SEA-HAWKS!!!

5 papers from the Super Bowl of Economics Planet Money went to the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, and we saw some fascinating papers presented there.

Great coverage of our paper J-curve paper on AI’s productivity impacts by @willagreer.bsky.social in @npr.org’s Planet Money newsletter! www.npr.org/sections/pla...

Too much spam here, but I like LinkedIn now.,

Thoughts of love (and maybe some whisky) to all toddler parents with no daycare this week

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.

24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Hiring this year in economics or management? I try to read every JMP on innovation, entrepreneurship, or econ of AI; why not make the list public? Here's 54 candidates on the market this year (link below). Many great papers + NBER Innovation PhD boot camp grads! kevinbryanecon.com/2025innovati...

OpenAI CFO Would Support Federal Backstop for Chip Investments Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s finance chief, says the company would support federal measures to make it easier to finance sizable investments in AI chips. She spoke at WSJ’s Tech Live event in California.

In case you missed it: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar insinuating OpenAI would be "open" to a bailout by the Federal Government for its 1.5 trillion chip purchase contracts...

www.wsj.com/video/openai...

New WP (by me and others) on how disclosure mandates:

(1) increase disclosure (primarily of negative outcomes), and (2) how expectations of increased disclosure by others slows down innovation.

Link and more details in @florianederer.bsky.social's thread...

PSA on United Airlines: If you miss your initial flight from a roundtrip they cancel all subsequent flights and keep your money. And airline is unwilling to rebook even though they have available seats. Just rebooked with Delta Air Lines, to leave SFO..

Gemini 2.5 Pro is very solid all around. Claude is better at coding. Last place, for most tasks: ChatGPT-5. However, I have actually been quite impressed with Chinese Open weight models such as Qwen3..

I have been incredibly fortunate to learn both from my amazing coauthors and a fantastic set of HBS alumni. And this work will be foundational for more forthcoming research (by others and myself) on how AI will impact the process of making business strategy going forward.

What is more, we establish causal evidence that business education has a persistent impact on CEO's strategy process -- even decades later. (So yes, business education does actually matter..)

Our basic result is that strategic decision-making styles vary widely across CEOs and that CEOs with more structured practices (proactive, consistent and hypothesis-driven), tend to outperform their (less-structured) peers especially in industries with high degrees of strategic complexity.

Very happy to see this paper in (online) print. Together with Michael Christensen, @raffasadun.bsky.social , @nickbloom.bsky.social and Jan Rivkin, we interviewed hundreds of CEOs to measure how they make business strategy.

pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/...

Yes, the idea that LLMs pay uniform attention to everything in a paper (or are "better at paying attention that humans") is a widely believed myth.

Financial crisis? "According to Moody’s, structured finance has become a popular way to pay for new data center projects, with more than $9 billion of issuance in the commercial mortgage-backed security and asset-backed security markets during the first four months of 2025." (Ian Frisch, NYTimes)

How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind Consultants have a lot to gain helping companies deploy the most transformative technology in decades. Some clients say so far they have overpromised and underdelivered.

"Accenture, (...), in its most recent quarter reported a $100 million increase in new generative AI bookings quarter over quarter. That is down from a $200 million quarter-over-quarter increase the previous two periods."

www.wsj.com/articles/how...

Your next airline ticket could be priced by AI Delta is testing an AI-powered pricing system that could charge two travelers different fares even if they are purchasing at the same moment. Pricing strategy

PSA if you travel to SMS-SF: I used the SMS-provided promo code on United and compared it with exactly the same flight without the promo code. The code made my airfare $40 MORE expensive. Nice anecdote for price discrimination or business ethics?

www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...

Full press conference: Governor names Charlie Kirk shooting suspect | CNN Utah’s governor Spencer Cox says they have a suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting in custody. Cox identified the suspect as Tyler Robinson and presented the evidence investigators have uncovered at a ...

On the Charlie Kirk assassination: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." (Isaac Asimov, Foundation)

www.cnn.com/2025/09/12/u...

Faith in God-like large language models is waning That may be good news for AI laggards like Apple

The LLM turning point is coming ( = we may be close to the "peak of inflated expectations" in the Hype Cycle).

www.economist.com/business/202...

Have we learned nothing from conflicts of interest during the subprime housing crisis? "Both authors have a financial interest in
www.expectedparrot.com. Horton is an economic advisor to Anthropic."

Excited to have my research (co-authored with the dream team of @mjyang.bsky.social, Zachary Kroff, and @erikbryn.bsky.social) featured in the New Yorker!

Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... 1/3

Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble Is the bubble about to burst?

Seems Sam Altman thinks "Yes", AI is in a bubble? Yet, he wants to let OpenAI employees convert stock to cash with an implied valuation of $500 Billion? (with a B!). What happend to getting "PhD level" ChatGPT-5 expertise, .. (checks notes) .. two weeks ago?!?

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

There is an.....interesting op-ed in today's WSJ from a 22 year old entrepreneur telling everyone that work life balance will "keep you mediocre" It is completly wrong. Let me tell you why with citations. [gift link to the very wrong op-ed] 1/n www.wsj.com/opinion/work...

Odd, or signal that ChatGPT-5 is lower quality, but cheaper to run, because it decides when a high-token test-time compute run is triggered..

This also raises huge issues for replicability of research based on older ChatGPT models..

Urg

Confirmed, geez

There are two Bs!