🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Tariffs on Mexico have been delayed. It’s nice to see that avocado prices at my local ALDI USA have also dropped again, reversing yesterday’s increase. Screenshot taken on Feb 3, 2025.

NEW in Econometrica: "The Margins of Trade" By Ana Cecília Fieler and Jonathan Eaton: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3982/EC…

An excellent choice. Good luck, Kim Ruhl, and thank you for your service.

We often talk about industrial policy as a means of helping “left behind workers,” but does that really make sense as a policy approach, and when does it work in practice? I wrote up this piece to synthesize what we’ve learned from recent work, including my own.

Becker and Heckman in 2012 on the case for government funding of basic research

Looking for a predoctoral opportunity for next year? Join Dani Rodrik and me at the Reimagining the Economy Project Harvard Kennedy School hks.harvard.edu/centers/wiener…

What would be the impact of Trump's announced 25% tariff on all steel and aluminium imports? Lydia Cox's (coxlydia.com) job-market paper provides good guidance. Latest version is here (coxlydia.com/papers/cox_ste…). Her results are summarized in my 2021 thread below.

Excited about this new paper with Sam Earnest, Dmitri Koustas, and Constantine Yannelis. We study the recent forgiveness of 7% (!) of student loan debt in the US 1/13

Congrats Toshi!

Great paper jointly estimating wage and amenity differences between multinational enterprises and domestic firms. Insightful analysis on how MNEs stack up against local companies in Saudi Arabia.

Good time to watch Friedman's pencil story again. making pencils potentially involves lots of bilateral trade deficits all across the world. youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtp…

Even Americans don’t want Trump’s barmy tariffs, writes Douglas Irwin economist.com/by-invitation/…

The calculation of the new 'reciprocal tariffs' amplifies policy uncertainty, as bilateral trade deficits are fluid: time.com/7274531/trump-…

In June 1930, the Treasury Secretary said the Smoot-Hawley tariff would aid business .... "fears and criticisms have been greatly exaggerated."

The official US Senate webpage says the Smoot-Hawley tariff ranks "among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history," adding: "As the economists predicted, the high tariff proved to be a disaster." senate.gov/artandhistory/…

If Powell is fired and courts uphold the firing, it would imply any successor could also be terminated if the president disagreed with his monetary policy. In that world, it matters less if the individual is "hawkish" or "dovish': POTUS effectively sets policy.

Looking forward to this workshop at Duke on disaggregating national accounts.

We have a late predoctoral fellowship opening in the Reimagining the Economy Project Harvard Kennedy School. Join Dani Rodrik and me to work on place-based and industrial policy next year. hks.harvard.edu/centers/wiener…

New at JIE: "The impact of NAFTA on prices and competition: Evidence from Mexican manufacturing plants", by Felipe Brugués, Ayumu Ken Kikkawa, Yuan Mei (Yuan MEI), Pablo Robles doi.org/10.1016/j.jint…

📣 Fresh "Spatial Economics for Granular Settings" at jdingel.com w/ new results: - Analytical results about overfitting and idiosyncrasies in special cases - SVD approximation is better than we realized - Code for main-text exhibits at github.com/jdingel/Dingel…