Urban economist studying housing regulations. https://xitter.cf/t.co/mLjgPJNovT
Joined August 2021
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James Macek retweeted
Such an embarrassment.
Every other AI company - even the scams - has no problem raising hundreds of millions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars in private markets.
Our clown show needs taxpayer money to keep the lights on.
Total joke.
"Cohere is a Canadian success story being written before our eyes" - Prime Minister @MarkJCarney
James Macek retweeted
New working paper: Can AI forecast treatment effects in economics from pre-registration documents?
Answer: Yes. 1/
James Macek retweeted
jrosenthalkay.github.io/2026…
@jordanr_k on Greany (2026) and related “change the elasticity” counterfactual scenarios.
James Macek retweeted
@ubcVSE is hiring this year with a focus on International Trade/Spatial Economics and Macroeconomics/International Macroeconomics. Please apply!
See econjobmarket.org/positions/… for more
James Macek retweeted
My college classmate Matt and I just used AI to create a Erdos #374 solution w/ a Lean-verified proof. We used a reciprocal-prime equidistribution estimate, Harman’s almost-all short-interval theorem, Weil’s bound, and the analytic large sieve. Full proof: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Erdős Problem #374 is solved! Jonathan Hartley and Matthew Olson proved the Erdős–Graham conjecture that D₆, the set of numbers needing six factorials to form a square, has positive density. They formalized the complete solution in Lean, and we verified it.
erdosproblems.ai/374
James Macek retweeted
Look at him, thats my Qual.
Your what?
My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.
Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants
I've been skeptical about the whole - software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument
But I've seen first hand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists
I predict the trend accelerates
Letter from @AQRCapital below
James Macek retweeted
Happy to share our preliminary draft! Attacks on oil tankers have economic effects that are smaller than, and distinct from, conventional oil shocks. Thanks to everyone for their input! Updated version coming soon.
Super interesting!
"Oil Shipping and Pirates: The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Tanker Attacks" by Viktor Gradoux and Julian Marcoux.
"This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of attacks on oil tankers. We identify oilshipping-cost shocks by combining a narrative record of tanker attacks with high-frequency changes in tanker freight rates. We focus on attacks along key shipping routes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the period since the onset of the U.S. shale oil boom, we find that these shocks lower economic activity and raise consumer prices in both the United States and the world economy. Crude production and oil prices show no significant immediate response, while inventories decline. These responses differ from those associated with conventional oil supply shocks and other shipping shocks. U.S. evidence points to an energy-trade channel, with increased congestion at Middle Eastern ports, lower crude imports and refinery inputs, leading to higher fuel prices. We also document that manufacturing orders and shipments fall immediately, consistent with precautionary adjustments in firms’ purchases and investment plans. These findings, together with the contraction in global activity, suggest that oil-shipping disruptions can hurt both oil-importing and oil-exporting economies."
dropbox.com/scl/fo/8fxblwhw2…
James Macek retweeted
NEW: We’ve spent months reporting on a Chinese intelligence effort to penetrate the Federal Reserve. It’s a fascinating and important saga, revealing the lengths that Chinese spies are willing to go to get any scrap of information about the Fed. It features lies, betrayal, nude photos, extortion, false identities and document leaks. And it doesn’t end at all the way you might expect: cnbc.com/2026/09/30/john-rog…
James Macek retweeted
I used GPT-6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon's generals that had gone unread for 217 years.
What makes this impressive isn't actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in ~6 hours from a single image and goal.
1/6🧵
James Macek retweeted
Studying how property rights uncertainty affects prices and speculative activities in the housing markets using a natural comparison of full and limited property houses in Shenzhen, from @HanmingF, Jing Wu, and Vincent Yao nber.org/papers/w35797
James Macek retweeted
We’re very proud to announce that the student prize winner of 2026 North American Meeting is Micah Baum for his paper “When Opportunity Moves to You: Housing Deregulation and the Distribution of Child Outcomes”!
James Macek retweeted
If you think rich tech workers moving in is bad for low-end rents, then you also have to accept that adding high-end supply is good.
Supply and demand work symmetrically.
buildingabundance.ca/p/housi…
James Macek retweeted
This is indeed a big deal. As my coauthors and I show (nber.org/system/files/workin…), the TCJA's increase in bonus depreciation raised investment by 4% and GDP by 1% in the US. And this is an even bigger reform!
That said, I'd love to see estimates of how this will affect the average effective tax rate (AETR) in addition to the METR.
The METR is the tax rate on the very last dollar of investment, which means that it governs the optimal scale of new investments conditional on those investments going forward. Importantly, in Canada that last dollar of investment is usually done by a large firm that has received some kind of bespoke subsidy from both the federal and provincial governments for that specific project.
The AETR takes into account all the fixed costs associated with big investment decisions. It governs the binary decision of whether to make a big investment in the first place at all. It also reflects the rates at which "typical" firms and projects - that don't receive those aforementioned bespoke subsidies - are taxed.
Canada has always been pretty competitive on the METR, but much less competitive on the AETR. In my view, this is one of the factors that explains our poor investment performance over the past decade.
BIG tax change announced today. A “productivity mega deduction” broadens how much is eligible for immediate expensing. That cuts the effective tax on new investment in half. More to do, but this is big.
Details: canada.ca/en/department-fina… #cdnecon
James Macek retweeted
🚨GWU has 2 tenure-track searches for International Trade this year🚨
Application review starts Oct 1.
Share and apply!
JOE ad: aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J…