David Johnson
@davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
94 followers 160 following 150 posts
Stay at home dad moonlighting as an associate professor of economics. Mostly interested in gun policy and fishing.
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davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Guys. 7 with 4 preps across 3 different addresses is a bit much.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
I honestly can't get over how terrible Brightspace is. I miss blackboard so much.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Halfway serious question: Can we call leaders "Authoritarian Christian Nationalists" without getting into trouble? Or does it need to be "Christian Nationalist with Authoritarian leanings"?
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
btw, when the outcome variable is logged gun sales, a panel regression (county fixed effect) with only year fixed effects has an r^2 of over .9. the within unit r^2 is also near .6.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
You can do the same exercise with actual gun sales! year fixed effects are even more similar across the two outcome variables (gun sales and estimated gun sales).
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Oh! The R^2 for a model estimating logged cc permits at the county level using ONLY year and county fixed effects is.....

R-squared = 0.9356
Adj R-squared = 0.9313
Within R-sq. = 0.6761
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
ta-da!

Almost parallel!

Which makes perfect sense because not every permit is going to come with a new gun
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Not great but not bad either. Blows up a little later in the panel ☹

But here is a thought: a lot of these CC permits are going to be renewals. So what if I also control for the number of permits issued 5 years in the past (common permit length)?
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Then do the same with our logged gun sales estimates.

If we are right, then both models should produce similar year fixed effects.

Here is what happens when I try it:
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
@troach.bsky.social and I's shitck is changes in gun sales are national vibes, & refs at some of the leading economic journals don't seem to buy it.

There is a natural test though: estimate logged county-level CC permits using fixed effects panel and only year fixed effects.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
~36% of the guns recovered in DC from November 2021 to August 2025 were Glocks.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
I think it is that but also law enforcement. I have a paper that looks at it in detail, FWIIW. Heavily influenced by the Kansas City Gun Experiment.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Watching Time Cop on Netflix. Whew. Movie goes hard.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
August and September are generally pretty average in terms of accidents (February is the low).

Hasn’t been this low since COVID.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Also a big drop in traffic accidents.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Just submitted the proofs for my job market paper from 2015.

Whew, what a journey.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
I ”jokingly“ suggested to my wife we put this guy out.

After she found out about Kimmel, she became very open to it.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Use the wayback machine to see how much of the tariff you had to eat! should be easy to find historical prices.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Sadly, I think you are right. Everyone can grasp it, so it ends up sucking all the air out of the room. Lowest common denominator.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
This isn’t a new thing. I have paper that used stormfront as a group. Part of the experiment asked students how much the agreed with stormfront’s motto/description. I was taken aback by how much agreement/support there was among undergraduates.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
This wasn't surprising to me.

Population tends to change in a linear way, while gun transactions change quite a bit y2y.

In other words, you are taking something that varies a lot and dividing it by something that doesn't, so of course, the numerator is going to dominate.
davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
Got a comment that the accuracy of our gun sales estimates is just due to population (e.g., pop grows -> sales grow).

Big nope there. Correlation between standardized gun sales estimates per capita and NICS gun checks per capita is about .8.