@catealacevich
Assistant Research Professor & Director of Quantitative Research and Evaluation - Health Care Quality & #Medicaid @UF ICHP | Past work: Oxford @ox.ac.uk @OxHealthEcon, @EIEEorg, @UPF.edu | @Unicatt.bsky.social Economics PhD. Personal views only
🆕 Integrating refugees: What policies work best?
Today on VoxDevTalks, Dany Bahar (@watsonschoolbrown.bsky.social) & Giovanni Peri (@ucdavis.bsky.social) discuss the long-term gains of early, well-sequenced policies for both refugees and host economies.
🔗 Link below ⤵️
Planting trees and bushes on smallholder farms in Africa leads to great increases in farm productivity and higher living standards, from Geoffrey Heal, Claudio Rizzi, and Simon Xu www.nber.org/papers/w34929
Anna Holmes hasn’t watched “The Pitt” or “Sinners” or probably anything else people are talking about—a tendency she calls “hype aversion.” Her avoidance, she writes, may have less to do with knee-jerk resistance than with something deeper:
Interesting correlations! Hoping to see some rigorous causal evidence soon
🔍 What happens when participants drop out of a study?
A new #CEGAWorkingPaper examines attrition in field experiments, finding that the most common test of attrition bias is not a test of internal validity in general.
📖 Learn more: go.cega.org/WPS-113
Mario Draghi Awarded 2026 SIEPR Prize for Global Policy Leadership | The Economic Misfit theeconomicmisfit.com/2026/02/28/m...
On immigration: "I often am asked to speak as an economist. And what we should never lose sight of is that each of us is a moral being. And you, as I, have to decide how we feel about this form of rhetoric."
Interviewer: "What's your take on how he's framing the economy?"
Me: "It's that he's lying."
🌾 How can machine learning predict agricultural yields?
CEGA researchers find that imagery-based monitoring effectively predicts maize yields in Zambia, offering governments a low-cost way to better target agricultural interventions.
Learn more: go.cega.org/cropyieldprediction
📢 #CallForPapers for the 11th Monash-Paris-Warwick-Zurich-CEPR Text-As-Data #Workshop!
Papers using text, audio, images, or other unstructured data are welcome.
Organisers: @elliottash.bsky.social @essobecker.bsky.social & Philine Widmer
Deadline: 13 March
cepr.org/events/11th-...
#EconSky
📢 New free virtual course (PEDL x STEG)
Private Enterprises, Productivity, and Economic Growth - starting 6 Feb 2026
When: Fridays, 15:30–17:00 (London time)
Format: Virtual + recordings available
🔗 More info: grp.cepr.org/node/231
📝 Register here: cepr.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?...
Again, this is not about the 2020 election: it's about creating the conditions to try and overturn defeat in 2026 and 2028. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...
The figure reports the results of the estimation of an event-study model. An observation is a story*time. Standard errors are clustered at the level of the stories. The dependent variable is the share of deleted posts at date t that were already present at date 0. Fact-checking has emerged as one of the most prominent policy tools to combat the spread of misinformation, but critics have argued that it infringes upon freedom of expression and that it has no meaningful impact on the circulation of misinformation. This column provides evidence from the field that fact-checking significantly reduces engagement with posts on Facebook rated as false and also decreases users' subsequent activity. The findings suggest that the impact of fact-checking primarily results not from Facebook’s actions to hide or demote content, but rather from users’ behavioural responses, challenging the idea that it suppresses free speech.
Julia Cage, @gallon.bsky.social, Emeric Henry, & @yuchenhuang.bsky.social provide evidence that fact-checking significantly reduced engagement with posts on Facebook rated as false and also decreases users' subsequent activity.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...
#EconSky
The Weiss Fund has a great new initiative for development economists on the PhD job market to support those taking up research positions in LMICs, offering supplementary income + research funds. Please share!
Is anyone interested in forming a session for #ASHEcon on bargaining, managed competition, emergency care billing, congestion, or any similar topics?
📣We are pleased to share the report “Improving the Publication Process in Economics” by an ad-hoc joint AEA-EEA-ES-RES committee - Joseph Altonji, Kevin Lang, Erzo Luttmer, Imran Rasul, Stefanie Stantcheva, Romain Wacziarg and Guido Imbens.
Read and share your views👉 buff.ly/4bg6xQi
#EconSky
"We recommend that journals ask reviewers to separate their comments into essential
and optional comments [...]" 👍🏼
Two of Florida’s most iconic coral species are now functionally extinct. The 2023–2024 marine heat wave wiped out 97.8% to 100% of staghorn and elkhorn corals across nearly 400 surveyed reefs, according to marine scientists. buff.ly/IjWGm0D
Open call for applications, Graduate and Early-Career Fellowships, Fiscal and Economic Effects of Innovation and Productivity Policies. Submit applications by 5 pm EST on January 4, 2026. More information: www.nber.org/calls-papers...
Nursing home value-added for black patients is 30 percent lower than for white patients, with most of the gap reflecting differences within, rather than across, nursing homes, from Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, @nealemahoney.bsky.social, and James C. Okun www.nber.org/papers/w34324
(I highly recommend John's writing tips for PhD students: www.johnhcochrane.com/research-all...)
Online course certificates (from MOOCs) are booming (40M+ learners in 2024). But do these credentials actually help people get jobs? Our team investigated this in a new study by @susanathey.bsky.social & Emil Palikot 👇.
🆕 RFBerlin Discussion Paper: Peter Fredriksson, @dgulumser.bsky.social, and @lenahensvik.bsky.social study whether and why differential wage responsiveness to outside offers contributes to the gender wage gap within job. 🧵
“American colleges, especially the most selective ones, are confronting the dual problems of rampant grade inflation and declining rigor,” @rosehorowitch.bsky.social writes. “Teacher evaluations are a big part of how higher education got to this point.”
Save the Date! 📅
Join CEGA on November 7 for the Global Mental Health Convening, gathering experts to explore mental health in low- and middle-income countries. Speakers include: @johanneshaushofer.com, @saraevans-lacko.bsky.social, Judith Bass, Matt Lowe, and more.
🔗 : go.cega.org/GMHC2025
Do students respond differently to feedback depending on the evaluator’s perceived gender? We find that they push back more when the randomly assigned name of the evaluator is female-sounding --implications for women’s authority and credibility in educational and professional contexts!
People chasing power for themselves often burn bridges. Those who lead by serving others build trust, stronger relationships and successful organizations.
Lessons for CEOs and the rest of us: buff.ly/GIv1jQW
Since at least the time of Greek philosophers, many writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing.
