The dept of Economic History in Lund is hiring a new Senior Lecturer! Ad is here, deadline 17 May:

lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

One reason I love economists is that they really do explain their work to me like I'm five.

After a month with Codex, Leontief’s point feels more prescient than ever: as automation shifts to cognitive tasks, it may become clear that we are not that different from horses after all.

A tight link between productivity and population density is one of the most robust associations in urban economics. In that light, Scandinavia’s economic transformation before World War I is remarkable, since it occurred in some of Europe’s least densely populated regions.

It’s a weird feeling to have refactored all the code in my ongoing projects and to realize that I’m probably never going to write another line of code in my life.

A decade later and I’m still a sucker for a railroad map: this shows the chance that working-class sons attained a white-collar occupation in adulthood in the early 20th century.

Markets and Mobility: How Employers Structure Economic Opportunity

Intergenerational mobility, measuring the ability to achieve economic success regardless of family background, is a critical reflection of a society’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Rising income inequality has raised concerns about the potential erosion of upward mobility. While education has traditionally been viewed as the path to mobility, its transformative power is facing challenges in a rapidly evolving job market. This project reorients the focus of intergenerational mobility research by highlighting the labor market as an arena for the reproduction of advantage. It employs a comparative approach, using administrative data from four countries: Sweden, Austria, England, and the United States. It also incorporates evidence from a broader set of nations through cross-national surveys, longitudinal household surveys, labor force surveys, secondary data, and digital trace data. The project employs cutting-edge empirical methods, including quasi- experimental designs, event studies, within-family comparisons, decomposition analyses, counterfactual simulations, and diagnostic checks to rigorously assess the extent of inequalities in the labor market. The research investigates how family background influences the sorting of individuals to employers and workplaces, accounting for education and occupation, and explores variations in career progression within and between employers. It comprehensively catalogues and assesses mechanisms shaping workplace inequality, contributing to the development of social closure theory. Additionally, the project evaluates intervention strategies, encompassing both employer practices and government actions, to promote fair opportunity in the labor market.

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project.

Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months.

Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Really enjoyed the paper! This might be of interest: doi.org/10.1017/S002...

Everyone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:

I really want to stay optimistic about how LLMs can revolutionize social science research. But the fact that I can't get GPT-5.2 to perform a simple word count really makes me wonder about the flurry of papers coming that heavily relies on LLMs for analyzing unstructured data.

Free tip for authors who want to speed up publication: make it make sense. An untold source of delay is reviewers struggling to understand what you even mean.

It’s kind of ironic that the Toner-Rodgers paper on AI and chemical science was entirely correct, even though it was completely made up.

Can state-building disrupt rather than stabilize society? In a new @apsrjournal.bsky.social article, @victorgayeco.bsky.social and I show that the expansion of state communication networks spurred rebellion for decades in France before the Revolution

👉 Article: doi.org/10.1017/S000...
🧵1/X

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Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in The Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis* Abstract. We trace the evolution of the language of science, religion, and political economy in the centuries leading to the British Industrial Revolution.

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in The Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis,” by Almelhem, Iyigun, Kennedy, and Rubin (@jaredcrubin): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Erik Prawitz, Associate Professor at Linnaeus University and Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), for an engaging… | Economic... Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Erik Prawitz, Associate Professor at Linnaeus University and Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), for an engaging presentatio...

Today @erikprawitz.bsky.social gave a seminar on "Cities and the Rise of Working Women" at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) 👏

New edition of our workshop, with @essobecker.bsky.social as keynote. Join us in Uppsala on May 28/29 and please repost if you can!

See you in Uppsala 🇸🇪 🎉

The deadline for our workshop in economic history with Elias Papaioannou as keynote speaker is approaching fast, make sure to apply!

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

Examining the social construction of race during the US Reconstruction Era finds that people with the same skin tone were racialized based on their wealth, setting a path for racial stratification, from @aadukia.bsky.social, Hornbeck, Keniston, and Lualdi https://www.nber.org/papers/w33502

Union wage effects in Sweden: Evidence from the interwar period In this paper, I use a new plant-level dataset to investigate the relationship between wages and the regional strength of unions. Using a shift-share …

I published my first paper, read it, cite it, love it!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Awesome!

Financing Innovation: The Role of Patent Examination. Stephen D. Billington, Christopher L. Colvin and Christopher Coyle. How does patent examination influence access to finance for innovative firms? We exploit a reform to the UK’s patent system that introduced substantive examination to the patent application process, improving the information available to potential investors on the value of firms’ patents. Using a newly compiled firm-level dataset of exchange-listed corporations, we find that firms holding examined patents were able to borrow more, reflecting improved access to capital markets, and leading to firm growth. Our results highlight the role of patent examination in reducing information asymmetries, enhancing the signalling value of patents, and mitigating financial barriers to innovation.

New working paper alert: "Financing Innovation: The Role of Patent Examination". @steve-bill-econ.bsky.social, Christopher Coyle and I have been working on this for quite a while now. We are excited to have a full draft for your enjoyment! www.quceh.org.uk/uploads/1/0/...

🚨 New Working Paper 🚨

w/ @pdavidboll.bsky.social and @jvoth.bsky.social

Do you run regressions on spatial data? Then keep reading!

We present a guide and Stata package for methods by Müller and Watson (2024 ECTA) to deal with Spatial Unit Roots in Regressions.

Link in 🧵 (1/n)

Thanks for the clarification @alexanderdonges.bsky.social!

Why do firms in poor countries not adopt new technologies? One reason: they're too small. We show in a recent paper that the "invention" of the the modern corporate form historically enabled marginal firms to grow and adopt new technologies. Paper forthcoming in the JEH and @voxeu.org column here:

I thought several German states had general incorporation laws already in the 1860s and that it became Reich law from 1871? I also think I recall talks about a "Gründerboom" in the early 1870s as a result of the legislative changes?

Why do firms in poor countries not adopt new technologies? One reason: they're too small. We show in a recent paper that the "invention" of the the modern corporate form historically enabled marginal firms to grow and adopt new technologies. Paper forthcoming in the JEH and @voxeu.org column here:

New Publication! 🎉 Congratulations to @erikprawitz.bsky.social and @thorberger.bsky.social for publishing their paper "Inventors among the 'Impoverished Sophisticate'" in the prestigious Journal of Economic History! 🤩