Let the sabbatical begin! Thank you to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social economics for hosting me for the year (and thanks for the nice office view!)

New @voxeu.org column (w/ Fize & Jaravel) on "design-based fiscal stimulus": the design of stimulus transfers (e.g. using prepaid cards with an expiry date) can strongly affect how much they increase demand. Based on our forthcoming paper @aeajournals.bsky.social 👉 cepr.org/voxeu/column...

35% of our master graduates in the last two years went to intl' orgs (incl WTO, ILO, UN), and several (11%) to gov (mostly central banks). About 40% went to PhD or predoc. And it's a lovely place.

Colleagues: if you have students that want to work in econ policy jobs in intl' organizations, please recommend them to apply to our master program at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. We have a stellar placement record, and would like to grow the master.
👉 www.graduateinstitute.ch/academic-dep...

Finally, we compare our estimated changes with data on relative urbanization based on city sizes (like much else, these measures are very rough... all this is >1000y ago). We were surprised that they lined up quite closely!

Estimating the model, we find large declines in real consumption in the Roman-Byzantine heartlands in the eastern Mediterranean, and increases in the Frankish lands. We see the "End of Antiquity" in our estimates!

We build on work by the late Jonathan Eaton (and Kortum and Dekle) and propose a model where real per capita consumption can be decomposed into technology, trade openness, and trade deficit. Under some assumptions we can identify each term from the coin data.

The patterns of coin flows change sharply around the time of the Arab conquests (yep, border effects!) in line with a trade disruption. Pirenne's famous thesis (Arab conquests => End of Antiquity) comes to mind! But could trade have been really that important?

We find that coin flows exhibit very similar properties as modern-day trade flows (gravity); not too surpising given that coins were the main medium of exchange for long-distance trade.

Thomas Chaney and I updated our working paper on "Trade and the End of Antiquity" (which recently got some airtime on twitter). A short re-cap: 1/n

he ain't done yet

al-Maqdisī (945-991), BuzzFeed writer par excellence:

1/4 New micro-macro paper on MPCs, with Xavier Jaravel and @efize.bsky.social. We run an RCT to evaluate the consumption response to stimulus transfers, incl. a cash-like transfer and some more creative designs. It was expensive, but we think it was worth it ;) jmboehm.github.io/Helicopter.pdf