Oxford, hosted by Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology.

Submission deadline: 1 Feb 2026

Are we going through the dispute of positivism once again? 😳

Coercion and Monopsony in Modern American Manufacturing: Evidence from Alabama Prison Labor Susan Helper Suresh Naidu Akseli Palomaki Adam Reich Aaron Sojourner We study coercion and monopsony in contemporary U.S. manufacturing labor markets. We combine administrative data from the Alabama Department of Corrections work release program with a unique survey of workers in the Alabama auto supply chain where workers report their work-release status. We first present descriptive patterns of work-release labor, finding that the use of incarcerated (i.e., work-release) labor is concentrated in the auto supply industry, especially in the Montgomery area, where Hyundai’s assembly plant is located. In the survey, the share of plant-level workers who are incarcerated is negatively correlated with non-incarcerated wages. The survey also enables estimation of hypothetical quit elasticities separately among incarcerated and non-incarcerated workers. Incarcerated workers are estimated to have quit elasticities less than half that of non-incarcerated workers. Because Alabama law requires employers to pay the same wage to incarcerated and non-incarcerated workers in the same jobs, the additional monopsony power introduced by employer access to incarcerated workers creates an incentive and ability for employers to reduce plant-level wages to, and employment of, non-incarcerated workers. We build a quantitative model of firm-specific labor supply that, for incarcerated workers, distinguishes the roles of coercion (the risk of physical harm in prison from not working), wage garnishment that blunts the consumption effect of higher wages, and monopsony (limited mobility across employers). Using it, we estimate effects on free and incarcerated workers’ welfare from i) reforming prison conditions to eliminate violence, ii) eliminating prison labor wage garnishment, iii) imposing a $15 minimum wage, &iv) abolishing prison labor. Free worker welfare goes up in all scenarios...

How does employer access to prisoners’ labor through work release impact the well-being of those workers & of free workers?

New working paper by Sue Helper, Suresh Naidu, Akseli Palomaki, Adam Reich, + me provides evidence, focus on auto manufacturing in AL
#EconSky
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Home The Generative² Social Science Lab is a collaborative research forum based at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. - gen2socscilab/Generative2-Social-Science-Lab

Excited to announce the launch of a new working group at Nuffield College, the Generative² Social Science Lab (co-organised with @pablogerbas.bsky.social). We will have our first meeting tomorrow at 11:00am, come join us! More details here: github.com/gen2socscila...

Our submission to Journal of Vegetation Science for a special issue has been sitting for six months with zero reviewers, after JVS switched to this system. I just resigned as an editor of Global Ecology & Biogeography today (after 7 years) because I can no longer do my job effectively.

Job alert! Join us at @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social as a postdoctoral fellow to work on your own research for three years. #sociology

Great work by @pablogerbas.bsky.social! Loved the clear, causal lens on educational mobility — such a productive framework. The insights on Chile’s 2015 tuition-free policy were especially compelling. Thanks @mebucca.bsky.social @andreacanales.bsky.social @taniahutt.bsky.social for the workshop!

`tinyplot` v0.4.2 is now available on CRAN + R-universe 🎉 Mostly bug fixes, but includes some important integration improvements for Positron IDE users. Release notes: grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/NEW...

#rstats

Which Kind of Science Reform What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

I am often told that public critique of published articles must also solve the issues found. I think this frequently enforced requirement hinders scientific self-correction.

Blog post:

mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

🔥Coming July 2: 'Metrics and Models'!🔥

A new seminar series on advanced modelling w/ impact across health/society.

🌍 Open to *ALL*!
🕑 Weds 2pm UK alternating weeks (online)
🔗 metrics-and-models.github.io
📬 metrics_and_models-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk

Brilliant speakers. *Please share*!

There's no doubt that editors for academic publishing need more help and support to keep things going.

But my god, this isn't it.

I've published in a number of OUP outlets. This would force me to reconsider. I suspect other #SkyStorians will, too.

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research.

bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

Folks, always share your code. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful. And if you feel that it’s still too messy or not sufficiently clean to be shared, you shouldn’t submit yet. After all, there could be mistakes in your mess.

Also, *please* don’t compare this to the climate change (denial) discourse. I’m strongly opposed against such rhetorical moves that try to cash in on the hard-earned trust that *other* scientific fields have built up.

Update: the application deadline for this position has been extended until Feb. 12!

GEORGE LUCAS IN 1999: a trade embargo is going to spark the galactic reckoning and collapse

ME IN 2025: ah, okay

We are delighted to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming special issue on ESR @europeansocreview.bsky.social

Education and Social Mobility: Celebrating Richard Breen’s Contribution to Sociology

Deadline for submission: 15 of June 2025

More details on the call 👇

SFI is a research hub, home to between 20 and 50 resident and visiting researchers at any given time. SFI is currently seeking applications for full-time resident faculty. These 5+year appointments offer broad intellectual freedom and encouragement to take risks.
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We’re thrilled to announce that this year’s keynote speaker is Prof. Aaron Clauset, from CU Boulder. He is one of the world's foremost experts in Network Science and Complex Systems

Apply by 3 March
www.maths.ox.ac.uk/events/summe...

@aaronclauset.bsky.social
@colorado.edu

Ask Cantor 😅

NEXT CALL: Tenure Track Assistant Professor position in Demography and Population Health (REF. POL-TTPT-2025-01) NEXT CALL: Tenure Track Assistant Professor position in Demography and Population Health (REF. POL-TTPT-2025-01) 12.12.2024 RRSS WhatsApp RRSS Facebook RRSS Twitter RRSS email Copiar URL The...

We are hiring!! (2 positions) TT Assistant Professor position in #Demography and Population Health. DEADLINE 02/02/25 Please share
www.upf.edu/web/politiqu... #sociology

New working paper out today with @epiellie.bsky.social called "Do LLMs Act as Repositories of Causal Knowledge?"

Can LLMs (ie ChatGPT) build for us the causal models we need to identify an effect? There are reasons to expect they could. But can they? Well, not really, no.

arxiv.org/html/2412.10...

Announcing the ISA RC28 2025 Summer Meeting at UCLA!
Conference theme: “Social Inequality and Labor Market Restructuring;” Keynotes by Michael Hout and Xi Song

Conference dates: August 4-7, 2025
Abstracts due: February 17, 2025

See you in L.A.!

`etwfe` v0.5.0 is now available on CRAN (and R-universe). grantmcdermott.com/etwfe/

As a reminder, `etwfe` makes it easy to estimate Extended TwoWay Fixed Effects a la @jmwooldridge.bsky.social. Super flexible and good for nonlinear models, recovering heterogeneous TEs, etc.

#econsky #rstats

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