Let me close by noting that one of the best job benefits is heavily subsidized faculty housing for new professors, located in the aforementioned valley of Mānoa (pictured below).

It is walking distance from the econ department.

5/5

Re: the PF position, the ideal applicant would be interested contributing to our budding research partnership with the HI Department of Taxation, helping them to use their admin data for conducting policy-relevant research.

The ideal applicant also enjoys plumeria trees.

4/5

We can hire at either the assistant or associate level for both positions, and welcome applications from everyone: new PhDs, folks with existing faculty positions, and/or those with policy experience outside academia.

Did I mention how many rainbows you'll see working here?

3/5

Want to live and work in this beautiful mountain valley in Hawaiʻi? #econsky

The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization (UHERO) is hiring for 2 TT positions:
-> Public Finance/Tax: aeaweb.org/joe/listing....
-> Macro/tourism/forecasting: aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

More below

1/5

DIY is best. Pick your fav reasoning model, upload PDF, tell it you want a summary that you can give to a text to speech model. Copy & paste into the ElevenLabs phone app to get amazing text to speech for free.

I use Gemini flash thinking, with a detailed prompt. Free here:
aistudio.google.com

The same error as Claude

But Deepseek-r1 makes an error

Here's o1-mini

Here's Gemini's newest "thinking" model, with a weird formatting issue, but still correct

Here's o1, with the right answer. o1-pro gets it also, naturally.

Here's an example of the kind of task I mean. This is for an actual project, and is certainly simple enough to do, but a tad tedious. It sure would be nice to outsource it to a virtual RA, but only if I can trust the results!

My tests of Deepseek so far indicate consistently weaker performance than o1-pro & also regular o1 on basic applied theory tasks in econ. Often o1-mini also outperforms it. More interestingly, Gemini's latest "thinking" model outperforms Deepseek on my tasks more often than not.

A related benefit: it turns out the climate in Mānoa is particularly well-suited to the production of rainbows. Within a year of moving here (maybe less), I saw more rainbows than I had in my entire life previously.

3/3

One of the best job benefits is heavily subsidized faculty housing for new professors, located in the aforementioned valley of Mānoa.

The department is walking distance from faculty housing. Every day, I walk past numerous plumeria trees.

2/3

Repost from twitter, w/ new pics...

Want to live and work in this beautiful mountain valley in Hawaiʻi?

UH Mānoa Econ is hiring a TT AP in the Economics of Inequality.

aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

Our definition of inequality is very broad. If you do anything inequality-related, please apply.

1/3

If the net income limit were removed the state's only cost would be 50% of the extra SNAP admin costs that result. For Hawaii, this is a very cheap way to get $ to needy families.
As such, we reached out to state officials about the matter.

The result:

5/6

My estimates suggest that removing the net income limit could result in an additional 13-14,000 HI households receiving SNAP benefits each month, delivering $40-45M in federally-funded benefits annually.

The effects may well be larger if there are positive take-up effects.

4/6

Under current HI rules, a household whose net income goes even $1 over the federal poverty line loses all their SNAP benefits. For a family of 4, this amounts to $900/month (>$10K/year). These steep "benefit cliffs" raise concerns about both fairness and disincentive effects.

3/6