Panel data is everywhere in data science—but many models assume independence when observations are actually correlated over time. Ignore this in simulations, and your confidence intervals will be wrong.

The 4 biggest challenges I’ve faced in data science - and how I’ve approached them:

1. Causality - experiment if you can
2. Messy data - prioritize stable infra
3. Small data - know the limits
4. Culture - show the value, get leadership to care

What did I miss? Wrong ranking?

"Bar is raised because gravity is lower" was a fun sentence to write

Our political economy of field experiments study has just been released by the @nberpubs.bsky.social!

Written with @gubri.bsky.social, who is brilliant and on the market this year!

Here are the first five sets of slides:

01 Introduction: psantanna.com/DiD/01_Intro...

02 Classical 2x2 setup: psantanna.com/DiD/02_two_b...

03 Clustering issues: psantanna.com/DiD/03_Clust...

04 Functional form: psantanna.com/DiD/04_Funct...

05 Covariates: psantanna.com/DiD/05_Covar...

New working paper out today with @epiellie.bsky.social called "Do LLMs Act as Repositories of Causal Knowledge?"

Can LLMs (ie ChatGPT) build for us the causal models we need to identify an effect? There are reasons to expect they could. But can they? Well, not really, no.

arxiv.org/html/2412.10...

How policymakers and the US population update their beliefs on the use of science and the trust they have in government following a field experiment that demonstrated the ineffectiveness of a policy intervention, from Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List https://www.nber.org/papers/w33239

Economics hasn’t fully internalized how difficult climate tipping points are to both predict and reverse. My JMP 🚨 estimates the costs of this unpredictability and irreversibility.

A thread! 🧵 (1/14)
#econjobmarket #econjmp #econtwitter #climate

This seems like a lot until you think about the likely return on this investment.

I was going to suggest East-West Germany comparison then remembered this great JEP piece on why caution is warranted www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=... @essobecker.bsky.social @lukasmergele.bsky.social

Soviets? Old Soviet Joke: We Pretend to Work,They Pretend to Pay Us.

I summarized this thread in a fuller, written form on my blog:

paulgp.github.io/2024/11/06/c...

(I also, as a sidenote, revamped my blog CSS to be able to do sidenotes and figures, which I'm pleased with)

Behavioral economics: people cannot add or subtract

Macroeconomics: *maybe* people cannot deal with the fact that the entire cross sectional distribution is a state variable

Historically, many people have believed that sources of power, like the vote, access to education, and the printing press, should be restricted to only the rich and powerful.

Today, some want you to believe that about data access.

Opening data access is less of a societal threat than closing it.

Ok, this needs a lot of tweaking and more work, but here's a minimal viable product for

An econometrics paper (Deep Neural Networks for Estimation and Inference)
1. paulgp.github.io/2024/11/06/r...

An economic theory paper (Targeting Interventions in Networks)
2. paulgp.github.io/2024/11/06/r...