Posts

A home for my writing, research, data projects, teaching materials, and other things I’ve made or found worth sharing.

The Hairy Chart - Some Plots Have Tell-Tales

Project
Data Visualization

The federal funds rate & its often hairy predictions (often hairily bad predictions). An example of a bitemporal plot.

Oct 18, 2026

The Hairy Chart, Interactive

Project
Data Visualization

The federal funds target rate since 1982, with the paths expected for it at each past date, from four free sources.

Oct 17, 2026

A century of American mortality in one data visualization

Project
Data Visualization

This project builds a Lexis plot of US mortality from public data, then makes an expanded interactive version, running from 1934 to 2024, by sex, with fifty mortality causes.

Aug 21, 2026

US mortality, interactive Lexis plot explorer

Project
Data Visualization

An interactive Lexis diagram of American mortality: every age and every calendar year from 1934 to 2024 on one grid, colored by death rates, or whether they were falling or rising.

Aug 20, 2026

PCT GeoGuesser

Project
Thru-Hiking

How Well do you know the PCT? PCT GeoGuesser is a photo-based guessing game that challenges you to identify where along the Pacific Crest Trail each image was taken using clues from the landscape, geology, and vegetation.

Jun 1, 2026

Portland Postcard Company

Project
Postcards

The Pacific Northwest’s best historic postcards. Reprints matched to the originals as closely as possible in paper, size, and finish.

Mar 1, 2026

My 2025 Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike - With Hand Drawn Data Visualizations

Thru-Hiking
Project
Postcards

I spent months thru-hiking the PCT, logging the miles, aches, emotions, and assorted stuff of life while on foot in the wilderness. I aggregated all that into this collection of illustrated stats, trail stories, and postcards.

Dec 20, 2025

Hotelling’s Minimum Differentiation Principle in a Continuous-Time Experiment with Price and Location Choices

Economics

Hotelling’s famous vendors may have no stable equilibrium, but in the lab they still gravitate toward one another, clustering near the center while continually adjusting prices and positions. The experiment reveals a market shaped less by a final resting point than by the speed of movement itself, with faster adjustment sometimes encouraging coordination and sometimes unsettling it.

Apr 27, 2023

Subjects in the lab, activists in the field: public goods and punishment

Economics

What happens when the people in an economics experiment are not students, but real-world activists? By bringing a public-goods game into the field in Mumbai, we uncover how experience with collective action shapes people’s willingness to accept cooperation, and to punish those who refuse it, even at a personal cost.

Sep 1, 2020

Aggregate Dynamics in a Large Virtual Economy: Prices and Real Activity in Team Fortress 2

Economics

Using a nearly complete record of transactions from Team Fortress 2, this paper constructs prices and macroeconomic indicators for a large virtual economy built around decentralized barter. It shows how certain goods emerged as currencies, identifies price rigidities created by competing forms of money, and documents speculative bubbles following announcements by the game’s designers.

May 20, 2016

Emirati women do not shy away from competition: Evidence from a patriarchal society in transition

Economics

Do women shy away from competition, or does that depend on the society around them? An experiment with Emirati university students produces a striking departure from the established literature, offering a window into how gender, culture, and changing institutions may shape competitive behavior.

Feb 29, 2016

Emergence of networks and market institutions in a large virtual economy

Economics

Using more than 40 million transactions from Team Fortress 2, this paper traces how a large virtual economy evolved from pure barter toward monetary exchange. Network analysis reveals the rapid emergence of commodity money, market makers, brokers, and other specialized intermediaries, showing how economic institutions can arise spontaneously even when they are not built into a market’s design.

Feb 29, 2016

Market concentration and the responsiveness of prices and mark-ups☆

Economics

Why do studies reach such different conclusions about how mark-ups behave over the business cycle? By bringing price-setting into the laboratory, we show that part of the answer may lie in the market itself: the same economic shock can produce very different pricing behavior depending on how many firms are competing.

Feb 29, 2016

Hotelling revisits the lab: equilibration in continuous and discrete time

Economics

This paper asks a deceptively simple question: does the way competitors adjust their choices determine whether they reach the equilibrium economists predict? In the lab, firms repeatedly miss the mark when everyone moves at once, but allowing them to reposition continuously transforms a restless scramble into a remarkably orderly pattern.

Dec 1, 2015

Software for continuous game experiments

Economics

What changes when laboratory games unfold continuously, with participants able to react and adapt in real time? This article introduces the software we built to explore that question, opening the door to richer, more visually intuitive experiments in strategic behavior.

Jan 8, 2014

Solow Growth Model - Videos

Teaching

A video tutorial and walk-through of the Solow growth model, beginning with the basic setup and assumptions, the capital accumulation equation, the steady state, the Solow diagram, transition dynamics, and convergence. The model is then extended to incorporate population growth and labor-augmenting technological progress.

Dec 20, 2012

A Basic Beer in Utility (BIU) Model

Economics

This is what happens when your monetary economics study group starts homebrewing while working through problem sets.

Aug 3, 2010
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