Lukas Hack

Postdoctoral Researcher in Economics @KOFETH @ETH | Formerly @EconUniMannheim @GESSuniMannheim | Macro - Monetary - Fiscal

[Ralph Lütticke @RalphLuet]

Now that I have your attention : )
Gernot Müller and I are looking for a Ph.D. student to work on
"Heterogeneous Expectations in HANK Models: Empirical Evidence, New Solution Methods, and Macroeconomic Implications.” For details check the Link.
Deadline is July 31, 2026.
https://t.co/DEef1MPYqc

[Javier Bianchi @JavierBianchi7]

📢 New paper w/ @GregWKaplan 🧵1/10

How small is “small” for local-linear methods to deliver reliable answers in heterogeneous-agent models of fiscal stimulus?

Our answer: very small.

[Yucheng Yang @YuchengYang1993]

It's a wrap! Very proud to have hosted a fantastic workshop on new methods & models in macro. Two days, ten terrific talks, many lively debates on new models, computation, AI, rational expectation & RL, state/sequence/path space, and beyond. A thread on the talks & frontier🧵

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

@Thiess_Buettner @WielandVolker Ich den USA wurde das doch auch praktiziert.. Das ist doch keine Theoriewelt oder was ist hier der Punkt bei “funktioniert”?

[Yucheng Yang @YuchengYang1993]

Very much looking forward to the 𝐙𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 next week! Excited to welcome an outstanding group of macroeconomists pushing the very frontier: Tom Sargent, @ben_moll, @a_auclert, @MarlonAzinovic, and many others! @Florian_Scheuer @comp_simon

[Klaus Adam @klaus_adam]

We show in a #new #paper how to estimate the misallocation #costs associated with different #inflation #rates directly from micro price data.

👉Cool feature: it works without having to commit to specific pricing models & with lots of (unobserved) product heterogeneity!

🧵(1/N)

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

🛃 Call of customs duty 🛃

I am very happy to see this policy brief online!

We show that US import tariff increases are supply shocks that pose a substantial tradeoff for monetary policy!

Based on joint work with Alessandro Franconi!

[SUERF - The European Money and Finance Forum @suerf_org]

#SUERFpolicybrief “Call of customs duty: How monetary policy shapes the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs" by Alessandro Franconi (@banquedefrance) and @LukasHack_ (@ETH)

📄 https://t.co/oUBVWXcZQl

[Refet Gürkaynak @RefetGurkaynak]

CEPR Monetary Economics and Fluctuations program meeting. Members and non-members alike are welcome to submit relevant work.

https://t.co/p9RXOeROcm

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

📜Maybe John H. Cochrane's cautionary words against another inflation surge may not be as unwarranted as I initially thought(https://t.co/SgJAYgMwx5 )

Caveat: Only 1/3 of the experts expect an @ecb interest rate hike, so restrictive monetary policy may dampen the impact END

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

❓What are the consequences of the hostilities in the Middle East for the German economy?

1️⃣Experts expect the war to last for 1-3 months, keeping oil prices elevated at 100$
2️⃣German Inflation is expected to rise to 2.7% in 2026, calling for potential @ecb rate hike

Short🧵

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

✎Why 4.7%? The FMT survey asked for several war scenarios and the marginal effect of a 10-dollar increase in the oil price on inflation is 0.25 percentage points. So, 2.7% + 0.25% x (180-100)/10 = 4.7%, as a back-of-the-envelop calculation. 4/X

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

@makro_philip @ben_moll Link top journal publications with conference volumes, i.e., lighter refereeing to get into the „AER quarterly conference“, with proper(!) peer review only after presentation? Less restrictive and actually feasible to implement. Of course, initial light refereeing is a challenge

[Gauti Eggertsson 🇺🇦 @GautiEggertsson]

AI is a game changer for economic research. We will look back and think: before and after.

The junior job market used to place enormous value on technical skills — and rightly so. We wanted to pass on the latest research methods to new PhD students. But the cost of mastering frontier solution techniques has dropped dramatically. I now find myself replicating papers and experimenting with frontier methods in an evening or a few days using Claude Code. That would have taken weeks before — which in practice meant I wouldn’t have done it at all.

So what does the new equilibrium look like? Some are pessimistic: ChatGPT can write PhD dissertations, they say. Maybe. But those dissertations won’t push the frontier or generate excitement.

I take the other side of that bet. We are in the business of figuring out how the world works and generating new knowledge. There is plenty we don’t understand, and no shortage of questions to answer. AI just accelerates the process.

The returns on conceptual thinking and original ideas are now relatively higher compared to the technical grunt work of debugging code and cleaning datasets. I think this is a great development.

My guess is it will also erode the monopoly that top US schools — and a handful of others — have long enjoyed. Part of that monopoly rested on access to knowledge that didn’t travel easily. Person-to-person transmission has always been far more efficient than learning from books or published papers — which are outdated by the time they appear, given publication lags.
Now knowledge transmission is nearly instantaneous. I find myself using techniques I understood in principle but could never justify the time to implement, because other methods were simply faster. That’s no longer true. The same goes for big data work.

One question keeps nagging me though: how should this change how we teach?

[Julius Betschka @JuliusBetschka]

Die KI-generierten Video zu ICE im @heutejournal haben das Zeug zum echten Medienskandal. Der Sender täte gut daran, schnell Intention & Fehlerkette zu benennen & eine Wiederholung auszuschließen. Schlimm, wenn man nicht mal im ÖRR auf Echtheit von Bildern vertrauen kann.

[Lukas Hack @LukasHack_]

@joshgans @Simon_Mongey @ben_golub Which models do you have in mind?

[Matthias Meier @MatthiasMeier1]

📢Call for Papers

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬

📝Mannheim, August 28-29

🚨Fantastic keynotes: Jordi Galí @CREIResearch
and Guido Lorenzoni @ChicagoBooth

📅Deadline: March 31

My great co-organizer: @KlausAdam

[Michael Bauer @michaelbauer_hh]

This Thursday Gernot Müller (@uni_tue) will kick off the new year for the Virtual Seminar on Monetary Economics, organized by @sffed and @cepr_org. He'll present his paper "Inflation Forecast Targeting Revisited". Join us at 11am Eastern via Zoom!
https://t.co/Om36Di9d6q

[Ludwig Straub @ludwigstraub]

🚨Application deadline coming up for our 2026 heterogenous-agent macro workshop in Frankfurt!

June 8-10 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Run with @a_auclert and Matt Rognlie. Hosted by @MathiasTrabandt.

All the details are here 👉 https://t.co/PtmNX5nMlK

Apply by this Friday!