My Best Work

What you might have missed by me, and what's worth reading

Hey everyone – I have been just terrifically busy with school these past couple weeks. Better work will come soon, but for now, I shall be unabashedly sentimental. About six months ago, I began blogging in earnest. It’s been quite fun, and I’ve written things I’m proud of. Many of you joined me later, and so missed some things which you might want to read. Here are my best.

The Returns to Education – It isn’t possible to infer what fraction of the private returns to education are from our experimental designs. This implies

Why Does Unemployment Happen? – I cover a lot of important material, and cover it fast. Highly recommend reading for a better understanding of the world.

What Should Our Counterfactuals Be? – What does it mean for something to cause another thing? We necessarily imply some different world where but for that thing, things would be different. I use the study of the railroad in American history to illustrate this.

Do Neighbors Matter? – How big is the effect of your peers? I review the evidence, and find that there are effects, but small.

Endogenous Growth and Human Intelligence – It is in part an intellectual history of endogenous growth models, and in part a discussion of human capital differences across countries.

Institutional Investors, Spillovers, and Optimal Investment into Innovation – As firms get larger, they internalize more of the public goods they create. I see if the proliferation of institutional investors has led to an increase in innovation, as marginally profitable projects get funded.

The Sharecropping Problem, and Optimal Innovation – How should we arrange property rights in order to induce innovation? When what has been done isn’t perfectly specifiable, the person best able to create innovations should receive the residual.

Why Do Firms Choose to be Inefficient? – Firms facing less competition not only exploit market power, but are also less productively efficient. This is a big deal for the developing world.

Things Aren’t What They Seem – If reporting is correlated with degree of harm, our understanding of a phenomenon is distorted.

Abraham Lincoln as Messiah – Self-recommending.

Must We Have These Institutions Forever? – On persistence over time, and what we can do about it.

The Medicare Price Caps are the Moral Equivalent of Genocide – Do you believe that investment responds to expected profit? Then apply it!

Scattered Thoughts on Slavery and the Byzantine Empire – The world really is a wonderful place, isn’t it? I give a discussion of slavery in the context of international trade, and make predictions for what will be remembered in the future.