Kind: Articles

The work on causal claims in economics has taken off and there is quite a lot of interest in the methodology used across many different fields. I keep on saying, technology will humble us all and there may well have to be a fundamental debate about the social contract and the organisation of society. I…

It is the start of a new year and I expect 2025, unfortunately, to bring even more ruptures or surprises than 2024 did. The acceleration is in full swing and I frankly do think that some constraints that need relieving are being relieved. Yet, I want to offer some reflections on the state of AI…

This is a repost of an older version of a blog post. This was originally posted in 2016. For my paper Social Insurance and Conflict : Evidence from India, I was using the SENNA Natural Language processing toolkit to automatically generate a conflict dataset at the district level, based on raw newspaper clippings collected from the SATP (South…

This is a repost of a blog post from 2019 that was published also at the LSE and republished at Warwick Uni. I become increasingly sceptical of much of UK polling. There appears to be a very strange disconnect. Eurobarometer polling suggests that attitudes to the EU, if anything, appear to have become more pro-European…

In the complex landscape of the digital economy, the interplay between data sellers and buyers shapes the contours of modern commerce. Xueying Zhao’s job market paper (JMP) sheds light on a crucial aspect of this ecosystem: how data sellers can maximize profits by tailoring supplemental signals to buyers with private information. Here, I try to…

Below is the powerpoint of a keynote I gave (but interrupted after 1h due to feeling unwell) at the Shared Perspectives event at University of Bologna, October 6, 2023. Political-Economy-of-Climate-InactionDownload

The invasion of Ukraine is now in its second year. The war has raised a ton of issues and has made transparent many of the institutional failings that are due to relatively slow and modest technology adoption. The shocks have just been hitting incredibly hard and very frequent. The pandemic highlighted the many structural deficiencies…

This is another meta reflection that I want to share. This is relating the the Horizon IT system or the Post Office scandal. I must admit I have not followed all the details here but what strikes me as surprising is the timing that this scandal is being brought to light. Well, not quite brought…

One meta reflection on the Piketty, Saez, Zucman and Auten & Splinter debate is the following. It suggests there is an attempt to reset, control or cast doubt on a narrative. On one side you have academics at a top US University, on the other hand, you have academic economists associated with the public sector.…

Information governance and barriers to the free flow of information and data has been a or the key barrier to climate action. But with the rise of the information and attention economy, politically slanted information has both become the prime source of rents, while at the same time, has morphed into a potential weapon that…