We celebrated graduation and Mother's Day with an Indian student at Sacred Heart Univ, because her parents couldn't be here.
We noticed that over 90% of the 4,000 Masters graduates were from India.
So I asked some questions, and here's a thread on US education-immigration policy

Many Indian students take collateralized loans worth US$40-50,000 from Indian private Banks to pay tuition for one-year CS and IT degrees at run-of-the-mill US universities like Sacred Heart Univ (SHU).
There are three possible reasons why this is a sensible investment

Nemat Shafik - @Columbia Prez only has 1 well-cited publication in her life, in Oxford Econ Papers 1994.
This paper is lifted almost entirely from a 1992 report coauthored with consultant not credited in the publication.
This is wholesale intellectual theft, not subtle plagiarism





This is not a close call. Table 1s are the same. Fig 1s are the same. Massive overlap in text.
She stole the junior author's intellectual property and simply removed his name from published version.
If he contributed enough to be an author in 1992, how can she delete him in 94?

Mask research is in the news again with headlines like "mask mandates don't work".
I'll write my views here on how we should think about mask-wearing based on the research summarized in #CochraneReview
[Only minimum statistical literacy required to follow the argument] Different studies are designed to answer 3 related but *different* questions
1. Do masks work when people actually wear them?
vs
2. Do mask mandates work?
vs
3. Does softly encouraging mask-wearing work?

We have good evidence that #1 works (RCTs in hospitals, lab studies,...]

My twitter feed is full of Ph.D. admissions decisions. Let me instead share with applicants and letter-writers what I learned after reading ~250 files this year, and then spending 18 hours in meetings with my colleagues on the Ph.D. admissions committee discussing those files. Ph.D. admissions decisions are very important, and we take them extremely seriously at @YaleEconomics. The 18 hours of meetings *after* files read by multiple faculty easily exceed the meeting time allocated to either junior or senior faculty recruiting!

Some misinterpretation of our #Bangladesh Mask RCT by those who don’t read research, which I’ll ignore, but also some parochial/racist reactions, which I must respond to nbcnews.com/science/scienc… 1."Americans experimenting on Bangladeshis to inform Americans”. Sorry, not all work is done to service Westerners. I [co-lead (clearly signaled as last) author], am Bangladeshi. We conducted study to primarily benefit LMICs. Study sites included districts where my family resides

Educated, skilled workers are more likely to emigrate away from polluted cities. This affects aggregate productivity and welfare, and also explains ~14% of an enduring macro-development puzzle:
Why do people remain in low-productivity areas when big cities offer higher wages?

https://twitter.com/YaleEGC/status/1352228760175726592

Greater out-migration of the college-educated from polluted areas is clearly evident even in the raw data in China (see maps), but we use multiple data sources and empirical techniques to uncover the causal effect of pollution on emigration

A thread on my sense of the immediate #policypriorities for @JoeBiden & @KamalaHarris administration, to undo the most consequential damages wrought by the last 4 years. A journalist’s question forced me to think about #economicpolicy, so I thought I'd get your reactions. [1/9] First, bring #COVID under control. There’s no lives vs livelihoods tradeoff. Economy will move only when the virus is contained. Rich people need to feel comfortable to go out, to spend money. They hold back due to fear of contracting COVID, not due to any #lockdown [2/9]

#COVID spreads through human-to-human transmission, so #migrants are an important vector. In the absence of adequate covid tests in LMICs, can we predict sub-national COVID spread, or identify likely hotspots using data on migration?

Short answer: Yes.
yrise.yale.edu/using-migratio… Data on airport returnees predict subsequent quarantines & #COVID19 distress calls across districts in #Bangladesh. Data on migration permits predict confirmed cases in #Philippines municipalities and Bangladeshi sub-districts.

Nearly a million #Rohingya refugees reside in densely packed camps in Coxbazar, Bangladesh. We conducted surveys of representative samples of refugees and Bangladeshi hosts living near camps after #COVID19 crisis hit. Alarming findings out in @WHOBulletin: who.int/bulletin/onlin… Both hosts and refugees face significant economic distress.
59% of hosts and 72% of refugees unable to buy essential items.
Sharp decrease in employment: 76% of males in host communities were employed in July 2019, but only 21% today.
Coauthors: Paula Lopez-Pena @caustindavis

A @dawn_com op-ed accuses me of valuing #Pakistani lives less than American lives because our paper (foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/10/poo…) uses VSL. The following 3 tweets explain in plain English (as the writer requests) why this is a gross misrepresentation.

https://twitter.com/KhurramHusain/status/1258244024743399424

Richer people can afford to stay at home. Both this journalist and I can work from home, and even if not, we're willing to sacrifice our economic livelihoods to avoid the risk of contracting COVID. Because even with pay-cuts, we can still easily put food on the table

You've heard about the Econ Nobelists’ contributions, but I’d like to share anecdotes on the personal impact that the trio have had on so many. Their humanity should not get overshadowed by their brilliance. They are excellent humans, first and foremost. vox.com/future-perfect… In 2001 I was in the UMD Ph.D. program which had no faculty listing “development econ” as their primary field. I had no exposure to modern devo. #AbhijitBanerjee stopped by my poster at a @WIDER conf in Helsinki, and politely, gently explained that what I was doing was not great.

My thoughts on Bangladesh’s economic progress relative to India/Pakistan, in response to @AtifRMian's question posed to me. 13-tweet thread follows.[Warning: these thoughts are of Twitter-length & depth, not the level at which academics normally engage on such complex questions]

https://twitter.com/AtifRMian/status/1127505041168973824

1. From macro data, the 2 proximate causes are our 2 biggest exports: (a) Garments and (b) Humans (i.e. remittances), both of which contribute large shares of GDP. [Not "exporting people to India", as trolls claim in Atif's thread, but remittance receipts from ME, SEA and Europe]