Veugerity — Issue #2
July 2026
Here is the July 2026 edition of Veugerity, a monthly selection of my work.
Writing
Destruction, Policy, and the Evolving Consequences of Washington, DC’s 1968 Civil Disturbance — The Review of Economics and Statistics, with Leah Brooks and Jonathan Rose. We describe and analyze what happened to DC’s 14th Street, Shaw, and H Street retail corridors in the decades that followed the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. (Ungated working paper.)
Intergovernmental Grants to School Districts and Educational Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic — NBER Working Paper, with Jeffrey Clemens and Philip Hoxie. The federal government sent school districts a very large amount of pandemic aid. We evaluate its impact on schools with district poverty shares near 5% and find that the aid crowded out local revenue and did not mitigate learning losses.
A Smaller Labor Force Means a Smaller Economy — The Dispatch. An analysis of the macroeconomic consequences of low fertility and falling immigration.
This Is Your Economy on Tariffs — Home of the Brave. An update on the state of US tariff policy and some suggestions for improvement.
Media
I told Joe Kelly of The Australian that there has been “no rebirth of manufacturing in the heartland; how could there be, with extreme uncertainty over future policy and tariffs on industrial inputs? The main consequences of Trump’s second-term tariff policies have been chaos and disruption. American households have faced higher prices and businesses have seen their supply chains upended.” A belated happy Fourth!
Al Jazeera English, “This is America” — Harry Broadman and I discussed the USMCA renegotiation process (July 13).
Jessica Guynn quoted me in a USA Today article on the economic consequences of the administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Venezuelans (July 30).
Events
Filipe Campante and I taught a week-long mini-course on the politics and economics of the FIFA World Cup (July 13–17), as part of the AEI–Johns Hopkins Fellowship Exchange Program. No video, but we gave a lunch talk on the same topics for students in AEI’s Summer Honors Program, moderated by Shantanu Kamat. You can watch that here.
I moderated a panel on “Delivering Equitable Prosperity” at LibCon2026, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism’s annual conference on liberalism in the 21st century (July 16–17), with Simon Johnson, Scott Lincicome, and Sonja Trauss. No video unfortunately.
The Center for American Progress hosted an event on immigration policy, featuring Senator Cortez Masto (D-NV), on July 29. I participated as a panelist. You can watch it here.
That’s all for July. Replies and feedback are welcome, as always.
— Stan