Matt Schaelling

/Current/: PhD @Brown_Economics; on the 2025-26 Job Market
/Previous/: Predoc @SIEPR; BA Math @BYU
/Interests/: Applied micro (Urban & Education)

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@bobbyfijan Seems like your initial markets are primarily in warm regions w/o basements, where the foundation doesn’t have to be so deep. How will the design / construction be adapted for regions that need a deep foundation and have basements? Will the cellar be accessed from the outside?

[Chris Cillizza @ChrisCillizza]

I am a BIG fan of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.

Was before this (he has been talking about the need to take the temperature down for year) but am even more impressed with how he had handled himself after the Kirk murder.

More Spencer Coxes!

[Benji Backer @BenjiBacker]

Utah Gov. @SpencerJCox has quietly been one of the nation’s best governors…for a while now.

He’s outcome-oriented, humanity-driven, community-first, courageously bold, and always working across differences to benefit the people.

Americans are all seeing his leadership now.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Gov. Cox is exactly right.

He's been talking along these lines for years, and the need for his message has only gotten greater.

[VoxDev @vox_dev]

Sewers and urbanisation in developing countries

Last month on VoxDev, @SeanMcCulloch11 (@Brown_Economics), @MattSchaelling, Matthew Turner & Toru Kitagawa discussed how access to sewers can help catalyse urban migration: https://t.co/VGj4WdRGCS

[Dominic Pino @DominicJPino]

It's sad that this quote from Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck remains relevant, but here it is anyway:

“In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

[Mike Pence @Mike_Pence]

The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and tariffs. Article 1, Section 8 provides that the Congress “shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” The president has no authority in the Constitution to unilaterally impose tariffs without an act of Congress. To restore the power to levy Tariff’s back to the American people, Congress should take immediate steps to reclaim their Constitutional authority On Tariffs.
https://t.co/OQ8ZOe06yx

[VoxDev @vox_dev]

🆕 Sewers and urbanisation in developing countries

Today on VoxDev, @SeanMcCulloch11 (@Brown_Economics), @MattSchaelling, Matthew Turner & Toru Kitagawa discuss how access to sewers can help catalyse urban migration: https://t.co/VGj4WdRGCS

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@alz_zyd_ It then generated like 500 lines of code to do this whereas I did it in like 50-100 lines of code and so then it was just kind of a pain to go through all of it’s verbose output and make sure that the code was reasonable.

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@alz_zyd_ I’ve found LLMs great at small coding tasks but I asked it to write code from scratch to do a larger task (approx “here’s a CSV of reading passages, write code that does NLP named entity recognition and return a data.frame of [passage_id, first_name, last_name]”).

[NBER @nberpubs]

Sewer access shapes developing world cities. New research shows effects on population density as large as for highways, but little on demographics, from @SeanMcCulloch11, @MattSchaelling, Matthew Turner, and Toru Kitagawa https://t.co/14aRw2bVB8

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Many social programs are presented as investments that will pay for themselves via better outcomes in the future. But is it true? What if govt funding was tied to outcomes rather than inputs? We @Arnold_Ventures and others tested that model in a first of its kind project. 1/12

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@btshapir I told my wife I am on team minivan over SUV, but she seems skeptical (I think on “coolness” grounds).

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@btshapir By contrast, the Sienna drove so smoothly, could fit *so much stuff* with the seats taken out (probably more than a typical truck bed with a cap that provides the same security / weather protection as the van), and it’s easy to make tight turns / parallel park.

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@aaronbailey @jkimballcook my hypothesis would be that the Yugoslav system provided much better capital allocation than Soviet system but still less growth than a private ownership system.

[Matt Schaelling @MattSchaelling]

@aaronbailey @jkimballcook Yugoslavia earnestly tried to counter that with a more market oriented allocation system while maintaining meaningful collective ownership. I don't think that really creates a dynamic economy that produces growth like something with private ownership —