nicholas decker

• economic datasets for researchers: this is an ongoing project to collect all the useful datasets i can find in one place. suggestions are warmly appreciated.

• in-depth twitter threads on over 140 different papers

• "a summer reading list for the bright and ambitious student"

my favorite essays

• "berry-hausman-pakes should win the nobel prize": a clear, readable introduction to empirical industrial organization
• "against business schools": economists shouldn't assist in doing things which straightforwardly make the world worse
• "imprison younger offenders longer": age at first offense reveals information about the underlying criminality of a erson, which should then be used to adjust sentence length
• "does industrial policy work?: too much of evidence which people cite in favor of industrial policy does not actually support it. that's a shame, because as i show, there is good evidence for it!
• "why i support capitalism": and what i think capitalism really
• "the work of raj chetty": i just love his papers so much man
• "the gains from trade are not the gains from trade": static gains from trade come nowhere close to explaining economic growth -- instead, it is the diffusion of ideas which matters
• "the incredible macroeconomic implications of uniform pricing": prices are commonly uniform across a market, even when local demand varies. why does this happen? what are the implications?
• "what do economists do?": a whirlwind tour of how economists answer questions
• "should we take everything from the old to give to the young?": on the difficulties of finding out what our social discount rate should be
• "price indices, inflation inequality, and cpi bias": explaining the difficulties associated with measuring real income
• "why do the same products have different prices?": explaining why price dispersion exists
• "the china shock": did import competition make us worse off? did it make some parts of the country worse off?
• "what's the matter with india?": the judiciary makes it very hard to hire and fire workers
• "should we restrict immigration to increase innovation?": there are conditions under which labor scarcity induces innovation, to the eventual benefit of all. i argue that these conditions are unlikely to be met in the case of immigration, and that we should instead subsidize science directly
• "the life's work of paul krugman": a reasonably comprehensive overview of paul krugman's contributions to economic theory
• "the life's work of banerjee, duflo and kremer": a synoptic review of the work of my heroes
• "why tariffs are never the optimal industrial policy": gains from trade come along many more margins than you might think, and placing tariffs is the worst possible way to subsidize domestic industry
• "should effective altruists have kids?": yes
• "why does unemployment happen?": differentiating two stories of equilibrium unemployment, and using it to make predictions about the effects of artificial intelligence
• "the returns to education": we cannot, in fact, differentiate between signaling and human capital acquisition in our studies of the returns to education
• "the primacy of reallocation in economic growth": changes in sectoral productivity need not the sectors where technology is changing in a distorted economy
• "what should our counterfactuals be?": making causal claims about long-run effects makes us choose between the unrealistic and the unknowable; explores the economic impact of the railroad
• "you don't experiment enough": on apathy as a profound bias, illustrated with a paper on the london tube
• "the moral duty to marry an immigrant": on what we can do in our fallen world
• "do neighbors matter?": a review of the literature on peer effects in education and elsewhere
• "why do firms choose to be inefficient?": in which nicholas bloom's work first became a loadbearing part of how i think about the world
• "the problem with psychology is that it has no theory": why i am an economist

wikipedia articles i've written

• pete klenow
• chang-tai hsieh
• nicholas bloom
• dave donaldson
• arnaud costinot
• marc melitz
• chad jones
• peter hull
• jacob moscona
• matthew gentzkow
• costas arkolakis
• david weil
• andres rodriguez-clare
• rick hornbeck