Jan Kabatek 🇺🇦

A while ago I gave a talk on "Doing research with Australian population-level administrative data" (specifically, PLIDA). The talk contained tips and tricks that may prove useful to both beginners and experts, and so I am sharing the slides here: jankabatek.com/embed/plida/

Gary King just dropped a study showing that AI peer reviews now dominate human peer reviews on every metric they tested. gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

📢Open science alert📢 New service is being introduced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for replicating studies based on population-level microdata. This is a great step towards transparency and reproducibility in one of the last bastions of restricted-access research 🙏

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

No more pretending that Trump is not a Russian ally. If you read only one thing about Ukraine this week, it should be this one.

come to Munich!

Hi folks -- CAYLUS (Central Australian Youth Link Up Service) is advertising for a community worker position and I thought I'd put the call out. Scroll down the list here until you see "Community Development worker" for details. www.tangentyere.org.au/work-with-us

16hr flight ahead of me. It might just be enough to deal with all the outstanding emails... 🤞

An account from am economist who was not worried about AI but now is worried because of the Hugging Face Incident I think it is very hard to ignore the fact that cybersecurity will become a very big issue very quickly and we can only hope AI defense beats offense joshuagans.substack.com/p/its-worse

New paper by Ronchi and Smith www.restud.com/daddys-girl-... #REStud #EconSky

The authors behind this study openly try dozens to hundreds of quasi experiments and publish only the ones that "work". This makes me very skeptical of any of their findings, regardless of any robustness tests they do.

The call for submissions is closing this Friday, make sure you don't miss it 👇 #CALIBERsummit

@ksaxby.bsky.social is 100% correct, this census will be a turning point for LGBTQ+ research in Australia! 🌈 theconversation.com/for-the-firs...

Pretty big break happening in academia between the “AI is banned for reviews” journals and the “AI is mandatory for reviews” journals. www.refine.ink/blog/economi...

📢We're hiring 📢 Short notice, but Melbourne Institute is looking for a Senior Research Fellow (level C) to work on applied industrial microeconomics research using Australian administrative datasets. Apply here: unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UOM_Ex...

My particular thanks to all the young scholars I've met over the years, including those I first met as graduate students, who have encouraged me to think more deeply about the economics of gender.

#Statatip: use inrange(VAR,MIN,MAX)==1 to condition on MIN<=VAR<=MAX

SEHO2026 is delivering both great talks and stunning views ❤️🇮🇹

A lovely write-up of our last week's @leap-econ.bsky.social summit by Serena Doyle: melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/news/news/20...

Very cool analysis of the submissions to a major management journal that shows how much the system of science, built for humans, is under strain as a result of AI. AI can be used to do better science or it can be used to just do more stuff. The danger is that "more" is winning due to incentives.

🚨 U Melbourne flagship McKenzie Postdoc - 3 years fully funded, no teaching - 25K research budget - fame and prestige EOI closing 7 May, need to have a supervisor (email/DM me with Qs!) sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/research-fun...

And all of this started because Stanisław Ulam didn't feel like calculating the odds of winning a game of Solitaire...

The fateful V-Day is approaching once again, please be careful out there, folks! www.huffpost.com/entry/valent...

Vladyslav Heraskevych, Ukraine's skeleton racer, was scheduled to compete in his third Olympic Games on Feb. 12. He was barred from taking part in the competition after refusing to change his helmet, one depicting the faces of Ukrainian athletes killed during Russia's full-scale invasion.

The fateful V-Day is approaching once again, please be careful out there, folks! www.huffpost.com/entry/valent...

If you’re not using Claude Code, now’s the time to jump in!

Talking to lots of folks across various professions using Claude Code, it is genuinely surprising, even to me, how much of a leap they have seen in the ability of LLMs to do real work in the last six weeks. I know people on this site are sometimes skeptical of AI, but worth paying attention to.

Call for papers for Workshop in Causal Health Economics (organized by Erik Grönqvist and @helenasvaleryd.bsky.social) with @hitoshishigeoka.bsky.social as keynote speaker. Just before #ESPE in Helsinki and best time to visit Sweden 👇

If you'd like to embed a Bluesky feed on your website, check out this neat and simple widget: github.com/Vincenius/bs...

By the same token, Alfredo was just promoted to Full Professor, and I am sure the whole Wollongong is dancing in the streets. 🕺🎵🎶

My greatest 2025 accomplishment is that I pushed through a (very mundane) request that was summarily rejected by our central HR. Becoming Associate is nice and all that, but Jan vs. Kafka was the true fight of the year. 🤜🤛

While most of us are enjoying a peaceful holiday season, this horrific war is still happening. Please consider donating to the Ukrainian cause 💙💛 u24.gov.ua

G’day, mate. The night may lengthen, but it never has the final word—hate exhausts itself.

I need you to listen to and share this story - of how Trump is preparing to abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian money for his billionaire friends. It could be the greatest corruption of American foreign policy in our history. Russia gets Ukraine. Trump's friends get rich.

What. A. Line-up!!! This is going to be such an amazing event, do make sure to submit your work! 🌈❤️

Check out the amazing line up of speakers!! Please submit and share 🌟 🌈 @jankabatek.com @drbrendannolan1.bsky.social

💻🏠 Work From Home arrangements are here to stay, so let's unpack their consequences for workers' mental health! Take a look at @theconversation.com piece in which we explore the key findings of our new study 👇

“ #Working from home had a strong positive effect on women’s #MentalHealth, but only in certain circumstances..biggest gains were recorded when #women worked mainly from home while still spending some time (1 to 2 days)..on-site each week.”: buff.ly/5cO4iR4 via @jankabatek.com

Can working from home benefit your mental health? Here's the promised Conversation article, reporting on the results of our new longitudinal study. TL;DR: Hybrid work is most beneficial, and women benefit more than men. theconversation.com/whats-workin... The study itself: doi.org/10.1016/j.so...