🎤Inaugurujemy w nowym roku akademickim cykl seminaryjny CEAPS. Polecamy uwadze - spotkanie odbędzie się 16.09 o 14:00 w sali A409 @EconUW. W przypadku ewentualnych pytań zapraszamy do kontaktu z prof. Katarzyną Metelską-Szaniawską: kmetelska@wne.uw.edu.pl

Why do many governments not comply with their constitutions? Is culture an important factor? Our new article answers these questions linkedin.com/pulse/culture-c… via @LinkedIn

Culture and constitutional compliance sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

📢NEW DATA: FINANCIAL SANCTIONS📢 After a long and demanding effort, we're proud to release the Global Sanctions Data Base–Financial Sanctions, alongside the updated GSDB-R5. Deep thanks to a great team: Costas, Erdal, Gabriel, Heider, Ohyun & Sasha.👇 ideas.repec.org/p/drx/wpaper…

Culture and constitutional compliance Jerg Gutmann, Anna Lewczuk-Czerwińska, Jacek Lewkowicz, Stefan Voigt arxiv.org/abs/2608.23369 [𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚗.𝙶𝙽] 💬Accepted in European Economic Review

Everybody has heard of the Luddites, but few know Sir Thomas Maitland, the man who defeated them. Rather than using brute force to take them all out, Maitland simply identified the men he took to be ringleaders, had them arrested on evidence that was often thin, and executed them. Hit one, educate a hundred. This is the strategy that the British magazine The Economist seems to have adopted toward the new version of the Luddites: AI critics. Rather than the public execution, they use the public humiliation of the anti-AI ringleaders, with equally scant evidence. Whatever its editors intended, the critical piece against @DAcemogluMIT, published by the magazine on August 17th, functions less like a conventional assessment of scholarship than like an act of intellectual discipline. I have long criticized important parts of Daron’s work, and I am not afraid to expose weaknesses in his reasoning, as I have in the latest episode of my Capitalisn’t podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=rOnrvBzJ…. But I would never have written that piece. If The Economist had objections to his Nobel Prize, it should have raised them when it was awarded. But it did not. If it had objections to his paper on demography, it should have raised them when the paper came out. But it did not. Why does the British magazine raise these questions only now? Why does it do a review of a book that is not about AI, but only reviews the half-chapter he wrote about AI? I have read The Economist for more than thirty years. I cannot remember it ever attacking a living economist in this ad hominem way, let alone one of Daron's caliber. The piece is not really about Daron. It is a warning shot. If the Economist can humiliate the leading economist of my generation, imagine what it can do to anybody else who criticizes AI. Criticize the new incarnation of the latest technological wonder, and your weakest paper becomes your body of work. Praise it, and your weakest paper is never mentioned at all or even celebrated like a great piece of scholarship. If AI delivers even half of its promises, it will be transformative, ushering in a new era of productivity and growth, as the first industrial revolution was and possibly even more. Many professional economists only see these long-run benefits. Yet, the path to Nirvana is littered with the bodies of the people hurt during the transition. It took between 50 and 70 years after the start of the First Industrial Revolution for workers' wages to begin rising. In the meantime, life expectancy stagnated, and average height declined, a clear sign that the Dickensian stories of squalor and misery were not the product of their author’s imagination but a real account of what the country went through. Criticizing AI is not necessarily resisting progress; it is pointing out the costs it entails. Unlike 19th-century Great Britain, today, the democratic West is not forced to maximize the speed of innovation at all costs. We need a serious public debate on the costs and benefits of acceleration, with concrete proposals for minimizing transition costs. This debate needs critical voices like Daron’s. In the undemocratic Great Britain of the early 19th century, Lord Maitland was not serving the British people, but the British merchant elite, who had only to gain by putting the innovation pedal to the metal, since the costs were borne by others. In the interest of whom is The Economist publicly humiliating Daron?

Now available on our website: Gutmann, J., Metelska-Szaniawska, K. & Voigt, S. Can new constitutions tighten the reins? The effect of constitutional change on constitutional compliance. Public Choice (2026). doi.org/10.1007/s11127-025-0…

I am not happy about the Economist’s article, which feels like a hit piece. There is also a background to it, which is more troubling (as I will share at some point). I asked them to allow me to respond. I am waiting for their answer. If not in the magazine, I will share my response here.

8/ @jerggutmann, @ka_met_sza & @DrStefanVoigt, "Can New Constitutions Tighten the Reins?" New constitutions improve constitutional compliance, but only durably in democracies. In nondemocracies, any improvement is small and short-lived. link.springer.com/article/10…

IV-PPML-HDFE. We are happy to introduce an instrumental-variable Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator with high-dimensional fixed effects. We also provide a robust and user-friendly ‘ivppmlhdfe’ package for Stata and Julia. More details here 👇 ideas.repec.org/p/drx/wpaper…

Leader similarity and international sanctions advance.sagepub.com/users/93…

🚨 Out Now: Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice, edited by Richard Jong-A-Pin & Christian Bjørnskov Learn more: e-elgar.com/shop/isbn/978180… Free chapter: doi.org/10.4337/978180220775… Contributors: @Nonicoc, @fuchs_andreas, @NathanPGoodman, @jerggutmann, @humphreys_brad , @PhilWMagness

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025. US Constitution & institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom.

@majdzadehr & @jerggutmann, co-authors in The Lancet, discuss with @ShabnamvonHein how #sanctions on #Iran worsen access to vital medicines & strain the health system. They call for enforceable humanitarian exemptions and better monitoring shorturl.at/EpyMi

How much do political leaders themselves matter for international politics? At a @UniLeiden lecture on 19 Nov, @jerggutmann (@unihh) explores if countries ruled by political leaders with more similar backgrounds are less likely to sanction each other. universiteitleiden.nl/en/eve…

The nation-state foundations of constitutional compliance link.springer.com/article/10…

The next IIEA webinar is scheduled for 12 November at 17:00 CET. @majdzadehr and @jerggutmann will talk about #Sanctions and their effects on #health and #conflict. Register to join here: iraneconomics.org/webinars

1/5 Our new correspondence in @TheLancet is a warning. The reimposition of UN sanctions on Iran threatens a public health crisis, and the international community is unprepared. We argue for a new approach. doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(2… #Iran #Sanctions #GlobalHealth

Currently in FirstView: In “An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology,” @KevinLynnCope develops a dynamic method for estimating the ideology of federal judges. The Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Score (JuDJIS) is based on over 20,000 evaluations by a sample of jurists.

The other day a student asked me about the prevalence of insider trading in prediction markets. I now have an answer.