Juan S. Muñoz-Morales

Thrilled to share that our paper is now out in
@restatjournal.bsky.social
‼️

Punchline: In a market where elite university access is costly, precise signals allow highly talented but income-constrained graduates to enter the labor market as if they had attended an elite institution. 🇨🇴

Signaling Specific Skills and the Labor Market of College Graduates Abstract. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we study the labor market effects of a government-sponsored award given to top-performing students on Colombia’s national college exit exam. The award signals field-specific skills, leading recipients to earn seven to ten percent more than comparable peers without the signal. The benefits are concentrated among graduates from lowerreputation institutions, who enter the market with weaker signals and gain access to better job matches and higher-paying firms. These returns persist for up to five years, driven by an upward shift in the intercept of the wage-experience profile of those with weaker signals.

Awards to top grads boost wages ~7%, with effects concentrated among those from lower-reputation colleges. Just Accepted new paper by Matias Busso, Sebastián Montaño, and Juan Muñoz-Morales @jmunozmorales.bsky.social zurl.co/tG9oo

We are hosting the Canadian Macroeconomics Study Group at @westernu.ca!
This year's keynote is Kjetil Storesletten @hellerhurwicz.bsky.social

Program 👉 baxter-robinson.github.io/CMSG2025_Pro...
Registration is 100 CAD (70 for students!) 🔗https://economics.uwo.ca/about-us/workshops/index.html

Starting today I will be visiting the economics department at @sciencespo.bsky.social. Send me an email if you are around and/or interested in having a coffee or lunch!

🚨 Excited to share insights from a paper I co-authored with @juanherreno.bsky.social on why emerging economies often face financial crises or "Sudden Stops"! Just published in Journal of International Economics (@jintlecon.bsky.social )

📝 Link: shorturl.at/JdJhr

#Econsky #Macroeconomics

„There’s gonna be a brain drain like you’ve never seen. A big, beautiful brain drain. People are saying it might be the world‘s best brain drain, I dunno, but that’s what they‘re saying.“

In São Paulo, I presented what I call “the Latin American paradox”

Why is it that Latin Americans are actually quite supportive of gender equality, and yet we see high femicides?

My answer: a weak state, drug wars & conflict give rise to generalized violence

Lille Economics and Management (LEM, CNRS UMR 9221) and
@ieseg.fr invite applications for a fully funded #PhD position in Economics of Migration and Migration policy, based at our #Lille campus.

▸https://bit.ly/4lslNhL #IESEGresearch #IESEGiflame #Econsky @simori.bsky.social

One of my best students just had his funding offer for a PhD in the US withdrawn. Meanwhile we've had a massive surge in applications to our program from really strong US and international students. It feels like a shift is already underway.

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

1/19: Seems timely to share a paper which explores how people perceive & understand trade and trade policies. Which factors shape the support for different trade policies? Thread below with the key takeaways #EconTwitter 🧵, and full paper here: socialeconomicslab.org/understandin...

Trump's tariff formula confounds the world, punishes the poor Ridiculed for imposing trade tariffs on frozen islands largely inhabited by penguins, Donald Trump's formula for calculating those levies has a serious side: it is also hitting some of the world's poorest nations hardest.

"There is really no methodology there," Mary Lovely says. "It is like finding you have cancer and finding the medication is based on your weight divided by your age. The word 'reciprocal' is deeply misleading."

Hi #EconSky 🎓 multiple (3) #CallsForApplications #PhDScholarship at @iesegresearch.bsky.social #IESEGIflame
@Lem. The successful candidates will develop his/her PhD dissertations on #Migration #Economics #PoliticalEconomy and/or using historical data 📷Deadline: May 4th, 2025. Details below 👇

Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

“An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.”

U.S. oligarchs and their blindness to what goes beyond their borders 😢.

Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Featured in the latest Digest: "Unintended Consequences of Merit-Based Teacher Reform in Colombia"

https://www.nber.org/digest/202503/unintended-consequences-merit-based-teacher-reform-colombia

Have we passed peak intelligence?

In international tests, student scores for reading and maths sunk to a new low.

US teens are struggling to concentrate & evaluate information.

The excellent @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Warning: this thread is dark 🧵

Nice program for those working on migration!

https://www.anr-malynes.com/

📢📢Hi #Econsky! You are a PhD or postdoc student interested in the #Economics of #Labor #Family and #Migration. Please submit your work to our thematic workshop. Check the fantastic line up of speakers of the 4th edition.
www.anr-malynes.com
please retweet 👇👇👇👇

The unintended consequences of merit-based teacher selection: Evidence from a large-scale reform in Colombia Teacher quality is a key factor in improving student academic achievement. As such, educational policymakers strive to design systems to hire the most…

Link to published version @jpube.bsky.social :
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Link to @iza.org brief:
wol.iza.org/opinions/hid...

Link to @voxdev.bsky.social brief:
voxdev.org/topic/educat...

Link to op-ed (in Spanish):
www.lasillavacia.com/red-de-exper...

Happy to see a nice summary of our paper on the March issue of @nber.org digest:

“The Unintended Consequences of Merit-Based Teacher Reform in Colombia.”

Can merit-based selection of public teachers necessarily leads to student’s learning gains?

Not always

#EconSky
www.nber.org/digest/20250...

📢 Call for papers: 📢

@cesifo.org Area Conference on Economics of Education
(co-organized with Rick Hanushek)

5-6 Sept 2025, Munich

Keynote: @raffasadun.bsky.social

👉 www.cesifo.org/en/event/202...

Submission deadline: 18 May 2025

Past programs: sites.google.com/view/woessma...

The Marco Rubio of 2025 seems to have amnesia about who is at fault here. Perhaps he should listen to his past self.

The Society for Computational Economics is hosting its 31st Conference on Computing in Economics and Finance in Chile this summer. Our former PhD student Carlos Rondon Moreno is one of the conference co-chairs and our colleague Christiane Baumeister is one of the plenary speakers

How Trump Has Undermined U.S. Climate Policy President Trump has quickly transformed America’s approach to the environment, withholding funds and stretching the limits of presidential power.

“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said...

This is so worrying.

‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/c...

Who do you think has “taken” more good American jobs this year, undocumented workers or DOGE?

Zelensky is a wartime leader watching his people suffer and die under Russian attacks every day. To be lectured and lied to by Trump and Vance, as they defend the war criminal dictator committing these atrocities, is unimaginable agony. An everlasting shame for America.

“Why don't you wear a suit? You're at the highest level in this country's office & you refuse to wear a suit. A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the office.”

This is not good.....also is self inflicted (if this comes to pass in the official estimates).

Within academia, the job market is particularly difficult this year. A dearth of interviews and jobs. The exact same thing happened when I went on the job market years ago: 150 applications, 1 interview!

Back then I wondered about the implications. So, what did I do? I wrote a paper!

Just published at AER: Insights: getting negative information about your health when there are no treatment options available lowers long-run survival, with increased risky behaviors being one likely mechanism.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...