Jörg Peters | Lightnews

Jörg Ankel-Peters

@jrgptrs.bsky.social

2.1K followers 310 following 250 posts

development & environmental economist. energy access, climate policy, replication & meta-science. RWI & I4R. #FirstGen bit.ly/40e2aQj

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Environmental science 29%

Energy 16%

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Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · Oct 11

Thought about scientific consensus recently? We have a new DP @i4replication.bsky.social that probes into the famous replication debate between Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson (AJR) and Albouy - and how experts assess this debate. We find that they disagree. 1/8 www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

Reposted by Jörg Peters

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 7h

Important new paper on normative bias in research. In a many-analyst design estimates produced by pro- vs anti-immigration teams systematically differ, driven by specification choices. It’s exploratory analysis expanding on a PNAS paper, but findings seem plausible. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 8h

Also for the reasons mentioned in that quoted thread you think, like, people being "randomy abused for posting regular research results"? Is that playing out in the econ community, too? (I'm in my curious-mode, not my contrarian mode :-))

Reposted by Jörg Peters

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 1d

As long as we ponder limits from both sides of the normative rubicon, all is good.

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 1d

Older working-age individuals are more likely to experience chronic illness, to retire early, or to be discouraged if. In this context, the relatively high share of Helfertätigkeiten (low-skilled jobs) among migrants is particularly relevant. This raises a few legitimate follow-up questions.

Reposted by Jörg Peters, Justin Sandefur, Valerie Mueller , and 1 more Jörg Peters, Justin Sandefur, Valerie Mueller, Alfredo R. Paloyo

Ryan Edwards @ryanbedwards.bsky.social · 1d

Two minor updates, friends:

- As of 1 January 2026, I'm an Associate Professor.

- As of today, the first paper I started writing on palm oil, about a decade ago, is in print in the Journal of International Economics.

Read, share, cite. Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Export agriculture and rural poverty: Evidence from Indonesian palm oil

This paper measures the impacts of Indonesia’s palm oil export expansion on district poverty and household expenditure from 2002 to 2015. Identificati…

www.sciencedirect.com

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 4d

..haha... well, I4R is agnostic about signs of effects and effect sizes. So far you only pre-specified your claim - as long as you don't change your hypothesis ex-post or p-hack your weight... there will be no I4R-fury.

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 9d

I agree with that of course. He would probably even make his case stronger by engaging with the credibility revolution (and its shortcomings).

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 9d

Interesting indeed. Of course there is and has always been good descriptive work in economics. Some economists are smart after all, and smart people know how to do description. But *the paradigm* is obsessed with causality, and hence 90% of papers are merely "causal", and it is how we train people.

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 10d

As far as the econ part of the social sciences is concerned, we need more papers that ignore the [largely underpowered] "credibility revolution" and rather think deeply about good description. I am therefore looking forward to reading it.

Reposted by Jörg Peters

Herman van de Werfhorst 🟥 @hermwerf.bsky.social · 10d

New paper by John Goldthorpe, in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, restating and developing his position on causality. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Description, Causal Explanation, and Policy Intervention in Sociology - KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

I seek to restate and to develop a position I have previously taken up on the relation between description and causal explanation in sociology, in part by reference to an ongoing controversy on this m...

link.springer.com

Reposted by Jörg Peters

Punk Rock History @punkrockhistory.bsky.social · 15d

23 years ago today, one of the greatest died

In memory of Joe Strummer 🖤

... gone but not forgotten...

📸 Anthony Saint James

#punk #punks #punkrock #punklegend #joestrummer #theclash #punkrockhistory #history #otd

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Right - but why are economists so obsessed with unobservables in OLS while they keep on ignoring them in applied IV work?

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Thanks - and indeed! From your (vast) experience, why do you think people keep ignoring it?

Reposted by Jörg Peters

David A. Jaeger (econ) @davidajaeger.bsky.social · 16d

Yeah, that’s been known for at least 30 years.

www.nber.org/papers/t0137

The Cure Can Be Worse than the Disease: A Cautionary Tale Regarding Instrumental Variables

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

www.nber.org

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Bottom line: IVs need a different default. Start from a pessimistic prior – i.e. assume exclusion is violated - and try to vigoriously falsifiy that claim. We call this the revised-prior falsificationist approach, and apply it to a seminal topographic IV paper, Dinkelman (2011). 6/6

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Weak IVs are the other structural issue. It’s well established—but widely ignored in practice—that inference is not credible when instruments are weak and exclusion is even subtly violated: under weakness, those violations can generate more bias than the original OLS confounding. 5/6

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Collider bias is well established in econometrics. Yet in practice, IV aficionados rarely acknowledge it — even when conditioning on variables that are likely colliders. 4/6

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

So, topography is everywhere in socio-economic causal webs – and thus exclusion is the exception, not the default. The usual fix is adding controls. But other IV aficionados instrument (i.e. explicitly suspect endogeneity in) many of those controls - so controlling for them risks collider bias 3/6

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

Topography as IV is our case in point. We comb through top 120 econ journals (2011–2023) and find 161 studies using topographic variation. Here’s what the literature collectively implies: a dense causal web in which topography touches far more than the isolated channel any single IV paper wants. 2/6

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 16d

We have a new DP @i4replication.bsky.social. It's on IVs - the credibility revolution’s workhorse in economics. To show how problematic they are, we look at what IV aficionados do & think. IV users can dismiss our assessment as too critical, but not theirs, right? 1/6 www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

Reposted by Jörg Peters

Reposted by Jörg Peters, Valerie Mueller

Institute for Replication @i4replication.bsky.social · 19d

📷New blog post: Where Papers Go Before (and After) rejection at a top field journal? This blog post explore this and more. One key finding is that desk- and referee-rejected manuscripts end up getting published at roughly the same rate elsewhere.

i4replication.org/where-papers...

Reposted by Brian A. Nosek, Brendan Nyhan, Jörg Peters , and 1 more Brian A. Nosek, Brendan Nyhan, Jörg Peters, Melanie C. Green

Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social · 20d

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨

We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait

The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

Reposted by Jörg Peters

VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · 22d

🆕 A reversing deforestation mechanism for climate and ecosystem restoration

Today on VoxDev, Juliano Assunção (Climate Policy Initiative) discusses a proposal to reduce deforestation, protect standing forests, and incentivise reforestation at scale: https://ow.ly/fY6J50XJtEh

A reversing deforestation mechanism for climate and ecosystem restoration

We need to reduce deforestation, protect standing forests, and incentivise reforestation at scale. The climate depends on it. Here is a proposal that can achieve all three.

ow.ly

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