Forthcoming at the Journal of Law & Economics:
"Firearms and Lynching" by myself and @plwarre
static1.squarespace.com/static/5329e89… Main result: greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South. In a context where you are excluded from the institutions of governance and public safety, where terrorism against you is condoned, the tools of self-defense matter

A lot of people are dunking on this for being incoherent, but there is something really important happening here as well. Scientific nihilism - the belief that we can't truly know or understand anything, is a longtime cornerstone of bad economics and bad politics 1/7

https://twitter.com/thebadstats/status/1486103450446303234

I spent time in grad school adjacent to an ideological subset who were relentless in their efforts to carve out an intellectual foxhole from which they could lob attacks at other ideas while making no credible contributions of their own because *nothing* new could be learned.

This is mostly me chatting with a friend trying to find humor in all the suboptimal career decisions I've made. To my mind though, things have worked out pretty well, so here's a 🧵on building an academic research career without an elite pedigree (1/n)

https://twitter.com/ProbCausation/status/1437391836843290626

If you get into PhD program a school that is movies-about-smart-people famous, go there. But despite some conventional wisdoms, science decidedly does not begin and end in 02138. So what should you do?

If you want to know more about how law enforcement has been transformed into a regressive revenue generation mechanism, here's a🧵of resources wrapped in an argument for why the problem runs deeper in our democracy than you might think (1/n) Let's start with 1) the consequences for individuals caught in the system, so we can then better appreciate 2) why the political mechanisms behind them are not to be taken lightly, and then close out with 3) policy solutions

YouTube is interesting to me because I think you can make a good case that it is a, in many ways, unique regulatory target, and one that lends itself to bespoke policy solutions. So here's a thread no one asked for w/ a punchline I didn't expect [1/16]

https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1136356223396261888

YouTube is a network good w/ a high fixed costs, which means it's likely characterized by increasing returns to scale and decreasing avg costs. For those keeping score, that means it's a likely natural monopoly and the pro-regulation folks should be licking their chops [2]

New (accepted!) paper and thread: “To Serve and Collect: The Fiscal and Racial Determinants of Law Enforcement” by myself, Thomas Stratmann, and @ATabarrok, forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Studies 1/17
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Punchline: when local governments are running budget deficits, black and Hispanic arrest rates increase, while white arrests remain (mostly) unchanged, *but only if* local police are legally able to retain forfeiture revenues in their budget 2/17