Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 5, 2026: paper summaries
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.
Idiosyncratic favorites
Charles Taylor@ctaylor463
1/ What moved people before states, markets, or borders? We turn ancient DNA into a direct measure of prehistoric migration. When two ancient individuals share a long segment of inherited DNA (identity-by-descent, IBD), they share a recent ancestor, so someone in that lineage
NBER @nberpubs
Using ancient DNA data to measure migration over the past 10,000 years shows that human mobility followed climate corridors and migration acted as adaptation to climate change, from Peter Huybers, Marco Tabellini, @ctaylor463, and Francesco Toti https://t.co/tWNCgY1Fw7
10:11 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 38K Views
5 Replies · 60 Reposts · 222 Likes
Charles Taylor@ctaylor463
2/ The hypothesis: know-how was tied to environment. Knowing how to farm a cool growing season or herd an arid steppe didn't transfer to a new climate, so people should have moved toward places that felt ecologically familiar, matching what their skills were built for.
10:11 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 3.25K Views
1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 28 Likes
Charles Taylor@ctaylor463
3/ And people and populations moved far. Linked pairs span 1,550 km on average. One Yamnaya-associated burial near Samara (c. 3200 BCE) is closely related to people 2,600 km east in Siberia and 2,200 km west in Europe within a few centuries: one lineage spanning the continent.
10:11 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 3.66K Views
1 Reply · 7 Reposts · 35 Likes
Charles Taylor@ctaylor463
4/ And how far people moved tracked how they lived. Pastoralists were the most mobile group in our data; their wealth, livestock, walks to new pasture, while farmers and foragers stayed closer to home.
10:11 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 5.88K Views
1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 19 Likes
Charles Taylor@ctaylor463
9/ People even migrated to stay in their climate. When home warmed, later generations tended to settle somewhere cooler, partly offsetting the shift. Migration kept their environment roughly constant as the climate moved underfoot.
10:11 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 808 Views
1 Reply · 16 Likes
More paper summaries
^additional useful commentary from Guy Lichtinger & Seyed M Hosseini (new Substack!) and from Brian Albrecht
Stefan Nagel@ProfStefanNagel
New paper 📢, short 🧵, ungated link at the end
NBER @nberpubs
Monetary policy leaning against experience-based inflation expectations generates secular movements in real interest rates beyond changes in the natural rate of interest, from @ProfStefanNagel https://t.co/mA8HXelZsv
2:39 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 7.58K Views
1 Reply · 12 Reposts · 53 Likes
^…xD…
Christian Vedel@ChristianVedel
Machine Learning is causing massive leaps everywhere. Also in Economic History. There is a conversation we need to have. What ought to be the new scientific standards? Together with two coauthors . Our argument: We should maybe care a bit less about accuracy... 📝🧵
2:51 PM · Jun 30, 2026 · 3.96K Views
1 Reply · 11 Reposts · 30 Likes
Matt Burgess@matthewgburgess
New working paper, led by @appliedkath (yes, another one; she's on a roll this year!).
"Can homophily explain public underestimation of climate policy support?"
Link below.
We start with data from a previous survey study (Sparkman et al.) finding that the U.S. public
11:54 AM · Jul 1, 2026 · 1.52K Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 6 Likes
Sophia Kazinnik@SophiaKazinnik
1/ People feel inflation firsthand and everyday when they get groceries, gas, pay rent. They also hear competing stories about what caused it.
I analyzed 350,000+ podcast episodes to see which inflation stories people actually hear.
11:23 PM · Jun 30, 2026 · 12.8K Views
3 Replies · 10 Reposts · 64 Likes
