AP in Econ at @USCDornsife. I do Information Economics & more. Best friend of Spinoza (Nosik) Petrov-Libgober.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined September 2016
- Tweets6.5K
- Following1.7K
- Followers2.5K
- Likes34.9K
Pinned Tweet
New paper!!!
How does complexity relate to organization design?
And what does the answer say about how organizational hierarchy might change with new technologies like AI?
Thread below. If you don't have time for that, the picture basically summarizes the main idea.
This paper is awesome
I’m on the 2026–27 economics job market, studying how clean energy policy can get the level of investment right, and still leave unrealized benefits by getting the location wrong. 1/5
#EconJobMarket #EnergyEconomics #EnvironmentalEconomics #AppliedMicroeconomics #CleanEnergy
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
We're hiring! Please send us your best rookie JMCs
Full-consideration date: November 21. JOE link below
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
What monetary policy maximizes efficiency—the joint surplus of all households—in heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian economies (HANK)? In a canonical HANK model, the answer is the same policy as in RANK. Read on for why (1/9) nber.org/papers/w35967
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
@johannesmboehm and Chaney combine data on half a million ancient coins with a model of trade and money to reconstruct trade and consumption from AD 325 to 950. The estimates show economic activity shifting away from the Mediterranean from the 6th century.
econometricsociety.org/publi…
His closing message is "I didn't harass the people who didn't pay, the collection agency I sold their debt to did"?
Did I get that right?
With 3 days left to #ElectionDay, here’s part of the closing argument from @RogerMarshallMD.
#kansassenate
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Jim was my advisor in graduate school. I came in with a notebook of completely insane ideas, and he sat there patiently week after week helping me turn at least some of them into actual economics.
I learned so much from him intellectually. But even more so, I learned from him how to teach, how to be mentor, how to sit there, week after week listening to crazy ideas and getting excited about them along with the students. I've missed him since leaving graduate school, and I will miss him even more now that I can't see him again.
Thank you Jim, for all you've done for me, and for all the others you've touched with your brilliance and kindness.
Today I mourn the loss of a great person and economist. Jim Andreoni has been a friend and mentor since the early 1990s. Jim was a Wisconsin kid through and through. Big heart, always friendly and wise, and one of the most caring people you will ever meet.
Professionally, Jim inspired us all across areas as diverse as charitable giving and GARP. At one point I was introducing Jim for a keynote and I simply pulled out my most recent working paper and showed the first page of the references. It was all Andreoni references. There was no more to say. We lost an intellectual giant today but more importantly we lost a great human being.
Jim, we will miss you deeply my friend.
Cool ideas about how AI will change organizations. Will take a look.
I talked a bit about AI and organizations in my organization design paper, but maybe I should do it more....
But interesting predictions about how firm size might change, which I had nothing to say about.
I joined @GoogleDeepMind to develop a research program on the economics of AGI. Today, together with Andrew Koh (@andrewjkoh) and Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), we are incredibly excited to release The Economics of Intelligence, the first in a series of projects from our group on how AGI will change the economy.
How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this project, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, based on how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.
We have seen exponential increases in what AI agents can do but the broader economy seems almost remarkably unchanged. Part of the reason is that the solo AI agent is the wrong economic object; economic transformation is an equilibrium outcome where organizations compete. Looking at how intelligence functions within organizations, transformation will depend on when two key capability thresholds are crossed: competence (gains on individual skills, e.g., coding, math) and coordination (gains on ability of agents to cooperate and work together).
We show that what economic transformation looks like depends on whether AI becomes supercompetent, supercooperative, or both—the regime of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Tracking this transition shows why the real visible transformation may come from improvements in coordination—a capability most benchmarks don’t yet track. Past a certain threshold, AI capabilities can break the Coasian ceiling on firm size and lead to an economy that looks drastically different than the one we see today.
Two main takeaways:
1. To understand the path of transformation, we should be tracking agentic coordination more closely.
2. The impact of AI will likely show up in wages before market structure or employment.
We are really excited about this paper. Excited to hear people’s thoughts.
Link: institute.deepmind.com/essay…
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Special issue of Experimental Economics Games: Experiments and Behavioral Theory
Submissions open on November 15 and papers will be accepted on a rolling basis. Submissions close on June 30, 2027.
tinyurl.com/3e28dp53
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "Complementary Climate Policies for Supply and Demand" by Geir B. Asheim and Bård Harstad. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.12…
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
An expert typically knows much more than a decision maker. Aybas & Callander show that the complexity of the environment matters to cheap talk: an expert can hold power and communicate precisely, in contrast to simple environments econometricsociety.org/publi…
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Leah Hunt, a @PennStateEcon student on the job market has written a really lovely paper on diversity and merit.
Even if non-merit considerations convey no info about merit, using them in hiring can improve the average merit of hired workers.
The argument is new & yet ECON 101
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Good managers are matched with bad workers to ensure all production lines meet deadlines with important buyers. In the September issue, by Achyuta Adhvaryu @achadhvaryu Vittorio Bassi @bassi_vittorio Anant Nyshadham @AnantNyshadham and Jorge Tamayo zurl.co/jfBTB
I feel like Grok's writing is aesthetically the most AI-ish but also the kind I most prefer. So predictable and structured, I know exactly what I'm going to get. Dependable.
Claude/ChatGPT's writing feels like it's more trying to fool me. Unnatural but harder to pinpoint.
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Managerial misperceptions and heuristics lead to inefficient contract design, reducing firm performance by over 55 percent and challenging key assumptions of optimal contracting, from @fannan2316 and Collin B. Raymond nber.org/papers/w35788
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Can AI conduct qualitative interviews with thousands of people? In a new REStud paper, Friedrich Geiecke and @XJaravel develop an open-source approach that combines the depth of qualitative interviews with the scale of surveys.
1/6
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
"We characterize equilibria in a canonical class of economies with endogenous production networks, showing that log-prices equal a min-max over networks of a primitive affine function of log-productivities."
NEW in @nberpubs: nber.org/papers/w35909
1000%.
I generally have no problem with AI if it's being disclosed; in many cases it can be a positive (e.g., someone used refine/refine competitor check).
But obfuscating AI use is frankly an insult--in the same way that failing to write/present as carefully as one could is.
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Very happy to share a new paper, “Technology Bottlenecks: Measuring Where AI Could Raise the Value of Work It Cannot Yet Do.”
AI exposure measures ask about the work AI is capable of doing. We ask instead where the marginal value of work AI cannot yet do may rise as AI speeds up the rest of the job.
To do so, we employ 288 million U.S. job postings mapped line by line to their closest O*NET tasks and GPT-4 feasibility ratings from Eloundou et al. (2024) to construct a measure, “bottleneck pressure,” for each task in each occupation that posts it.
Using a simple task-based framework, we derive this pressure at the task level, showing that for an AI-infeasible task it is the exposure of the occupation that posts it, so the same task can face very different bottleneck pressure in different jobs.
Reporting bottleneck pressure alongside AI exposure shows both the scope for AI to perform work and where improving the work it cannot do may pay off more as capabilities expand.
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
Apropos of nothing, a friend received a rejection from a journal this week. R1’s ref report was obviously AI generated. 100% according to Pangram! Very, very likely that they didn’t even read the paper. And the editor just went with it.
What are we even doing here? If you want AI feedback, you could put the paper through it yourself. We go to journals, presumably, because they have access to experts. “Experts” delegating their thinking to AI is very clearly a violation of this social compact. What is the point of paying hundreds of dollars and waiting months for feedback from referees who pretend that they are contributing something?
I’m not anti-AI. I’m not against using it in refereeing either, if it’s done thoughtfully. But there are too many who are acting like it’s augmenting their expertise, when in fact they are letting it replace their thinking entirely. That’s a very dangerous norm to establish. If you replace your thinking entirely with AI, eventually you will be replaced.
Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places) retweeted
I’m very opinionated. So it’s nearly impossible for me to hear someone’s arguments and *not* find something I disagree with. (This includes reading things I myself wrote years - or weeks - ago.) And yet the amazing Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown has put out a long, detailed video on the future of mathematics, in which I cannot find a single flaw. I’ll be sending this to every PhD student and postdoc I know, and strongly recommend everyone watch it.
youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI…
(Of course I tried to say many of the same things in my conversation with Thomas Koberda. But Grant’s version, unsurprisingly, does an infinitely better job at communicating those ideas!)
