Education

arXiv will ban authors who submit papers with LLM mistakes

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

In the world of academic preprints, arXiv has long been the go-to platform for researchers to share work quickly. But with the explosion of generative AI tools, the repository is drawing a line in the sand.

On May 14, 2026, arXiv moderator Thomas Dietterich announced a clarified enforcement policy. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that authors didn’t properly check LLM-generated content, all listed authors face serious consequences.

What counts as “Incontrovertible Evidence”? The policy targets clear signs of unchecked AI output, including:

  • Hallucinated or fake references
  • Meta-comments left by the model (e.g., “Here is a 200-word summary; would you like me to make any changes?” or placeholder instructions like “fill in the real numbers from your experiments”)
  • Other obvious errors, plagiarized text, biased content, or misleading claims generated by AI

arXiv’s Code of Conduct already holds every author fully responsible for the entire paper’s contents.

The Penalty

  • One-year ban from submitting new papers to arXiv.
  • After the ban, future submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue before arXiv will host them.

At first researchers discussing the policy online seemed happy about the one-year ban, but when I pointed out that it is essentially a ban for life to use it at a pre-print venue, some people became nervous.

Why now? arXiv has been overwhelmed by low-effort “AI slop.” These papers are marked by fabricated citations and shallow summaries. This erodes trust in the entire preprint ecosystem.

In response to the complaints (someone like me would be worried that I’ll somehow let an error slip through and then be banned for life from posting working papers), Scientific Director Steinn Sigurðsson shared:

on the whole @arxiv flap about hallucinated references etc

you don’t see the stuff we reject… some of it is really really egregious

the decision to impose additional consequences is largely to throttle that stuff so n00bs and bad actors don’t trash us trying repeatedly

This is the problem that we face with every internet forum. A few bad actors ruin it for good people.

In 2022 I wrote Content moderation strategy

Elon Musk buying Twitter is the big news this week. He wants to enhance free speech on the site and, according to him, make it more open and fun. Some fans are hoping that he will make the content moderation and ban policy more transparent. Maybe that’s possible. 

If no one can be banned, then bad actors will bring the whole platform down. Inevitably, good people get caught in the net, and it’s devastating to be locked out of a platform where your peers are sharing.

However, if you want to be taken seriously by tech folk then ask for a system that is possible. A substantially better experience might be incompatible with the site being free to users.

Part of the problem that I don’t hear people talking about is that a free platform is not easily compatible with good customer service.

For some not-fake work and citations: Buchanan et al. (2024) provided early clear evidence that a mark of LLM-written work is fake citations. And, Buchanan and Hickman (2024) show that certain framings can prompt people to be more suspicious of AI-generated writing, such that they are pushed toward doing a fact-check before believing all claims.

Buchanan, Joy, and William Hickman. “Do people trust humans more than ChatGPT?.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 112 (2024): 102239.

Buchanan, Joy, Stephen Hill, and Olga Shapoval. “ChatGPT hallucinates non-existent citations: Evidence from economics.” The American Economist 69.1 (2024): 80-87.

Which Business Programs Require Economics?

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Disclaimer: This post might throw shade.

The vast majority of business majors across the US are required to take two or more Economics courses. You can look across the spectrum. All of the top 20 business schools require two or more econ classes. In fact, Wharton is the top-ranked business school and their business program is actually an *economics* program. They don’t have finance/accounting/business degrees. Instead, they have an Economics degree with the various business concentrations. Again – the top business school in the country is an Economics program.

What about at the other end of the spectrum? I live in Florida. Every single Florida state school requires both Micro and Macroeconomics for business majors. These schools include everything from Florida State University to the local Florida state college down the road. I didn’t look at other state-run higher education systems in other states. There are a lot of states…

I teach at a private Catholic university. We’re listed in something called ‘The Newman Guide’ which recommends 17 Catholic schools. Many of these are liberal arts schools, but the list also includes Catholic University of America, which is an R1. Most of these schools also require two or more Economics classes in their Business major programs. The only exception is University of Dallas, which has Economics in the core curriculum.*

So, overwhelmingly undergraduate business programs across the country require two economics courses. But, why? The students are often not happy to be there, and I’ve even heard business professors demean the math as performatively rigorous and superfluous. They argue that plenty of people get rich or are otherwise successful without all of the quantitative skills that economics leverages.

I think that the fear of math is both a red herring and a scapegoat. Rather, Economics confronts students with the liberal arts – whether they like it or not. Be careful. Liberal Arts are not the same as Humanities. They include argumentation, the ability to write and communicate, clear and consistent logic, and, yes, even math. Accounting can tell you how to keep track of the money, but it doesn’t include a theory for when you should produce more or less in contrast to your competitors. Finance does better since it has the time value of money and ‘with vs without’ analysis. That’s closer to marginal thinking. But finance lacks a theory of markets outside of portfolio theory and arbitrage.**

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The Empire Strikes Back against AI Cheating

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

People are considering whether university evaluations can survive in the AI age. Hollis Robbins wrote on Substack: “How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom“

Robbins emphasizes class size and teaching load against the time of an instructor.  An instructor teaching 4 sections with 100 students each is very limited in their ability to monitor and prosecute AI teaching. It’s worse if this instructor is on a temporary contract.

Limited eyes and hands and human attention really are a constraint here, at least for now. Some people see AI tools in the hands of students as the end of education itself.

I have been tweeting my replies to this:

I don’t do remote exams, but I hear about improvements to remote proctoring technology. The arms race is not over.

Technology goes both ways. The phone students were using to cheat are now being marshalled as a “second camera” for remote test proctoring. Instructors are going to largely win this year if they take current technology seriously, for multiple choice and short answer evaluations.

The commercial Respondus program has just added Word extensions. This technology already exists and can run on the students’ laptops.

Right now, a clever student might still be able to shift their carbon-based eyes to a direction where the answer is displayed illicitly. And the instructor’s eyes can only monitor so many eyes. This is all so 2024. This conversation may be over soon. Human students can be placed under the supervision of machine eyes. Right now, we are still dealing with issues of false positives when machines flag students for cheating, but the machines are improving.

I believe that the roads will eventually be dominated by machine drivers and their unblinking eyes. Humans might drive cars for fun in the hinterlands, but it will no longer be considered a serious thing humans to do for work. Monitoring student cheating will become like truck driving. Human eyes are on the way out. We are going to become more cheat-proof than college has ever been before.

As a college professor, that will have implications for my job, although I can imagine a not-completely-negative future. Maybe I could do more fun work with students because the work of proctoring will be handled automatically. I have spent many many hours constructing tests that would be hard to cheat on and watching students take them. I take cheating seriously, and all the faculty at my business school work hard to protect the value of our degree. I predict that this will become a trivial part of teaching within 10 years.

Will students respond with various forms of hacking and deep fakes against such a system? Maybe. So far, in any arms race, Uncle Sam has been winning in the end for a century now.

If there is a will to do so, we could even bring back the research paper by having students work on a monitored computer that does not let them use AI to write. (We could almost do that already, but perhaps the true limiting factor is that, as I like to say, readers are that which is scarce.)

[Credit to my colleagues Art Carden and Anna Leigh Stone who have talked with me about test proctoring this semester.]

Education is a core US export

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

While there is no shortage of examples of willful ignorance and outright lying in politics, the idea that blocking foreign students from attending US universities is anything other than disastrous to US students is positively enraging. The real curiousity here is whether the value of a US degree has yet dipped below the full tuition price tags that foreign students almost always pay. Beyond the billions in tuition received and tuition subsidies indirectly consumed, I couldn’t even begin to put a price on the cultural power accrued from being the global center for higher education for the last century. This administration’s capacity to find new and innovative ways to tear down US institutions is unrivaled and beyond even the grandest dreams of our most optimistic enemies.

Should Practicing Economists Read Tyler’s New Marginalism Book

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Tyler Cowen’s new (free online) book entitled The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution is going to be “interesting,” but should you read it?

Mike Makowsky explained that Academic economists are overcommitted

If you are already struggling to meet your deadlines for referee reports you owe to editors, should you take the time? If you don’t have time to indulge your curiosity about the 18th century and dead thinkers, right in the middle of the semester, should you look at it now or maybe browse it over the summer?

I think it’s worth going straight to the last chapter right now.

“Chapter 4: Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?“

It was written for you and released quickly for this moment. Tyler does not personally have to worry about his job, but you might.

This link will take you straight to an in-browser e-reader https://tylercowen.com/marginal-revolution-generative-book/app/

Or you can download the PDF at https://tylercowen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TheMarginalRevolution-Tyler_Cowen.pdf

You might face mental resistance to reading this chapter, because you don’t want to hear the message. If that’s you, then it’s especially useful to read this chapter. He’s not correct about everything. Develop your counter argument, to go forth and save marginalism. You can only do that if you understand and name the threats. This is more about methods/professions and less about ideology than you might think from the title.

Here are some quotes that stood out to me

The ties of empirical work in economics to economic theory are evolving, and in particular the explicit ties to intuitive microeconomic reasoning, and marginalist thinking, are being cut. In much of traditional econometrics, the emphasis is on testing pre-existing models…

in machine learning, we let the algorithm build the “theory” for us, noting it may have tens of millions of variables and thus not count as a theory…

So much for prediction, what about hypothesis generation? Well, there is a new approach to that too, using machine learning.

A lot of economists do not regularly describe what they actually do for work. Yes, we are saving the world by writing papers, but what exactly do you do? Do you generate hypotheses? Is that what you are teaching your students to do?

It’s not fun to think of how the econ profession might need to reposition, but we owe it to students. Who better to work on this than tenured professors? 

I think the case for undergraduates students to major in economics is strong. I also think the case for doing 4 years of college is strong for students who want to learn.

Last summer I wrote: Students still need to learn principles

If economics is “more interesting” than hard science, then it might serve to scoop up good thinkers at the undergraduate level and get them doing something more technical than what they would end up doing in a humanities program. When I graduated from college, the fact that most econ student had accidentally learned to code was a benefit to them.

College graduate humans ought to be able to read and pass the Turing Test if they are going to be effective complements to AI.

Economists championing marginalism for students, today, write: For Gen Z, Economics May Be the Key to Success in the New AI World

Let me plug Mike as well for thinking about what research econs do in 2026: The actual AI problem in academic economics “Oh, what shall all the candlemakers do now that the sun has risen?” made me laugh.

Young Scholars or Any Scholars

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

The Economic Science Association has listed some exceptions to the under-40 rule for being considered a success. I approve.

– *ESA Young Scholar Prize*: This prize is to be awarded to one young scholar whose research has made a significant contribution to experimental methodology. Nominees must

  • be under the age of 40; ESA will consider nominations of individuals over the age of 40 who started their research career late, or have had career interruptions, (b) hold an untenured position, or (c) have completed their PhD at most 10 years previously.

One does start to question if we ought to use the word “young” at all, if we are going to admit all those exceptions, since Awards for young talent are antinatalist.

Perhaps the worst thing about older people is a lower willingness to move-to-opportunity geographically. That’s not so bad from the perspective of an institution that has already made a hire, but it is bad from the perspective of a subfield or with respect to graduate admissions.

Experimental Economics is a small world, so I think there was a genuine impact on the way of thinking due to the success of Gary Charness.

Claude writes:

Charness did not follow the standard trajectory of a prodigy moving seamlessly from PhD to tenure-track stardom. He earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley relatively late, in 1999, after a career in business and industry. He was in his early 40s when he entered the academic job market — an age at which many economists assume a researcher’s most creative years are already behind them.

Despite entering academia so late, Charness went on to become one of the most cited and prolific experimental economists in the world. He continued producing high-impact work well into his 60s, with no visible declining trajectory in the originality or influence of his research.

Joy again:

Notice the move-to-opportunity at the age of 50, as indicated by Wikipedia “After commuting for three years between San Francisco and Barcelona (and floating free for another year), Gary accepted a position as an assistant professor at UCSB in 2001.”

In case you are missing the reference, this is how it’s typically used: “Evaluating the Impact of Moving to Opportunity in the United States” 

Whether full-time permanent research jobs or research awards for writing papers will still exist at all in 20 years, because of changes wrought by AI, I do not know. This week a student walked into my office to ask for help with Excel, which I was happy to provide. I told her that she could have just asked AI, but she claimed that, “Claude was acting up this week.” The year 2026 is odd because I am trying to synthesize the claim that “AGI is here” with the fact that AI still cannot perform most basic tasks correctly. Do organizations need a contingency plan for when Claude is “acting up?”

Do Required Personal Finance Classes Work?

James Bailey1 Comment

41 states now require students to take a course in economics or personal finance in order to graduate high school:

Source: Council for Economic Education

12 states representing 21% of US high schoolers passed mandates for personal finance classes just since 2022. This sounds like a good idea that will enable students to navigate the modern economy. But does it work in practice?

A 2023 working paper “Does State-mandated Financial Education Affect Financial Well-being?” by Jeremy Burke, J. Michael Collins, and Carly Urban argues that it does, at least for men:

We find that the overall effects of high school financial education graduation requirements on subjective financial well-being are positive, between 0.75 and 0.80 points, or roughly 1.5 percent of mean levels. These overall effects are driven almost entirely by males, for whom financial education increases financial well-being by 1.86 points, or 3.8 percent of mean financial well-being.

The paper has nice figures on financial wellbeing beyond the mandate question:

As soon as I heard about the rapid growth in these mandates from Meb Faber and Tim Ranzetta, I knew there was a paper to be written here. I was glad to see at least one has already tackled this, but there are more papers to be written: use post-2018 data to evaluate the new wave of mandates, evaluate the economics mandates in addition to the personal finance ones, and use a more detailed objective measure like the Survey of Consumer Finances.

There’s also more to be done in practice, hiring and training the teachers to offer these new classes:

our estimates are likely attenuated due to poor compliance by schools subject to new financial education curriculum mandates. Urban (2020) finds evidence that less than half of affected schools may have complied. As a result, our estimated overall and differential effects may be less than half the true effects

What’s the Best Major to Prepare for Law School?

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments
  • This is post coauthored with Jack Cavanaugh, Ave Maria University Graduate of 2025.

Say that you want to become a successful lawyer. What does that mean? One possible meaning is that you are well-compensated. Money is not everything, but it does give people more options for how to spend their time and resources. Law degrees are a type of graduate degree. So, what bachelor’s degree major should one choose in preparation for law school? We lack rich administrative data on college majors and LSAT scores.

Luckily, the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) comes to the rescue. It has all of the typical demographic covariates, income, occupation, and college major. So, if we make the small leap that well-prepared law school students become high-performing lawyers who are ultimately paid more, then what college major puts you on the right path? What should your major be?

We don’t look at an exhaustive list. We place several occupations into bins and examine only a few alternative majors. Any unlisted major falls under ‘other’. Below are the raw average incomes by occupational category and college major. Note two majors in particular. First, Pre-law literally has the word ‘law’ in the name and is marketed as preparation for law school. However, it is the undergraduate major associated with the lowest paid lawyers. For that matter, Pre-law majors have the lowest pay no matter what their occupation is. Second, Economics majors are the most highly paid in all of the occupations.

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Is AI learning just MOOCs again?

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

I created a provocative title for fun. Tyler pointed me to this podcast:

Joe Liemandt  – Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education (Apple podcast link)

I suppose I’m sold on their claim that most kids can learn basic facts and some academic skills from an iPad app. Listen all the way through if you are going to listen at all, because even some cracks in the tech product are revealed after the big pitch in the beginning.

I have been using Duolingo to review my high school French and Spanish. I think the few minutes a day I spend have helped drag some vocabulary back out of long-term storage. Although, as I recently heard a comedian say, “All my friends who have Duolingo are still speaking English to me.”

Folks should consider whether AI learning apps is just MOOCs again. Essentially, they need to get kids to watch (short, this time) videos of lecture content. MOOCs were longer lecture content videos. Maybe shorter is the key, combined with personalized feedback. Maybe not, for getting cheap effective comprehensive education that scales.

Last year I wrote Why Podcasts Succeeded in Gaining Influence Where MOOCs Failed

About half an hour in, Liemandt asserts that anyone in America would agree that kids learn life skills through “sports” not school. That’s an oversimplification, but I agree that sports ranks higher than “math class” for developing leadership ability.

Since they at Alpha School believe that have solved quickly learning facts, it’s interesting to hear how they do the rest of “education.” The school must fill enough time that the parents don’t have to see their kids half the day and also teach leadership/ communication/character. Alpha school is expensive ($40,000 a year) and there are many paid adults involved who are called “guides and coaches.”

The extracurriculars that Alpha school offers sounds a lot like what most kids can do in some form at a good public middle school or high school in America.  I wrote about the value of outside-class activities in college here: The Value of Student Organizations and On-Campus Education: Anecdotal Evidence from Tim Keller

My students at Samford are especially good at taking on leadership roles and creating a thriving community. Residential college provides a good testing ground for leadership and there are real “market tests” of success for things like sorority events, as the Alpha school encourages for older kids.

I applaud people trying to innovate. I think we’ll see more educational apps in schools, and that will be great. I’m not trying to dump on Alpha School. I just think the underperformance arc of MOOCs should temper our enthusiasm.

We Don’t Have Mass Starvations Like We Used To

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Two ideas coalesced to contribute to this post. First, for years in my Principles of Macroeconomics course I’ve taught that we no longer have mass starvation events due to A) Flexible prices & B) Access to international trade. Second, my thinking and taxonomy here has been refined by the work of Michael Munger on capitalism as a distinct concept from other pre-requisite social institutions.

Munger distinguishes between trade, markets, and capitalism. Trade could be barter or include other narrow sets of familiar trading partners, such as neighbors and bloodlines.  Markets additionally include impersonal trade. That is, a set of norms and even legal institutions emerge concerning commercial transactions that permit dependably buying and selling with strangers. Finally, capitalism includes both of these prerequisites in addition to the ability to raise funds by selling partial stakes in firms – or shares.

This last feature’s importance is due to the fact that debt or bond financing can’t fund very large and innovative endeavors because the upside to lenders is too small. That is, bonds are best for capital intensive projects that have a dependable rates of return that, hopefully, exceed the cost of borrowing. Selling shares of ownership in a company lets a diverse set of smaller stakeholders enjoy the upside of a speculative project. Importantly, speculative projects are innovative. They’re not always successful, but they are innovative in a way that bond and debt financing can’t satisfy. Selling equity shares open untapped capital markets.

With this refined taxonomy, I can better specify that it’s not access to international trade that is necessary to consistently prevent mass starvation. It’s access to international markets. For clarity, below is a 2×2 matrix that identifies which features characterize the presence of either flexible prices or access to international markets.

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