What I’m Doing Now

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a now page, read this. Disclaimer: I’ve omitted personal items since they wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, be of interest to anyone else.

Work

Beyond the usual duties of a professor in a PhD-granting department - teaching, research, service, and advising - I run the graduate programs for our department and serve as coeditor of a journal. That means I spend a lot of time sending and replying to email.

I have multiple research projects in progress, mostly catching up on things I failed to finish due to the pandemic. My research projects are at the intersection of macroeconomics, energy, labor, and time series econometrics. I’ve spent my entire career studying the adjustment of the macroeconomy to shocks. Right now that means understanding the role of labor market adjustment.

Website

I add posts to my website as it fits my schedule. I enjoy writing but haven’t had much time to write for my website during the pandemic.

Open Source

I maintain some open source projects. One involves embedding R in other languages, calling D functions from R, and writing a compiler for R. Another is a package called tstools that makes it easier to do time series analysis with R.

Learning

I’m working through Dynamic Economics by Adda and Cooper (2005). On a completely different note, I’m picking up web development skills as I need them. The list of things I plan to learn “someday” is long, and it includes computer science topics (machine learning, compilers, type theory), math (functional analysis, category theory), econometrics (time series, causality), statistics, large-scale applications, and philosophy, but there is no hope I will ever work through the full list. For some reason, the older I get, the more my preferences have shifted in the direction of math and proofs. One of the unexpected benefits of being an editor has been the opportunity to learn so much about a wide range of topics.

Social Media

Social media is not a good fit for my personality. I do make occasional posts to a lightly-followed Twitter account. From time to time I’ll post comments on Hacker News, Reddit, and the D programming language forum using my last name. I keep my Twitter account active because a lot of good information (working papers, economic data releases, etc.) gets posted there. It’s a constant battle to mute/block toxic individuals, spreaders of misinformation, and bots, but overall the benefits of Twitter far outweigh the costs, unlike platforms like Facebook.