Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 5, 2026: good tweets
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
AI and Your Research
^have i made this joke before [reference]
^link. Not necessarily fun reading?, and not just a worthwhile read for grad students
Good tweets
^gif
^wary of all new administrative bureaucracy proposals but
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026
One of the great promises of LLMs is that they have reduced linguistic barriers for non-native English speakers in academia by at least an order of magnitude.
Economics, my own field, is 99% in English. I have written a few papers and a book in Spanish but, for all practical
2:11 AM · Apr 1, 2026 · 60.8K Views
12 Replies · 86 Reposts · 499 Likes
^usefully thought-provoking back-and-forth here on the use of AI in writing for non-native english speakers
Public goods
Charts
John Gramlich@johngramlich
Chart: Births to unauthorized immigrants in the US, 1990-2023 pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…
9:28 PM · Mar 31, 2026 · 104 Views
Arin Dube@arindube
A striking fact I learnt researching my book: For those in the bottom half, much of the real wage growth between 1979 and 2019 happened over just 7 "tight" years.
For top wages, full employment wasn't a big deal. For bottom wages, it was the nearly the whole game.
Arin Dube @arindube
What's behind the ebbs and flows in wages over the past century?
That’s what my forthcoming book, The Wage Standard, is all about: how rules, norms, and power in the labor market shape who shares in growth.
Coming out March 31. Pre-order here: https://t.co/UG2rv4a1Oc
9:30 PM · Mar 31, 2026 · 101K Views
9 Replies · 103 Reposts · 354 Likes
Sam Eshaghoff@SamEshaghoff
🚨The Q1 2026 data is in. This is my second quarter collecting the most up-to-date data on New York City rents and integrating them into an interactive heatmap. Link at the bottom.
1:16 PM · Apr 1, 2026 · 294K Views
23 Replies · 28 Reposts · 709 Likes
Jack Meyer 🏛️@Jackbmeyer
I would be interested to see a breakdown by cohort. Labor force participation for ages 20-24 has been falling consistently and never saw the same post-Covid rebound as prime-age employment. With AI disruption seemingly concentrated in new hires, the growing gap is concerning.
Callum Williams @econcallum
US prime-age employment rate is close to an all-time high. This is simply not consistent with large-scale AI disruption to the labour market
12:38 PM · Apr 3, 2026 · 3.35K Views
2 Reposts · 10 Likes
Quick Thoughts@lthlnkso
Data source goes back to 2010. If you plot all the years you can see this looks ~typical.
NYC usually has a pothole fixing spike in March, though the spikes have been smaller since 2019.
Paul E Williams @PEWilliams_
We now have an answer to the question of "is NYC just doing good social media posts about service delivery, or is service delivery actually changing?"
1:44 PM · Apr 3, 2026 · 11.8K Views
5 Replies · 4 Reposts · 117 Likes
Callum Williams@econcallum
@rohindhar Rohin I don't understand, you seem certain a boom is underway and I take your view seriously, but Zillow data shows that SF house prices are still way down on their covid levels. See here for Pac Heights. What gives??
3:19 PM · Mar 27, 2026 · 600 Views
1 Reply · 3 Likes
Oliver Kim@oliverwkim
@adam_tooze's post about Nigeria sparked some curiosity—had Claude scatter regional income dispersion vs GDP per capita.
Poor countries tend to have more income inequality between regions, though the negative relationship isn't super strong. Nigeria is also far from the worst!
Adam Tooze @adam_tooze
Nigeria is a country of truly extreme regional inequality. The ratio between per capita income in Lagos State and Kano is ten to one, however your measure it. More on today's Chartbook Top Links:
5:51 PM · Apr 1, 2026 · 9.34K Views
9 Replies · 18 Reposts · 80 Likes
Ernie Tedeschi@ernietedeschi
@TimDuy @zeynep Yes, here it is backed up to 1990.
4:49 PM · Mar 6, 2026 · 6.1K Views
1 Reply · 21 Likes
Fin
^truth nuke tweet