Charlie Rafkin

Public and behavioral economics

Postdoc @UCBerkeley @Stanford, then assistant professor @UBC

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@AndyMasley Truly an excellent post and useful post, thank you!

this misinfo about ai's enviromental impact is super widespread and annoying

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Finished the blog post, link below

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@nickgebbia The job market taught me so much useful stuff. For instance, when the overleaf download exceeds (100), it starts inserting random strings instead of numbers

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Notwithstanding incorrect standard errors and weird units for inflation, this first-pass regression is reasonably informative

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

There are some confounders here, but the inflation thing is actually statistically significant! Each additional $100 of inflation in a state since January 2021 predicts a further 1.6 swing against Harris in our polling average vs. the Biden-Trump margin in 2020.

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@FrankSchilbach @CESifoNetwork @hmmlowe Thanks, Frank! and definitely have big shoes to fill @hmmlowe

(though if he’s so inimitable why do I keep finding myself following his path, as a fellow frank student -> ubc AP??)

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Paper here: https://t.co/ojQaxdoGGt

(update coming soon, consider this a commitment device to stop procrastinating the painful post-JM revision..!)

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Honored to have my work with @esoltas on social preferences and eviction recognized at CESifo's behavioral economics conference!

[CESifo @CESifoNetwork]

🏆 Congratulations to @CharlieRafkin from @UCBerkeley, winner of the #CESifo Affiliate Award 2024 in Behavioral Economics! 🎉 His paper ‘Eviction as Bargaining Failure: Hostility and Misperceptions in the Rental Housing Market’ stood out for its impactful insights. 👏

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Earliest documented instance of econ hating… absolutely wrecked by Proudhon in 1840

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@dylanmatt @joshcmorrison Have you done the Revolutions podcast season on the French Revolution? Really really good if you want to fill in the background

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Very happy to share that I will start as an assistant professor at @ubcVSE in Jan 2026, after postdoc visits at Berkeley and Stanford!

So grateful for my time at @MITEcon, and for my fantastic advisors, mentors, coauthors, and classmates.

[UBC Economics @ubcVSE]

We're happy to announce three new hires, marking the end of a very successful recruiting year. Join us in welcoming Ying Gao, Charlie Rafkin (@CharlieRafkin), and Miguel Ortiz (@mortiz217 ) to Vancouver, and to UBC! Article: https://t.co/uOw7rrs91E

[Sam Asher @thesamasher]

Great Vox article on the Case Deaton research, including a very thoughtful discussion of our paper (@paulnovosad @CharlieRafkin and me) on how to think about outcomes like mortality by education group when the underlying educational distribution is changing over time

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@salonium One flag is that the indirect effect on dementia is larger than the direct effect on shingles (at least in pp). My guess (based on v little tbf!) is that biologically plausible “passthrough” could be no larger than 1 in 5, but the study is not powered to detect effects that small

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@salonium @paulgp @paulnovosad @thesamasher yeah, i love this paper and their analogy to comparing alaska vs. the US

but - we ultimately conclude the opposite way, ie there are in fact real (and huge) increases in mortality for the bottom 10%

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@paulgp @paulnovosad @thesamasher wow, cool - thanks paul!

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@pursuingabbynes Nuclear emergency warning -> descend 100 hours on escalator to safety… the perfect plan

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

Sharing some simple Javascript code embeds that can improve Qualtrics surveys for econ/social science research

(+ if you have similar hacks, I'd love to see them!)

https://t.co/XXcrf9Fkur

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@paulgp @jondr44 Need the event study of how readers interpret pretrends with big CIs (pre- and post-Roth '21/Rambachan and Roth '22)

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@paulgp @jondr44 Freyaldenhoven et al. (2021) gives some useful best practices https://t.co/FvuZYRWQzq - though not experimentally validated, I guess

[Charlie Rafkin @CharlieRafkin]

@Bill_Gardner @paulnovosad @thesamasher But is years of educ of *parents* available?