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The Shingles Vaccine Reduces Dementia

Alex Tabarrok·Marginal Revolution·4d ago

In 2023 in Can the Shingles Vaccine Prevent Dementia? I wrote: A new paper provides good evidence that the shingles vaccine can prevent dementia, which strongly suggests that some forms of dementia are caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the virus that on initial infection causes chickenpox. We now have three more studies–from America, Australia and Canada–that find similar results using large numbers and credible research designs. Thus, I think we can up this to the Shingles vaccine red...

AI-Native Firms

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·4d ago

Very important work from Hyunjin Kim and Rembrand Koning. Insead and HBS respectively: We study how firms built around AI capabilities-“AI-native” firms-are organized. Drawing on Y Combinator batches W20-F24 and U.S. venture-backed startups whose first financing closed between 2020 and 2024, we classify each firm’s AI-native status and link it to workforce microdata on team size, function, seniority, and hierarchy. Relative to non-AI startups in the same industry-cohort, AI-native firms are 25% ...

A Cohort Perspective on Latin America’s Fertility Transition

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·5d ago

Latin America’s momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with other demographic and socioeconomic processes. Across cohorts within subnational regions, children ever born fell one-for-one with mortality d...

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UK Fuel Price Intelligence – Market analytics from reporting stations

theazureguy·1mo ago171pts

Live UK fuel price averages, motorway premium, supermarket discount and brand comparisons from the Fuel Finder scheme.

The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44

delichon·14d ago21pts

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Montana’s SB535 and a Potential Biotech Renaissance in America

Alex Tabarrok·Marginal Revolution·6d ago

In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs, the FDA approved 50. China’s share of new commercial clinical trials jumped from 8% globally in 2013 to 30% in 2024, just behind the US at 35%. Last year, China-based Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals overtook AstraZeneca as the top clinical trial sponsor in the world. What’s remarkable is how China is winning: deregulation and capitalism. It’s faster and easier to set up a clinical trial in China than in the United States. China is even experimenting w...

Who Leads? Relative Age Effects on Social Capital

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·7d ago

A fascinating paper and result: This paper studies the causal effect of being the oldest within a school cohort on social capital. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and data from Facebook, we find that boys who are older than their classmates make 11% more friends in high school. This social advantage is associated with leadership roles, with relatively older boys 42% more likely to become class president than their relatively younger peers. Men who were relatively older during child...

What do the AIs think of us?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·12d ago

Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale. Here is more material of interest. And this: Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model. The post What do the AIs think of us? appeare...

How well does current AI find errors in economics papers?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·13d ago

Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamina...

New paper on the iPhone and fertility

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·14d ago

The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from vari...

How High-Skill Immigration Restrictions Eroded Regional Productivity: Evidence from the 2017 BAHA Executive Order

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·15d ago

This paper estimates the regional economic impact of high-skill immigration restrictions by analyzing the 2017 “Buy American, Hire American” (BAHA) policy as a quasi-experimental policy shock. By significantly tightening H-1B visa adjudication, BAHA caused new employment petition denial rates to double from 7% to 17%, while STEM-specific rejections tripled to 31%. Using a difference-indifferences framework, this study finds that states highly dependent on H-1B talent experienced a statistically ...

AI in gdp

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·25d ago

Quality-adjusted AI production in the United States grew at over 2,000 percent per year in 2024 and 2025, driven by three compounding forces: expanding data-center capacity, hardware efficiency gains, and—the largest of the three—algorithmic progress. Treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 2,600 percent per year in quality-adjusted real terms. National economic statistics accoun...

A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data

Alex Tabarrok·Marginal Revolution·27d ago

My latest paper, A Test of the Coase Conjecture Using Prices of Electronic Books, with the excellent Tim Groseclose, has just been published. The Coase Conjecture is another one of Coase’s little ideas — the original paper is six pages — that has spawned hundreds of follow-up papers and thousands of citations. The idea is simple. A monopolist of a durable good has a time-inconsistency problem. Set the monopoly price in period 1 and he will be tempted in period 2 to cut the price and mop up the c...

Robin (it’s happening)

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Scientific discovery is driven by the iterative process of observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis. Despite recent advancements in applying artificial intelligence to biology, no system has yet automated all these stages [1, 2, 3]. Here, we introduce Robin, the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology. By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents, Robin can genera...

Dwarkesh in the Datacenter

Alex Tabarrok·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Dwarkesh tours one of Jane Street’s datacenters. It’s extraordinary how much compute goes into finance. (I once predicted that the finance AIs would be the first to become conscious, since they have the most compute.) More generally, however, this is a peek inside the remarkable economics, technology and physics of a datacenter. Did you know the electrical signal in a copper wire can travel faster than light in fiber…and that matters! Amazing. The post Dwarkesh in the Datacenter appeared first o...

Revealing Life Preferences Through LLMs

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Here is some Weberian verstehen (or is it?), but from unexpected quarters: Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a prodigious corpus of human writing and may reveal human preferences over characteristics of life courses, such as income, longevity, and working conditions. We present OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and a broadly representative sample of Americans with pairs of life stories and ask them to choose the life they would prefer for themselves. A person’s choice is better predicted by the LLM’s c...

Meta-papers in science (from my email)

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

From Brennan Plaetzer: Hi Tyler, Your post yesterday argued AI will replace papers with meta-papers that synthesize, re-run, and extend prior work. I built one in oncology last month, before reading your post. I ran my friend Omar Abdel-Wahab’s (MSK) last ten papers through an AI synthesis layer. This came out on top: an integrated, falsifiable hypothesis bridging two of his 2025 papers, one in Cancer Cell on a refractory MEK1 mutation, one in Cell on splicing-derived neoantigens. It comes with ...

The interstate trade effects of autonomous trucks

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Recent advances in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technologies promise substantial cost savings for goods shipped by truck. In this study, we quantify the impacts of these transport cost reductions on the US interstate trade using a structural gravity model of domestic trade. Based on projected cost savings from the widespread adoption of self-driving technologies, we estimate significant increases in total interstate trade value. State-level impacts vary from 40.3% of GDP in Mississippi...

Using agents to build economic datasets

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Constructing datasets from primary sources is one of the costliest tasks in empirical economics. We propose Deep Research on a Loop (DRIL), a methodology that uses AI agents to assemble datasets from publicly available sources. DRIL applies a fixed research instrument across a mapped unit space (e.g., countries by years), with a two-stage architecture separating design from implementation. The instrument specifies variables and coding rules, an evidence policy governs sources and citations, and ...

Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don’t properly understand?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Off the top of my head: • Lightning (how does it happen?) • Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?) • Glass (thermodynamics of formation) • Turbulence (when does it start?) • Morphogenesis (how does a creature know what should go where?) • Rain (it seems to start faster than models would predict) • Ice (dynamics of slipperiness) • Static electricity (which material will donate electrons?) • General anaesthetic. (And the mechanism of a lot of drugs, e.g. paracetamol.) That is from Patrick Collison. It...

Will AI kill the research paper?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Imagine taking a macroeconomics paper and adding a little button at the end “Press this button to update this paper with the latest macro data.” All of a sudden you have multiple papers rather than one, and no single canonical version. It is the latter versions, not created directly by the authors, that people will look at. Imagine adding another button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other different yet still plausible specific...

USA sectoral shift fact of the day

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs. Here is the source (Charlie Bilello) and a graph. In relative terms, is this good or bad for men? The post USA sectoral shift fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Self-fulfilling misalignment?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

From Anthropic: We started by investigating why Claude chose to blackmail. We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation. And here is Alex Turner on the topic of self-fulfilling misalignment. I raised this possibility some while ago in a Free Press column, and mainly was met with hostility. The social return to a positive world view, and avoiding negative emotional contagion, never has been higher. The post Self-fulf...

Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso

Noi Mahoney·FreightWaves·1mo ago

Borderlands Mexico is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week in Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso; Hutchison Ports adds electric cranes at Port of Manzanillo; and Burlington breaks ground on distribution center near Phoenix. Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso A Dallas-based developer has broken ground on a major cross-border industrial project in ...

Less-than-truckload rates have sharp response to broader market turn

Zach Strickland, FW Market Expert & Market Analyst·FreightWaves·1mo ago

Chart of the Week: LTL Monthly Cost per Hundredweight, Van Contract Rate Per Mile Initial Report – USA SONAR: LTL.USA, VCRPM1.USA After a fairly sluggish start to the year, less-than-truckload (LTL) rates are now showing the highest levels of upward pressure since the exit of Yellow in the summer of 2023. The LTL monthly cost per hundredweight index measures pricing change momentum in the LTL market. This index tracks directional changes in the LTL pricing environment based on transactional data...

Do Market Reforms Cause Growth?

Tyler Cowen·Marginal Revolution·1mo ago

Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and pe...

Port Houston lands $48M federal grant for Bayport expansion 

Noi Mahoney·FreightWaves·1mo ago

Port Houston has secured a $48 million federal grant to expand and modernize its Bayport Container Terminal, a move aimed at boosting capacity, easing truck congestion and strengthening supply chain resilience along the Gulf Coast. The funding, awarded through the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program, will support construction of a new container yard and a new exit gate at Bayport. Port Houston will also contribute roughly $56 million in matching funds for the p...

Traffix expects double-digit rate increases to hold through 2026

John Paul Hampstead·FreightWaves·1mo ago

The North American freight market has officially turned the corner. After more than three years of subdued rates following the COVID-era boom, carriers have exited the market in droves, regulatory headwinds have further crimped capacity, and freight volumes are once again climbing. The result, according to Traffix’s newly released Q2 2026 Market Update, is a rapidly tightening environment where spot and contract rates are surging and shippers are being forced to rethink budgets that were built f...

SONAR Sitrep: US industrials, freight unexpected winners in Iran war

Caleb Revill·FreightWaves·1mo ago

Contrary to consensus expectations, the ongoing conflict in Iran isn’t just a geopolitical risk – it is actively widening the U.S. industrial cost advantage. While global competitors in Europe and Asia are grappling with surging gas prices and heavy war-risk premiums, the United States is emerging as a structural winner in heavy manufacturing. The catalyst? The unique mechanics of “associated gas” – natural gas produced as a byproduct of oil drilling. As elevated global crude oil (WTI) prices in...

Make it make sense: Low demand, rising rates on the trans-Pacific

Stuart Chirls·FreightWaves·1mo ago

The stalemate in the Iran war has been anything but for ocean container spot rates on the trans-Pacific. While there has been little diplomatic progress between Washington and Tehran toward ending the conflict, the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by United States forces has been fueling (pun intended) higher ocean prices during a traditional lull prior to the start of the peak shipping season. Asia-U.S. West Coast spot rates increased 1% to $2,675 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU), a...

The Robots Make the Predictions

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·1mo ago

Polymarket bots, OBDC II tenders, Rivian CEO pay, Claude capital allocation, World Liberty and Boardy.

Traders Do Something About the Weather

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

Also hedge-fund reneging, Polymarket vs. Kalshi and Onion Futures Act protests.

No, America is not in a "stealth manufacturing boom"

Noah Smith·Noahpinion·2mo ago

Photo by John Morgan via Wikimedia CommonsGreg Ip of the WSJ is one of my favorite economics writers, and you should always read what he writes. But in a recent post about manufacturing, I think he gets the main narrative wrong. Greg writes that America is in the middle of a “manufacturing revival”, which his headline writer calls a “stealth manufacturing boom”:You won’t hear this from either critics or fans of President Trump’s tariffs, but there’s a manufacturing revival going on…Critics have ...

AIbirds

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

NewBird AI, an Avis Budget squeeze, sports factor models and recursive online courses.

BOOM: Ticketmaster GUILTY of Monopolization

Matt Stoller·BIG·2mo ago

I was going to write about a brewing and important revolt in Hollywood against the Paramount deal, but just now, a jury in New York City ruled on state and Federal charges that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist. There were multiple counts involving different markets, including amphitheaters and concert ticketing, as well as state claims. The jury found the company liable on all of them. Ticketmaster’s counsel, Dan Wall, told our correspondent Gigi Liman the company is “disappoint...

What if a few AI companies end up with all the money and power?

Noah Smith·Noahpinion·2mo ago

Last year, a lot of people (including me) were wondering if the AI industry was in a bubble. These days it’s looking a lot less likely. The technology has found its killer app — agentic coding, which has upended the software industry as we know it. For power users, AI is no longer just a chatbot — you can tell it to go make you an app, or run some data analysis, and it’ll just do it for you and come back with the results. This is making a LOT of money. As I predicted, Anthropic has been quicker ...

Prediction Market Making Is Hard

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

Liquidity provision, event resolution, the Mythos trade, fintech concierges and AI Zuck.

Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market

Matt Stoller·BIG·2mo ago

Dan Geller is a Staff Attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel and can be reached at dan@antimonopoly.us.In 2023, the city of Evanston, Illinois raised its ambulance fee from $1500 to $2000, with a $15 mileage charge tacked on. Like many municipalities, city officials and taxpayers have gotten used to ever-increasing prices for basic services, all bucketed under the “cost of living” crisis we’re dealing with. In fact, yesterday the Michigan University consumer sentiment indicator hit the worst reading i...

Robot Retail Investors

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

Automatic dip-buying, a Satoshi candidate, dispersion and counting widgets.

Prediction Market Structured Notes

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

Also BDC redemptions, private credit bid/ask, GLP-1 marketing and Jamie Dimon Media.

Are Algae Securities Fraud?

Matt Levine·Matt Levine·2mo ago

Carbon onsets, mini-millionaire hedge funds and float-adjusted indexes.

a market-making project you can do today

Kris Abdelmessih·Moontower·2mo ago

Friends,I tweeted something the other day that I want to expand on because it’s one of those ideas that’s simple on the surface but points to an exercise that would teach viscerally market-making. Polymarket has a contract “Will crude oil settle above $90?” It was priced around 73 cents. That’s an implied probability. We also know that the value of a tight call spread around the $90 strike represents a tradeable probability.See a deeper understanding of vertical spreadsIf you price a 89.5/90.5 ...

a cleaner way to compute seasonal vol

Kris Abdelmessih·Moontower·3mo ago

Friends,Vivek emailed me a simple question after reading yesterday’s does revenue seasonality translate to vol seasonality? post: Why not just compute volatility from the daily returns within each calendar month instead of using a trailing 20-day window?Um, well, eh. I don’t know. I guess just had a blind spot. I think of rolling realized vol instinctively. But for a seasonality study, it has a problem I already flagged in the post: a big earnings move in August gets recounted ~20 times as the w...

does revenue seasonality translate to vol seasonality?

Kris Abdelmessih·Moontower·3mo ago

Friends,Last month H&R Block (NYSE: HRB) sold off hard on AI fears. Implied volatility soared to a new 1-year high. I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t prepping materials for the kids’ Investment Beginnings Class. In the class, we learn how growth expectations as embodied by P/E multiples combined with what earnings materialize to generate a return that is some mix of reality and how those expectations are revised as investors “see the flop”. HRB is a low P/E, high earnings yield company whose g...

BOOM: Senate Votes to Block Private Equity from Buying Homes

Matt Stoller·BIG·3mo ago

Until the Iran war, the main political pressure on President Donald Trump was high prices, particularly on housing and food. So earlier this year, he announced an executive order on a popular policy - banning Wall Street investors from controlling housing. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” he said, “and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.” I didn’t believe Trump was serious, because he’s generally talked a big game ...

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin on What's Actually Happening in the Economy

kyla scanlon·Kyla's Newsletter·5mo ago

I sat down with President Mary C. Daly, President and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, and President Tom Barkin, President and CEO of the Richmond Federal Reserve to talk about the current state of the US economy as we go into 2026. We look back to the past, particularly the 1970s and the 1990s, to understand what those periods can teach us abo… Read more

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee on What the Job Market Is Really Telling Us

kyla scanlon·Kyla's Newsletter·8mo ago

It’s never been a more important time to understand the labor market. The Fed is entering a rate cutting cycle, the government shut down, and private players are developing their own numbers to try and close the gap. I sat down with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee to talk about what the Chicago Fed’s new real-time labor market indicators are telli… Read more

Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack on the Risks Markets Are Missing Right Now

kyla scanlon·Kyla's Newsletter·9mo ago

It’s a muddled macro moment: inflation is reheating, labor market data is sending mixed signals, and the debate over Fed independence is getting louder. With potential rate cuts on the table, I sat down with Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack to talk about why independence matters, what she’s seeing in the data that keeps her leaning modestly restric… Read more

Bond risk premiums -- certainty found and lost again

John H. Cochrane·Grumpy Economist·30mo ago

This is a second post from a set of comments I gave at the NBER Asset Pricing conference in early November at Stanford. Conference agenda here. My full slides here. First post here, on new-Keynesian modelsI commented on "Downward Nominal Rigidities and Bond Premia" by François Gourio and Phuong Ngo. The paper was about bond premiums. Commenting made me realize that I thought I understood the issue, and now I realize I don't at all. Understanding term premiums still seems a fruitful area of resea...

Time for a new (?) theory of regulation

John H. Cochrane·Grumpy Economist·30mo ago

What's the basic story of economic regulation? Econ 101 courses repeat the benevolent dictator theory of regulation: There is a "market failure," natural monopoly, externality, or asymmetric information. Benevolent regulators craft optimal restrictions to restore market order. In political life "consumer protection" is often cited, though it doesn't fit that economic structure. Then "Chicago school" scholars such as George Stigler looked at how regulations actually operated. They found "regulato...