🚨🚨Revised paper 🚨🚨
The Balance of Power in Franchising
w/@ulrichatz.org, Blake Eliason, @mikelipsitz.bsky.social, @pnorlander.bsky.social, & @stpinto.bsky.social. We built the 1st comprehensive panel dataset of franchise contract terms: 46,000 documents, 4,500 chains, 20+ provisions, 2009-2024.
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In our paper, we use @arindube.bsky.social @dgirardi.bsky.social et al. (2025) LP-DiD method.
Example: The horizontal 0 line = “control” group; blue bars = “treated” group.
Treatment: outsourcing (strange medicine).
Before (left): earnings evolved similarly.
After 0 (right): 12% drop.
It's the 7th month of the US bombing random ships in Latin American waters they claim are drug smugglers (reminder that two survivors who were rescued were repatriated, not charged), and the death toll is 150+, and it barely gets discussed.
Photo of Mohamad Bazzi, DAWN fellow and journalism professor at New York University, accompanying the following quote on Israel's war in Lebanon: “Israel is repeating the Gaza playbook in its war on Lebanon: large-scale displacement of civilians, destroying infrastructure, targeting hospitals and healthcare workers, and killing journalists. And the world has become numb to Lebanese loss and suffering.”
“Israel is repeating the Gaza playbook in its war on Lebanon: large-scale displacement of civilians, destroying infrastructure, targeting hospitals and healthcare workers, and killing journalists. And the world has become numb to Lebanese loss and suffering” — my comments to @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social
It’s become obvious that the Trump administration gave zero thought to how this war would play out. Even now, though, I don’t think they quite appreciate how locked in they are to a complete and total clusterfuck. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-an...
Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”.
I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him.
Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation... 1/
NEWS: The Trump administration confirmed it bombed a girl’s school in Iran.
It's one of the most devastating military errors in decades.
Trump lied about it. Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties.
175 are dead. Most were kids. Hegseth should be fired.
A few hours after NYT reported that the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing many children, the White House last night posted this video mixing airstrike footage with Top Gun, Iron Man, Gladiator, Halo, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, John Wick, Superman, Transformers and Dragon Ball Z
See here for implantation:
bsky.app/profile/dgir...
📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats:
The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R!
If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you
Here: github.com/danielegirar...
#Econometrics #CausalInference
@arindube.bsky.social
📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats:
The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R!
If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you
Here: github.com/danielegirar...
#Econometrics #CausalInference
@arindube.bsky.social
Second, inflation is a choice, and the Fed’s track record under Chairman Jerome Powell is one of unwise choices. The Fed should re-examine its great mistakes that led to the great inflation. It should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much. Inflation is caused when government spends too much and prints too much. Money on Wall Street is too easy, and credit on Main Street is too tight. The Fed’s bloated balance sheet, designed to support the biggest firms in a bygone crisis era, can be reduced significantly. That largesse can be redeployed in the form of lower interest rates to support households and small and medium-size businesses.
A quick take on Warsh.
In terms of ideology and theory, at first glance he looks like a fairly standard pre-2008 'hawk' but he's perhaps closer to 80s monetarism: he thinks inflation is caused by government spending and money printing. 1/n
www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...
What’s so misguided about the formulation “authoritarianism is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” which I have heard from Ezra Klein and others, it’s that it misses the point: that’s true of authoritarianism *everywhere*.
This is good, addressing people directly, including those who have supported Trump
Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power
Seven House democrats that voted for ICE funding
The ICE Seven
NORWAY PM: I HAVE REPEATEDLY CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO TRUMP THAT IT IS AN INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE THAT AWARDS THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
Losing my mind at the Dems with their billionaire backers and powerful friends who have come up with the brilliant strategy that the party should adopt the policy positions of the avg MAGA voter — apparently ignoring that independents and swing voters even exist. Is this what $40 million gets you??
Gallego ("moderate" Dem) is going with "ICE needs to be totally torn down" (not "reform and retrain"). This is a pivot point for the country on immigration. You have been seeing this in the data for a while, and now officials are snapping to the public opinion www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ice-is-a-7...
Until recently, much of the evidence on these effects was at the subnational level and within country. I discuss three papers using novel cross-country evidence on the effects of national election outcomes (presidential and parliamentary elections), which are likely more consequential (14/n).
In the second part of the talk, I discuss recent work on the economic effects of elections through two main forces, representation and agency (13/n).
The first is “Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections” (AEJ: Applied) by @dgirardi.bsky.social. Using a cross-country RDD, Girardi finds that left-wing electoral victories cause large short-term decreases in stock market valuation (15/n).
A week ago, I gave the “Recent Developments in the Political Economy of Elections and Democracy” lecture at the 2026 AEA @assameeting.bsky.social !
Video: www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/202...
Slides: www.vincentpons.org/recent-devel...
Thread with the TL;DR of my talk below.
The immigration doom loop in full swing.
Chasing the xenophobes is a doomed strategy both economically *and* politically.
(1/3)
archive.ph/pyVLg
A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration.
doi.org/10.1126/scia...
🧵 Thread—>
The smear campaign against Mustapha Kharbouch -- falsely accused of the Brown shooting and MIT murder by powerful politicians, pundits and plutocrats -- is a prime example of how pervasive racism has become. It's also a story largely ignored by the mainstream media www.thenation.com/article/poli...
Ashamed of this government
