Economist and social science aficionado at ETH Zurich using experiments and data to find what works in public and social policy
Zurich, Switzerland
Joined August 2015
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How legal barriers to the labor market for #Refugees restrict their employment options and lower their wages and employment even years after arrival?
🚨New WP with @acahrens, Dominik Hangartner, Michael Siegenthaler, and Selina Kurrer 🚨
🧵by @acahrens has a short summary
👇
New WP 🚨
Why do refugees, and immigrants more generally, have lower employment and wages than observationally equivalent native citizens—even years after arrival in the host country?
Link: docs.iza.org/dp15901.pdf
A thread 🧵 1/11
Andreas Beerli retweeted
AI is the most transformative technology of our era.
That opens up an exciting set of Research opportunities.
@professor_ajay, @akorinek and I lay out nine grand challenges for economists in this new essay.
Transformative AI's potential impact demands new approaches to research on work, growth, inequality, and more.
@erikbryn, @professor_ajay, and @akorinek outline nine "grand challenges" in a new piece for @CACMmag.
Read their full agenda here: cacm.acm.org/research/a-rese…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Very interesting new report from @AnthropicAI on how AI has changed work inside Anthropic. They use their own HR data, agent logs, calendars and hiring scorecards, and they are upfront about what the data can and cannot tell us. A few thoughts below.
(anthropic.com/research/emplo…)
Andreas Beerli retweeted
The classic case: you start with a weak idea. If you talk and think about it with others, you make progress to better ideas.
If you talk and think about it with AI, it dresses up your idea in economic jargon, contract theory etc., now you have the same bad idea, but it's expressed in enough jargon that it's a little harder to tell that it's a bad idea.
It also looks very impressive, look at all that economic logic! You feel like you're really progressing as an academic thinker and writer, but in fact you're in a much worse place than when you started. 4/
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Amazing to see research move from the lab to real-world clinical utility - congrats to the team on this milestone & @TheLancet paper!
Today @TheLancet published our AMIE study with @BIDMC_Medicine, the first prospective study of patient-facing conversational diagnostics in a real clinic.
AMIE is a research system people can chat with before doctors appointments. Testing AMIE outside the lab with real urgent care patients showed how technology can help gather medical histories safely. Clinicians reported that the summaries helped them prepare for visits in 75% of cases and influenced their approach to care in more than half. AMIE’s differential diagnoses also matched the doctors’ final diagnoses 90% of the time giving clinicians more time to focus on patient care.
It’s Google’s first-ever paper in The Lancet’s main journal!
Andreas Beerli retweeted
With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here's what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally:
✅The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.)
✅ Field experiments will rise in value and generally making "connections" with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand
✅ Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it
✅Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts.
✅Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage.
⚠️Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this "bread and butter" research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for "peer-reviewed" research.
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Interesting new QJE paper shows inflation gets more attention when people are more exposed to it and when they have past inflation experiences. Those with inflation top of mind follow more inflation news, raise inflation expectations more; firms are more likely to raise prices.
Andreas Beerli retweeted
the future of academic papers!
Thrilled that #paper2agent is published in @nature today!
Scientific knowledge is traditionally stored in passive papers. Paper2Agent transforms papers into virtual authors that answer questions, apply its methods and collaborate w/ other paper agents to make new discoveries 🧵
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Important result from our Google AI x Econ team. Field evidence for pre existing expertise favoring the ability to learn from AI assisted work.
Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice, from @davidautor, Tanya Rodchenko, Josh Martin, Zanna Iscenko, Scott Strand, David Pearl, and Melissa Ferere nber.org/papers/w35720
Andreas Beerli retweeted
This is a big bust, folks
The first large scale (N>8000 participants) for lowering Lp(a) did not meet its primary endpoint for reducing adverse cardiovascular outcomes (vs placebo) novartis.com/news/media-rele…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
🚨 About to submit an Econ paper?
I just updated the Econ Journal Matchmaker:
🔗 scholar-tools.com/
I incorporated some of the most requested features.
#EconTwitter Please help spread the word by reposting. 🙏
More details below 👇
Andreas Beerli retweeted
My latest piece for @ScienceMagazine.
On Experiences and Economic Decision-making!
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
🧠 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁
When are firms willing to take a chance on workers switching occupations?
Research by Jeremias Klaeui, Daniel Kopp, Rafael Lalive & Michael Siegenthaler finds that occupation switchers are less likely to be contacted by employers, but transferable skills, relevant experience, and tighter labor markets can substantially narrow the gap.
🔗 rfberlin.com/research-insigh…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
📢 Hiring: Predoctoral Researcher @KOF_ETH to work with me on an SNSF-funded project on profit shifting, tax competition & tax havens. 70%, 1-year, starts Nov 2026. Great fit for anyone into public econ/taxation 👇
jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/12003?…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Health outcomes in the USA are increasingly politically polarized.
Declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness (even for issues unrelated to COVID-19) is leaving conservatives vulnerable to preventable health risks. nature.com/articles/s41562-0…
Andreas Beerli retweeted
What happens when someone receives $1,000/month for 3 years? The effects don't stop with the recipient.
In this new NBER working paper, we examine what changed for partners, households, friends & family after 1,000 people received $1,000/month with 2,000 in a control group. 🧵1/
Andreas Beerli retweeted
I have a new working paper out, on a curious fact about optimal experimental design
It turns out, contrary to some conventional wisdom, that independent randomization can be better than complete randomization (which holds the share of treated fixed) when you know potential outcomes are bounded. The paper shows this in a minimax setting and derives optimal estimators that leverage random variation in the share treated
Big thanks to @borusyak, Evan Munro, @jondr44, Kevin Chen, Paul GP, and others for conversations that led to this unusually theoretical note. Other comments welcome!
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Cool job alert: Oeindrila Dube is hiring a Program Director to replicate and expand the Sit-D police training program.
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries (and 97,220 citizens)
They find that a communitarian approach, where societies foster environments that care for others, is highly effective at boosting a nation’s overall happiness.
The scientists identified 56 specific factors that were significantly associated with happiness or life satisfaction and found that they fit into 5 categories.
The first driver is a society that allows for individual emancipation. This involves empowering people to make autonomous choices. Fighting for equality did not necessarily make the advocates themselves happier. However, living in an inclusive society raised the average happiness of the entire population.
The second driver is fostering Enlightenment ideas and institutions. This category includes valuing science, human rights, and democratic participation. Embracing these ideals operates through both pathways, directly benefiting the individual and shaping a better societal context.
The third driver involves satisfying basic human needs, such as access to food, shelter, and healthcare. When individuals feel secure in these basic resources, they report much higher levels of personal happiness.
The fourth driver, providing effective governing and security institutions, behaves similarly. Trusting institutions like the police, banks, and the justice system strongly improves an individual’s personal happiness.
The fifth driver, favoring close in-group ties, revealed a complex relationship. “One of the most surprising findings was that some mechanisms operate in opposite directions at the individual and societal levels. For example, feeling closely connected to one’s neighborhood is associated with greater individual happiness.” But when people only trust their immediate family or neighborhood, they may develop prejudice against outsiders.
psypost.org/scientists-ident… identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries (and 97,220 citizens)
They find that a communitarian approach, where societies foster environments that care for others, is highly effective at boosting a nation’s overall happiness.
The scientists identified 56 specific factors that were significantly associated with happiness or life satisfaction and found that they fit into 5 categories.
The first driver is a society that allows for individual emancipation. This involves empowering people to make autonomous choices. Fighting for equality did not necessarily make the advocates themselves happier. However, living in an inclusive society raised the average happiness of the entire population.
The second driver is fostering Enlightenment ideas and institutions. This category includes valuing science, human rights, and democratic participation. Embracing these ideals operates through both pathways, directly benefiting the individual and shaping a better societal context.
The third driver involves satisfying basic human needs, such as access to food, shelter, and healthcare. When individuals feel secure in these basic resources, they report much higher levels of personal happiness.
The fourth driver, providing effective governing and security institutions, behaves similarly. Trusting institutions like the police, banks, and the justice system strongly improves an individual’s personal happiness.
The fifth driver, favoring close in-group ties, revealed a complex relationship. “One of the most surprising findings was that some mechanisms operate in opposite directions at the individual and societal levels. For example, feeling closely connected to one’s neighborhood is associated with greater individual happiness.” But when people only trust their immediate family or neighborhood, they may develop prejudice against outsiders.
psypost.org/scientists-ident…,
Andreas Beerli retweeted
🚨 PhD position in Public Finance 🚨
I'm looking for a PhD student to work with me at @KOFETH_en/@ETH on international taxation: profit shifting, labor market effects of tax competition, and the political economy of international tax rules.
Deadline: 30 Sep 2026 ⬇️
Andreas Beerli retweeted
Hot yoga reduces depression symptoms.
Eight weeks of yoga in 105°F reduced depression scores by an average of 13 points in adults with moderate depression, and 44% of participants became nearly symptom-free.
There was also a dose-response relationship - each additional session was associated with nearly another 1-point reduction in depression scores.
It's not a standalone replacement for mental health care, but heat + movement is so powerful for physical and mental health.
