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When corporate landlords like Blackstone enter a suburban neighborhood, rents fall and segregation declines because minority renters can now afford to live there.

Lol economics and political science

A very good report from the Queensland PC today on construction productivity. Good to see governments taking the international evidence on zoning reform seriously. qpc.qld.gov.au/docs/construct…

A+ bait-flaming

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VoxDev explainer on our (me and Timur Natkhov) paper on the origins of Russian serfdom is out!

Reflecting on 20 years of MNREGA, Jean Drèze & Rahul R discuss some of the programme’s achievements and failures. In 10 charts based on official statistics, they present an overview of major MNREGA trends - including employment generation and real wages ideasforindia.in/topics/poverty…

In a world where constrained governments still trade temporary rights for security they can't otherwise afford, Russian history shows how outsourcing defense to local elites can bake coercion into the economic fabric. Fascinating economic history research on serfdom ⤵️

Dean Karlan's spent his career obsessing over a development economics question: How can we actually test what works? For the past two years, his job was to make USAID more efficient — to get the maximum value out of each dollar. Then came DOGE. statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-f…

The 2025 tariffs are bad (ofc), but they're gonna generate some amazing econ papers.

I'm grateful to Jeremy Lewin for appearing on Ross Douthat's podcast to talk about how he sees the future of foreign aid, and I am glad to hear that he doesn't approve of the wholesale destruction of PEPFAR. But he makes a bunch of false claims I want to address:

again, I agree with this. but I am torn between being filled with hope and filled with fury, because this is not what is happening on the ground. the thing you are defending is not the thing that you have done.

Very excited to see my first (and I expect, not last) paper w Zi Yang Kang out in print. Thread👇on what this paper is about + why I hope lots of folks will use it.

Every time.

Acronyms in writing: they’re bad, actually, and if a stranger on the street would not know what it means or use it instead of words, you should almost always just use your words

Great paper! My rough read: demand and supply of cultural traits … at eq’m if policy restricts the supply, the private sector will come in to satisfy the demand. Obvious, but not the way we normally think of cultural traits (the supply and demand part). Same logic applies

Christopher Bishop These people are the same in every country x.com/senatorpennyql…

so seen