Viewing profile — jdikatz

Interesting. But this is pointing out a classic statistical result that cohort, calendar time, and age effects can’t be nonparametically separated. So we cant know, based on just o…

NBER version: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936

Should have been more precise. By "social spending" I mean sum of (tax revenue) + (donations to charities), since 1% decrease in revenue translates to >1% increase in donations to …

Typical estimates suggest a 1% increase in tax expenditure on charitable deductions (so government forgone revenue due to deductions) leads to a more than 1% increase in charitable…

I’m a fan of right to repair, but I think it’s odd to include privacy / data breech concerns as an advocacy point. Operationalizing right to repair typically means making software …

Even if peer review doesn't actually signal paper quality, it's still useful for science journalists to note whether a paper is in its final form or still a work in progress. Refer…

Cool idea —- also makes me realize that if GitHub can see commit history of all repos, then Microsoft has a lot of partly identified info on personnel movement across teams within …

Agreed. Currently devouring the Russian revolution series: concrete decisions on reforms are made based on elite opinion of conditions on the ground, and arguments to sway those op…

On (1), I’m speaking from an allocative efficiency standpoint (should have been more precise). For example, say I’m a company selling in NY, I can locate production in NJ or AZ, an…

First, tax competition creates its own inefficiencies —- companies locate production in low tax jurisdictions instead of optimal locations given local skills, factor prices, etc. S…

Some recent experimental evidence consistent with Facebook being addictive and showing that helping people quit makes them happier: http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/faceb…

Would be interesting to see whether insurers with higher market share become less likely to cover ransom payments compared with smaller players —- the idea being that payments fina…

My understanding is that most of his decline in net worth is due to problems with branding and security at his hotels / resorts -- i.e. problems with his non-publicly traded assets…

This is a reasonable concern. And indeed we only (currently) track holdings of publicly-traded securities, where for some senators a decent fraction of assets are in privately-held…

Hi Alexandra, this is a great suggestion! We're still figuring out what the right set of benchmarks for "market" returns are -- right now we use the S&P 500, but are also consideri…

The 2012 STOCK Act requires disclosure of all assets exceeding $1,000 in value -- so the disclosure information we collect includes private holdings. We only calculate financial re…

Yeah this will probably end up being one of our benchmarks -- it's commonly used in academic literature to measure abnormal returns.

We include all senators who were in office sometime between Jan 1, 2014-present. Senators are removed as they leave office (and no longer included when calculating the "all senate"…

Thanks! We are in the process of adding data on House members and members of the executive branch (who also have to disclose).

We use adjusted close data pulled from Yahoo Finance to calculate daily returns. Adjusted close prices include adjustments for all applicable splits and dividend distributions.

"Launching with a Parachute: The Gig Economy and New Business Formation." NBER WP update (gated): https://www.nber.org/papers/w27183