nicholas decker

economics phd student at george mason university

I am looking for RA or pre-doc positions for the upcoming year.

datasets

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.

reading list

classic economics papers - foundational papers organized by topic, author, year, and journal

working papers

"primogeniture and immigration": version 0.5

using data on inheritance rules in different regions of germany, i show that there was no discernible selection of immigrants. this sharply challenges narratives of the industrial revolution which credit different family structures a large role in sectoral transformation and growth. this paper is on hiatus, as i believe it has nowhere to go

paper threads

in-depth twitter threads on over 140 different papers

my best 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