Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 12, 2025: good tweets
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Menu cost
12 min read
Jon Steinsson's tweet about menu cost models fitting data well is a central point in the article. Menu costs explain why firms don't adjust prices continuously and have major implications for monetary policy and macroeconomic models.
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Coase theorem
14 min read
The article directly references Acemoglu's 'Why not a political Coase theorem?' framing. Understanding the original Coase theorem about transaction costs and property rights is essential context for this political economy extension.
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Common knowledge (logic)
11 min read
The article criticizes an author for writing about common knowledge without understanding the concept. This formal game theory concept about shared knowledge structures is fascinating and often misunderstood.
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Good tweets
^Jon Steinsson: “the menu cost model fits the data so well it’s amazing”
^without digging into the details, and based on the following exchange, this sure sounds like what Acemoglu framed as “Why not a political Coase theorem?”:
^composition bias is plausibly important here… I am always citing blog posts from 2014 around here (sorry! retvrn!) but: here’s Scott Sumner and Dietz Vollrath a decade ago:
The second idea that Scott talks about is whether we should be impressed by French output per hour being as high as the U.S. In France, the high youth unemployment rate and early retirement rate mean that the employed population is concentrated in the 30-55 age range. If this age range tends to be particularly productive compared to other age groups, then shouldn’t French output per hour be much higher than in the U.S., where we employ lots of sub-30 and over-55 workers?
Has anyone done the adjustment (and looked at whether it could explain not just levels but also changes)?
^bizarre to write a book on common knowledge and then to seem not to understand the concept! (Based on the conversation here, at least)
From the archives: I think about this tweet at least once a month,
State of the job market
^thread continues
Public goods
Charts
Fin
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