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Latest — 20 Apr 2025

A Textbook Paradox: The Puzzle of Price Dispersion in E-Books

The same e-book sells at very different prices on different platforms. For instance, the e-book version of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited sells at $25.57 on Amazon and $39.99 on Google. (You can also buy a DRM-Free version for $39.99 on CUP). We can&

More issues

Scan to Save: Arbitrage Between Paper and Digital

Remember when e‑books were supposed to undercut paper editions—no printing, warehousing, shipping, or returns to pay for? Fast‑forward ten years, and you’ll often pay more for a DRM‑locked Kindle file than for a used paperback plus scanning. Case in point: * The Supreme Court and the

Breaking the Monotony: Calibrating Without Preserving Monotonicity

Calibration refers to how well the predicted probabilities of an event match the actual frequencies of that event occurring. For instance, when a calibrated model predicts that an event has a 20% probability of occurring, that event occurs 20% of the time. The intuition extends to continuous values. When a

Uncorrelated Tariffs

We know the means look a little off (not to say anything about the ends): The EU, like the United States, has generally low tariffs; the average tariff it charges on US goods is less than 3 percent. So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no

(Don't) Feed the Robots

"My site [with] modest traffic (~1,000 visitors per day) went from serving ~1GB/hr (to tons of AI crawlers!) to ~50MB/hr in traffic" Can you tell what was the point where I 1. Manually blocked a few AI crawlers 2. Moved my nameserver to Cloudflare plus

The GitHub Sampler

GitHub is the world's largest developer platform, making it a compelling place to build developer tools and study software development. However, with over half a billion repositories and an API that limits responses to a thousand results, it feels nigh impossible to answer even simple questions like, "

Not Eating Free Lunch? The Puzzle of Unspent Allotted Money

"[T]he share of unspent money under the MPLAD scheme at the end of the tenure of the current Lok Sabha nearly doubled to 16 per cent compared to 8.7 per cent in the 16th Lok Sabha (2014-19)." The Business Standard p.s. You can read the

Results May Vary

Economics papers are reproducible but not very robust

Coding At a Distance

Senior professors have long lived the future of coding. Professors ask. Underlings code. Professors critique the output, e.g., "I prefer statistical significance stars for the betas but not the constant term." Underlings revise the code. The cycle continues. Something similar can play out at companies. Now, thanks

No Comparative Advantage

The case for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage. For example, Indians “pay” for Snapchat (and, let’s say, allow it to repatriate the profits) because Americans are better at building it, and Indians are better at producing something else. The example doesn’t land. Indians