Economics Literature Search Full-text search across 15,000+ papers from top economics journals and NBER working papers. Track how empirical methods have evolved over time.

Finally updated the search engine behind econlit-db to Meilisearch. Everything should be quite fast now -- under a second or two. Let me know if you have any bugs. paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

we're working on a huge documentation/example gallery, etc push that we're hoping will make the PySAL stack more discoverable and easy to work with for folks like you we might be able to suck into our orbit :P

also, btw, brand new panel stuff in PySAL if you still have the itch :)

github.com/pysal/spreg/...)

i am a fan of the spatial panel (love a good elhorst)! I sent [this paper](papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....) to both JUE and RSUE and both editors were like 'interesting; needs reframe... everyone knows spatial effects matter...'

i was like ...but do they??

More abstractly, as discussed in Conley (1999), “locations” might index an economic characteristic and the “economic distance” between locations measures the dissimilarity of the characteristic. We thus follow the geostatistical tradition of positing a continuous parameter model of spatial variation, rather than, say, model dependence by spatial autoregressive (SAR) models of Cliff and Ord (1974) and Anselin (1988).2

Spatial Dependence In many instances where regression unalysis is applied 10 cross-sectional data, various measurement problems, spatial externalities, and other spillover effects may lead to dependent error terms. In addition, in the emptrical implementation of models of spatial processes, spatial structure, or spatial interaction, the dependent variable at one point in space may be functionally related 10 i1s values at some or all other locations in the system. In other words, spatial dependence is reflected in regression analysis in two distinct forms, one as a misspecification and the other as a result of the explicit modeling of space. In more formal terms, these two basic representations of spatial dependence can be expressed as: y= f(y, X, beta, epsilon), Or epsilon= g(epsilon, lambda, xi)

another quirk in the econometrica paper is all spatial autocorrelation is viewed as misspecification and i cant understand how their approach works any time you have legitimate spillover in X or Y?

arent they proposing griffith-style spatial filtering?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

*stares blankly in Regional Science*

here's Luc and Dan, a mere forty years ago, discussing the inferential issues in spatial regression, which were already very well-known at the time

that is precisely how i read it

on the one hand, it's dope to see spatial analysis win Econometrica's best paper (!)

on the other, it's so deeply troubling that this statement is news to economists in 2026

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it. Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal. On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."
If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

starting to think podcasts are the problem

at an analyst level i totally agree, but at a *software* level im curious what examples you have in mins that still don't do spatial indexing?

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained.

That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

Notepad++

"Chinese-linked cyberespionage group with a long history hijacked the update process for the popular code editing platform Notepad++ to deliver a custom backdoor and other malware."

(That’s real data from the paper :P)

a racial dot density map of the LA regions. Colored lines of varying widths show the level of flow from different communities (before the June ICE raids)

a racial dot density map of the LA regions. Colored lines of varying widths show the level of flow from different communities (after the June ICE raids). There are substantially fewer lines and smaller widths indicating fewer people traveling downtown from a smaller set of origins. Many of the reduced flows come from predominantly nonwhite communities, suggesting a chilling effect across the diverse region

if foot traffic flows into a place like downtown LA looked something like this before the ICE raids, then, say, like this afterward... well, there will be economic consequences, on top of everything else

socialecology.uci.edu/news/oc-busi...

DID NO ONE SEE WATCHMEN????

bsky.app/profile/scot...

it. um. won 11 emmys and explores the inherent racism underlying masked law enforcement

Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti “We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti.

"Please get the truth out about our son."

Density timelines – Mountain Doodles Global city density patterns across time.

Global datasets are really cool. Lots of fun to be had, I used this for looking at city evolution over time, sprawl, building heights, … Just really cool when one can do that globally with the click of a button. E.g.:

tobler/notebooks/extract_urban_areas.ipynb at main · pysal/tobler Areal & Dasymetric Interpolation; Change of Support - pysal/tobler

that looks.. awesome? I'd cooked up an example with copernicus data once github.com/pysal/tobler... but im unfamiliar with GHSL. Time to read up. It's a bit like NLCD where they go from remote-sensed imagery into a model of population density?

fwiw, serge has a new paper in the works based on that bipartite idea that's just about the econometrics of two interacting spatial systems, not necessarily schools and neighborhoods (its a tribute to harry kelejian), but its baaaad ass

not sure which one you meant, so heres both

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jg7lz...

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/24lvp...

we're on a roll here... school attendance boundaries are another boondoggle i find extraordinarily interesting :)

link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...

doi.org/10.1007/s110...

Comparing the effects of an NLCD-derived dasymetric refinement on estimation accuracies for multiple areal interpolation methods Comparability among population data enumerated within different time periods may be complicated by changing enumeration boundaries over time. Areal interpolation methods are commonly used to solve ...

makes me think of this one dx.doi.org/10.1080/1548...

theres another paper that explicitly uses different assumptions about target classes but its escaping me at the moment

hm interesting. If you actually want to *test* for the presence of school aged children, though, you'd definitely need census data center access, because the chidots data is still a noisy estimate? especially since we're talking about a very specific population, not necessarily uniformly distributed

💯 yeah, for sure.

even without access to a census data center, there's a paper in here if i (we?) ever had time, looking at these different methods and the accuracy going from, e.g. tract and downscaling to block using different dasymetric layers and different point process DGPs

ah snap. Thats nice. You still end up with the volumetric problem, but having real parcel data at your disposal is a massive boon

i grew up in urbana... im like 80% sure you can see my childhood home from the hancock observation deck

lololol i meant terrain *over here* 🤣

(aside, as a native illinoisan, one of the things that entertains me about becoming a southern californian is how much quality improvement you get in this kind of approach *just* by considering the natural environment. Because, you know, it has terrain :P)