Category: Data Source
One measure of economics GOAT
Who is the greatest economist of all time? This paper provides one potential measure that, along with other considerations, can contribute to debates on who the greatest economist of all time is. We build a novel dataset on the percentage of history of economic thought textbooks dedicated to top economists, using 43 distinct textbooks (1st editions, when available) published between 1901 and 2023. As a percentage of total book pages, Adam Smith has the highest share at 6.69%, beating out Ricardo (5.22%), Mill (3.83%), and Marx (4.36%). Just over 32% of all textbooks allocated most of their pages to Adam Smith, followed by Marx with 18.6%, Mill with 13.95%, and Ricardo with 11.3%. While interesting as a history of economic thought project, such an exercise isn’t merely amusing pedantry; it can provide insight into the types of contributions, research questions, and methodologies that have had the most enduring impact in economics. It may also inform future authors of history of economic textbooks.
That is from a new paper by Gabriel Benzecry and Daniel J. Smith. There is of course also my generative book on this topic at econgoat.ai.
“Tough on crime” is good for young men
Using data from hundreds of closely contested partisan elections from 2010 to 2019 and a vote share regression discontinuity design, we find that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates among young men ages 20 to 29 by 6.6%. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths, including a large reduction in firearm homicide among Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides and accidents primarily among White men. Mechanism analyses indicate that increased prison-based incapactation explains about one third of the effect among Black men and none of the effect among White men. Instead, the primary channel appears to be substantial increases in criminal conviction rates across racial groups and crime types, which then reduce firearm access through legal restrictions on gun ownership for the convicted.
That is from a new paper by Panka Bencsik and Tyler Giles. Via M.
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tariffs
We study the macroeconomic effects of tariff policy using U.S. historical data from 1840–2024. We construct a narrative series of plausibly exogenous tariff changes – based on major legislative actions, multilateral negotiations, and temporary surcharges – and use it as an instrument to identify a structural tariff shock. Tariff increases are contractionary: imports fall sharply, exports decline with a lag, and output and manufacturing activity drop persistently. The shock transmits through both supply and demand channels. Prices rise in the full sample but fall post-World War II, a pattern consistent with changes in the monetary policy response and with stronger international retaliation and reciprocity in the modern trade regime.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
GPT as a Measurement Tool
We present the GABRIEL software package, which uses GPT to quantify attributes in qualitative data (e.g. how “pro innovation” a speech is). GPT is evaluated on classification and attribute rating performance against 1000+ human annotated tasks across a range of topics and data. We find that GPT as a measurement tool is accurate across domains and generally indistinguishable from human evaluators. Our evidence indicates that labeling results do not depend on the exact prompting strategy used, and that GPT is not relying on training data contamination or inferring attributes from other attributes. We showcase the possibilities of GABRIEL by quantifying novel and granular trends in Congressional remarks, social media toxicity, and county-level school curricula. We then apply GABRIEL to study the history of tech adoption, using it to assemble a novel dataset of 37,000 technologies. Our analysis documents a tenfold decline of time lags from invention to adoption over the industrial age, from ~50 years to ~5 years today. We quantify the increasing dominance of companies and the U.S. in innovation, alongside characteristics that explain whether a technology will be adopted slowly or speedily.
That is from a new NBER working paper by .
Brazil facts of the day
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.
Here is more from The Economist. By the way, Brazil cannot change its pension system without amending the constitution.
India AI Data MCP
The Government of India’s Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation has created an impressive Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect AI’s to Indian datasets. An AI connected to data via an MCP essentially knows the entire codebook and can make use of the data like an expert. Once connected one can query the data in natural language and quickly create graphs and statistical analysis. I connected Claude to the MCP and created an elegant dashboard with data from India’s Annual Survey of Industries. Check it out.
“You see tech and AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics”
How many times have I heard versions of that claim? Erik Brynjolfsson picks up the telephone in the FT:
While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.
My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.
It is fine to suggest caution in interpreting such statistics, but they hardly push the other way.
Minimum wage hikes and robots
This paper studies how minimum wage policy affects firms’ adoption of automation technologies. Using both state-level measures of robot exposure and novel plant-level data on industrial robot imports linked to U.S. Census microdata from 1992-2021, we show that increases in minimum wages raise the likelihood of robot adoption in manufacturing. Our preferred identification exploits discontinuities at state borders, comparing otherwise similar firms exposed to different wage floors. Across specifications, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increases robot adoption by roughly 8 percent relative to the mean.
That is from Erik Brynjolfsson, et.al., including Andrew Wang. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
By the way, a photo from our textbook Modern Principles of Economics:
The cocaine problem seems to be getting worse again
Colombian coca cultivation fell dramatically between 2000 and 2015, a period that saw intense U.S.-backed eradication and interdiction efforts. That progress reversed in 2015, when peace talks and legal rulings in Colombia opened enforcement gaps. Coca plantation has since increased to record levels, which coincided with a sharp rise in cocaine-related overdose deaths in the U.S. We estimate how much of that rise can be causally attributed to Colombia’s new coca boom. Leveraging the unforeseen coca supply shock and cross-county differences in pre-shock cocaine exposure, we find that the surge in supply caused an immediate rise in overdose mortality in the U.S. Our analysis estimates on the order of 1,000–1,500 additional U.S. deaths per year in the late 2010s can be attributed to Colombia’s cocaine boom. Implicit annual loss in American statistical life values about $48,000 per hectare of cultivation in Colombia. If left untamed, the current level of coca cultivation (over 230,000 ha in 2022) may impose on the order of $10 billion per year in costs via overdose fatalities.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Xinming Du, Benjamin Hansen, Shan Zhang, and Eric Zou.
Changes in the Gender Wage Gap for Business Professionals
In the United States, much of the gap in earnings between men and women is due to the persistent gap for high wage earners. This paper explores changes in the gender wage gap for MBAs graduating from a large public university over 30 years. We document large gender wage gaps on average, which grow in the course of men’s and women’s careers. Comparing graduates at identical career stages across time periods to address composition concerns, we show that the raw gender wage gap has shrunk by 33 to 50 percent over the last two decades. Additionally, the temporal pattern of the gap has fundamentally shifted: while gaps only emerged over time in earlier decades, significant gaps now emerge immediately. Convergence in labor supply factors, particularly hours worked, explains much of the narrowing gap, alongside shifts in industry composition. However, unexplained wage gaps persist for recent graduates from the very start of their careers, suggesting different underlying mechanisms across cohorts. These findings highlight both progress in gender wage equity among business professionals and concerning patterns that emerge earlier in careers than in previous decades.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
Past Automation and Future A.I.: How Weak Links Tame the Growth Explosion
From Charles I. Jones and Christopher Tonetti:
How muchof past economic growth is due to automation, and what does this imply about the effects of A.I. and automation in the coming decades? We perform growth accounting using a task-based model for key sectors in the U.S. economy. Historically, TFP growth is largely due to improvements in capital productivity. The annual growth rate of capital productivity is at least 5pp larger than the sum of labor and factor-neutral productivity growth. The main benefit of automation is that we use rapidly-improving machines instead of slowly-improving humans on anincreasing set of tasks. Looking to the future, we develop an endogenous growth model in which the production of both goods and ideas is endogenously automated. We calibrate this model based on our historical evidence. Two key findings emerge. First, automation leads economic growth to accelerate over the next 75 years. Second, the acceleration is remarkably slow. By 2040, output is only 4% higher than it would have been without the growth acceleration, and by 2060 the gain is still only 19%. A key reason for the slow acceleration is the prominence of “weak links” (an elasticity of substitution among tasks less than one). Even when most tasks are automated by rapidly improving capital, output is constrained by the tasks performed by slowly-improving labor.
And an important sentence from the paper itself:
…, the key gain from automation is that it allows production of a task to shift away from slowly-improving human labor to rapidly-improving machines.
The authors stress that those are preliminary results, and the numbers are likely to change. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kurtis Hingl, who is also my research assistant.
Immigration and health for elderly Americans
We measure the impact of increased immigration on mortality among elderly Americans, who rely on the immigrant-intensive health and long-term care sectors. Using a shift-share approach we find a strong impact of immigration on the size of the immigrant care workforce: admitting 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 142 new foreign healthcare workers, without evidence of crowd out of native health care workers. We also find striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The politics of using AI
Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se.
That is from a new paper by Nicholas Bloom and Christos Makridis.
For a long time I have been predicting the return of phrenology
Yup:
Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is central for labor-market success, yet personality remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in AI and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, job matching, compensation, job transitions, and career advancement. The Photo Big 5 provides predictive power comparable to race, attractiveness, and educational background, and is only weakly correlated with cognitive measures such as test scores. We show that individuals systematically sort into occupations where their personality traits are valued and earn higher wages when traits align with occupational demands. While the scalability of the Photo Big 5 enables new academic insights into the role of personality in labor markets, its growing use in industry screening raises important ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Can government coerce women into having more babies?
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future. By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.