Matt Webb

Associate Professor of Economics at Carleton University. Interested in statistical inference, empirical micro, and experiments.

[Matt Webb @mattdwebb]

Hey #econtwitter, do you have a binary outcome? Estimate logit models? Want to cluster your standard errors? We've got bad, good, and great news for you. See the thread below, or our new working paper (with @jgmQED and @MortenEcon) for details https://t.co/LDjYwNRxwx 1/7

[Stephen Gordon @stephenfgordon]

Supply management costs low-income households some $600 a year in excessive dairy and poultry prices.

If you think that doesn't matter but the imagined market power of grocery stores does, you are not a serious person, much less a serious government.

https://t.co/4yoWvOEkb1

[I4R @I4Replication]

📢 Call for Papers! We are partnering with the Journal of Economic Surveys on a special issue: Reproducibility and Meta-Science in Economics.

Submission deadline: 1 March 2027. Details in thread 🧵

[The Review of Economic Studies @RevEconStudies]

Improve your economic data analysis by using jackknife standard errors under clustering. This is a minor code change, and can lead to greatly improved inference. This paper provides the theoretical foundation.

New paper by @BruceEHansen

https://t.co/DZZZmbjgnN

#REStud
#EconX

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[I4R @I4Replication]

Incentives to replicate articles are so bad. Even when your comment leads to the retraction of a PLOS One article, the reward is a (10 days late) email with a thank you at the bottom.

Retraction notice: https://t.co/JZYtD7IvVg.

But we are not complaining about PLOS One 🧵

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

I hadn't been following the Gino vs Harvard drama once it became obvious Gino was guilty, but this from Harvard's latest filing is nuts. They imaged the laptop at the start of the investigation, so they caught her when she made a fake, backdated file with "data" from her research

[Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @jkenney]

Reducing your community’s weight in Parliament to own the Libs 🤔

Pro tip: the Prime Minister will never see your note. Canada has been conducting a census since 1867 regardless of the party in office. Every country on Earth does a census.

By boycotting the Census, you’re not striking a blow for freedom or privacy. You’re reducing the population weight of your area when Parliamentary seats are allocated.

Not smart.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

"Load bearing," "I keep coming back to," "Not X, but Y"

A curse of using AI a lot is that you realize how much of the writing around you is just AI, now

People who don't use AI have been unable to identify AI prose on sight, but those who use it a lot can spot the tells easily

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

AI has raised the utility of work so much I'm working about 10h more per week than I used to.

The joy of research was always in the exploring and discovering, suddenly I can spend my time doing that again.

[Matt Webb @mattdwebb]

Big weekend at home. My wife is making her professional comedian debut @YukYuksOttawa, and I am seeing her perform live for the first time. Fingers crossed I'm still married on Monday. https://t.co/LrJ5fpDjDo

[I4R @I4Replication]

📢 We’re excited to launch a new AI project studying how performance varies across disciplines and levels of expertise.

This round is open to participants from economics, political science, and psychology.

[alz @alz_zyd_]

"Writing is important because it helps you think"

Writing is an inefficient and antisocial way to think. The best way to think is to debate ideas with other smart people. Talking with an LLM pretty much replicates this, and is thus a strictly better way to think than writing

[I4R @I4Replication]

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science.

Here’s what we found 👇

[Matt Webb @mattdwebb]

@emollick This tool seems like an interesting work around.

https://t.co/tRN32NRvzV

[Oliver Prompts @oliviscusAI]

Uploading raw PDFs to Claude is officially a waste of tokens 🤯

AlphaXiv just dropped a new skill that extracts arXiv IDs and fetches pre-built, machine-readable summaries. It feeds your model pure signal, the problem, approach, and results in seconds.

100% Free.

[Chris Selley @cselley]

I just can’t understand why Canada’s productivity lags.

[J.J. McCullough @JJ_McCullough]

The story of the Air Canada CEO isn’t that the Liberals are hypocritical about official bilingualism, or that so-and-so Liberal isn’t bilingual enough. It’s that official bilingualism has become a bizarre religion among Canada’s elite, preventing sane, merit-based hiring.

[Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @jkenney]

I await Governor General Mary Simon's condolence video in French.

Why do the Liberals hold the CEO of Air Canada to a higher standard of bilingualism than their own appointee as Governor General, who hasn't learned French after four years in the role?

TBH, I would rather have the CEO of our flagship carrier focusing his scarce time on safety and reliability than language training.

[Phillip Heiler @PhillipHeiler]

!! Econometrics Conference alert !! In honor of James MacKinnon's many contributions to Econometrics & his 75th Birthday, we will host a conference June 17-19, 2026 at the Aarhus Center for Econometrics (ACE) @AarhusUni_int @Aarhus_BSS. Submissions are open until April 12.

[Jack Fitzgerald | @jackfitzgerald.bsky.social @FitzgeraldJack_]

New preprint! We re-analyze 46 papers that use log-like specifications (ln(Z+1), inverse hyperbolic sine, etc). We find widespread non-robustness, and we show through theory + simulation how these models drive spurious significance. 1/

https://t.co/Uxy4srDuxe

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

You can just do things (genetically sequence your dog’s tumors and design a bespoke mRNA cancer vaccine to save her life)