Jonah Rexer
@jonahrexer
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@WorldBank Economist. Taught politics @Princeton , Econ PhD @Wharton . I study markets. Most of my life consists of deciding what to eat. Was 🇺🇸 in 🇺🇬🇲🇲🇳🇬
Brooklyn, NY
Joined August 2009
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Pretty psyched to finally say my solo JMP has been conditionally accepted at the AER! It’s wild that wacky PhD idea about oil pirates in Nigeria turned into the defining moment of my career. Incredibly thankful to all who gave comments and the great editorial staff at the AER.
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It’s a republic, not a democracy, so black people should have an extremely difficult time voting, is really a line that people are still taking in 2020
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This World Bank paper scandal (and economists' reactions) is the best proof of what I've long believed: that economists are more in thrall to an interesting/important result than buttressing the official views of any particular powerful institution.
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The Hoover Institution has become an embarrassment for my alma mater. I've never understood this vaguely parasitic relationship. Hoover benefits from
@Stanford
prestige, while Stanford gets tarred with the affiliation.
On the
@SWAtlasHoover
front, there’s a fascinating story to be told that
@Stanford
and particularly the
@HooverInst
has been a hot spot of covid misinformation from basically the beginning of the pandemic. It’s not just Atlas.
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Here's a thread for
@Noahpinion
on how economists have studied African development. We can divide this into i) long-run causes: (pre) colonial history, slavery, political institutions, ethnicity, and ii) proximate causes: mkt and govt failures. I'll focus on the first.
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Most answers are related to either bitcoin or exposure to high-cost goods and services (delivery apps, Bay Area housing, etc). Both seem reasonable. I'd add a general suspicion of institutional authority mixed with a healthy dose of Dunning-Kreuger
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Well this is great news: my first PhD thesis paper has been conditionally accepted at the Economic Journal! Thread to come once the final proofs are in.
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Evidence suggests large economic gains from reducing student debt overhang. If you want to argue for student debt forgiveness, make an efficiency argument, not an equity argument. It's not a progressive policy--but it seems like a smart one nonetheless.
What happens when you forgive student loans?
Borrowers'...
▪️indebtedness declines by 26%,
▪️defaults decline by 12%,
▪️geographical mobility increases, and
▪️income increases by more than $4000 (over a 3 year period)
Evidence:
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@AyannaPressley
Thanks for modeling how public figures should address important but problematic cultural figures...well done
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Am I the only one who has an ever-expanding latex preamble that grows every time I need some new functionality, half of which I don't really know the purpose of but am to afraid to delete any of it for fear of some unspecified error crashing the compilation...?
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Thesis: defended 📈📚🎓
I’m officially Dr. Rexer, but please don’t call me that.
Enormous shouts out to my committee, a team of legends
@guygrossman
@ArthurvBenthem
and Santosh Anagol. I’m on the shoulders of giants. Ready to put this PhD to good use.
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If my estimation converged in a timely fashion
Dayenu
If I used reshape correctly on the first try without looking at the help file
Dayenu
If all my results had *** except the placebo tests which are precise zeroes
Dayenu
If clustering errors didn't kill my results
DAYENU
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I spent 2 years living in Kampala, Uganda, and wondered why there are such dramatic differences in standards of living across the world.
In the immortal words of Bob Lucas “once one starts to think about [this], it is hard to think about anything else.”
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You may not believe it, but this is what did it for me. I actually liked Bernie the person (not the Twitter-left fantasy projection), even if I didn’t always agree with him. But his people were the worst. Truly the Leftist equivalent of the Trump coterie of clowns and sycophants
The reality is, that Bernie has absolutely TERRIBLE judgment when it came to who he surrounded himself with. His campaign was full of grifters/shit-stirrers/problematic people. Shaun King, Nomiki Konst, David Sirota, Brie Brie, Linda Sarsour, Jeff Weaver, Susan Sarandon, etc etc
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Anyone who describes a country facing a complete breakdown in order as exhibiting "continued progress toward political inclusion" does not know what they are talking about.
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Multiple very high-profile mainstream economists have now quit the cushy WB chief economist job in order to stand up for scholarly integrity. That's says a lot.
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One last thought — it’s even stranger given that the unambiguous triumph of tech in the last 20 years has been to make a lot of things goods and services much, much cheaper.
@xtrexer
Some tech people have argued CPI has missed dramatic tech-induced *deflation*. E.g. what would someone in 1960 pay for access to Google, Wikipedia, or Twitter?
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Hello JMCs! My team at the World Bank is hiring a macroeconomist. We’re a small but mighty group that does research on economic issues in South Asia. It’s a great mix of policy-relevant and academic work. Come join us!
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Trump will shake things up. What's the worst that could happen?
What would have happened if we managed the pandemic like Taiwan? We would have 99 deaths. Like Hong Kong? 165 deaths. Even if we managed to do as China, it would be 1650 deaths! Yet, with greater wealth, geographical advantage, and all the lag time, we managed 120,000.
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On my 4th rejection of my second year paper, I remind myself that “Fleetwood Mac” was their 10th album.
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***TWEET THREAD***
New working paper with
@guygrossman
@hthirumurthy
and
@soojongkim_1
"Political partisanship influences behavioral responses to governors’ recommendations for COVID-19 prevention in the United States"
link:
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This isn't complicated. Shut everything down now and we have a chance to beat this.
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Proposition: for every new paper written in development economics, there exists a paper written by Bannerjee, Duflo, or Kremer that can (and probably should) be cited in your lit review.
Corollary: this prize was extremely well deserved.
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I'm not saying we're all relentless truth-seekers. But the reaction has been very encouraging, and puts to lie the common leftist idea that we're just servants of the elite and the status quo.
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All I'll say is that I now understand why that Fryer paper ended up in JPE even after being totally destroyed by
@jonmummolo
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Alan Krueger set the standard for what a career in economics should look like. He also introduced me to causal inference with his work. In addition to brilliant insights his papers often had that elusive “shoe leather” quality—he went out in the world to get the data. Huge loss.
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I think that all we learned from the kitchen-sink regressions of both teams is you can kill an ethnicity dummy with enough (potentially bad) controls. There are plenty of arguments for excluding a lot of those controls. Sometimes the raw data are more transparent (and damning)
From 1995 through 2015, the number of Asian-Americans increased by almost 200%, while the total population of the United States increased by only 21%.
How can you tell me with a straight face that this graph represents anything other than racial discrimination?
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Since Guy has already spilled the beans — I’m thrilled to be joining
@ESoConflict
@PrincetonSPIA
next year as a postdoc. Very excited to work with a brilliant group of scholars studying how to make the world a less violent and more prosperous place.
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My coauthor just said that the negative oil prices are bad because he had log(p) in his model lol economists are the best/worst
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@cchukudebelu
By the way--a society where you have to rotate leadership between ethnic and religious groups is not a healthy, robust polity.
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Amidst all the horribleness in the world these days, I want to share some moments of happiness — a paper that we have been shopping to many places finally got an R&R today in a great journal. Despite how unimportant that feels, still worth celebrating.
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@Noahpinion
Definitely it has always been and will continue to be a major cultural force in music, movies, and literature. Politically and economically, however, it’s a complete mess. Multiple violent internal conflicts, one of the few places in Africa where poverty is actually *rising*
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My JMP on local firms and the political economy of oil theft in Nigeria is now up on the
@WorldBank
DevImpact blog. Check it out 👇
Dirty business: Illicit oil and indigenous firms in the Niger Delta: Today's job market post by
@jonahrexer
shows how local firms may have an advantage over multinationals in producing oil, despite being over lower quality
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Curious what the numbers are for the US. My guess is that this is one of the best elements of American Exceptionalism.
Percentage of Europeans totally comfortable having an immigrant as a friend. By country. Depressing chart from
@EurobarometerEU
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Very exciting that my PhD work on local firms in the Nigerian oil sector has been featured in
@vox_dev
. Take a look here:
🆕 Oil multinationals in Nigeria divesting their onshore assets to local firms resulted in substantial improvements in output & declines in oil theft & violence, driven by politically connected firms.
Today on VoxDev, research by
@jonahrexer
@wb_research
:
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Very pleased to announce that our paper on partisan responses to governors’ messaging in the pandemic has been accepted at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! Thanks to all who gave feedback, our reviewers great comments, and the editor who shepherded it through.
***TWEET THREAD***
New working paper with
@guygrossman
@hthirumurthy
and
@soojongkim_1
"Political partisanship influences behavioral responses to governors’ recommendations for COVID-19 prevention in the United States"
link:
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@wesyang
you're the one who feels the urge to dunk on what was obviously just a normie sincere tweet, friend. But that's basically all you have to offer, so keep on doin it.
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First, does pre-colonial history matter? Big time. The slave trade had long-lasting effects on development (Nunn 2008) . The likely mechanism was reduced trust among tribes. Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) .
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I have the burning desire to spend the rest of my day shouting READ THE PAPER to each commenter on this thread. There may be genuine gripes with the design, though the authors are very thorough in investigating pre-trends. By and large 95% of the comments are directly addressed.
My paper on Naloxone access and opioid abuse (joint work with
@anita_mukherjee
) is now online:
"The Moral Hazard of Lifesaving Innovations: Naloxone Access, Opioid Abuse, and Crime"
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The culture war has long ceased to be a winning issue for trump in key swing demographics and yet continues to double down on it. Political savant indeed.
From the Fox News Poll of Minnesota -- among SUBURBAN WOMEN...
Black Lives Matter
68% favorable
27% unfavorable
Donald Trump
28% favorable
71% unfavorable
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@agraybee
Trump has the deaths of hundreds of thousands on his hands, overseeing the worst mass casualty event in modern history, and people are still tweeting worm brained shit like this. It boggles the mind.
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"economists" canceling the term "human capital stock" was not in my 2020 pandemic bingo
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@mattyglesias
I've been arguing for a while that to many Trump voters, it isn't really about race. It's about a set of cultural grievances against the elite, urban, liberal establishment that is imperfectly correlated w/racial politics. Working class minorities can hold those same grievances.
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@Noahpinion
Half the world’s population getting 11% poorer in a single year (2018, as claimed) would imply a global economic catastrophe the likes of which we’ve basically never seen. People need to think about reasonable magnitudes before repeating made up stats
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People, please stop doing this. You will look very dumb once deaths predictably rise in about 2 weeks, as has happened literally EVERY time there has been a spike in cases anywhere. Why are people still doing this?
Of course we don't want to underestimate what might still be to come, but talking relentlessly about cases while saying little or nothing about deaths is not so informative.
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Very excited that my work on marriage markets and Boko Haram violence is featured in this
@EJ_RES
special virtual issue alongside papers by some of the best scholars studying conflict. I applaud EJ for highlighting work that focuses on the neglected, fragile parts of the world.
Hot off the press! Our virtual issue on The Economics of Conflict is out now. Featuring a foreword by the Editors.
#FreeToView
@OUPEconomics
@RoyalEconSoc
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@ne0liberal
@ComfortablySmug
@salonium
If smug trolls his way to a victory in this bracket, I will never forgive you
@ne0liberal
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Some dope new papers. Particularly interesting is the fact that British colonization in Africa is associated with weaker states and more ethnic salience. Runs against my priors that British were "better" than French. Sidenote: EJ publishes some of the best econ hist work
2 *very* interesting papers forthcoming in EJ:
1)
@JeanetBentzen
, Hariri & Robinson: The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy
Punchline: Contemporary democracy reflective of indigenous (democratic) institutions; mostly disrupted by colonization
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@dieworkwear
Naples is fantastic. What spots would you recommend for RTW or quick turnaround MTM tailoring for folks who don’t have a long time to spend there?
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Biden, on the other hand, isn’t anyone’s favorite or ideal candidate. But his people are dynamite strategizers and organizers. Not on Twitter begging for clout to impress the boss, but doing the work needed to get him elected. Judge a man by the company he keeps.
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In understanding the origin of African precolonial states, Herbst (2000) is informative. . He argues that precolonial state formation is a function of geography and density—Africa’s was unfavorable.
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But it goes back further than that. Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) show that pre-colonial political centralization importantly predicts present-day development .
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I’ve learned more about militancy and amnesty in two weeks traveling the Niger Delta than I did in nearly a year of reading literature and playing around with data. Economists, take a page out of Bourdain’s book. Get out and
#talktopeople
!
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I suspect my vote is an as-yet uncounted mail-in ballot in Philadelphia. Am I...the pivotal voter??
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Dope--the Roman origins of contemporary European development. Likely mechanism: the famous Roman roads, which facilitated urbanization
Just came across this interesting article in JEG 2017:
"Does European Development have Roman Roots?" by
@fabiwahl
Finding: Roman parts of Germany more economically developed *today*
Nice RDD design, provides plausible channels of persistence (Roman roads, urbanization)
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@AmySpiro
I think it might just be time to admit that the “Farrakhan is a fringe character whose ideas have no mainstream support” narrative isn’t entirely accurate...
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@Noahpinion
I just don’t think you know enough to make this bet. I’m writing multiple papers on Nigeria right now. It could go two ways in the next decade but most signs point to the bad way.
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If true, it means that geography can shape institutions, and these pre-colonial systems in turn affect present-day development. Fenske (2013) finds empirical support for this hypothesis . The importance of interaction between geog. and inst. is a theme here
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@arpitrage
I think the difference is that the fundamentals of the housing market justify high prices much more so than in other asset markets…some price gain has been due to low rates juicing housing demand but mostly prices reflect migration patterns and supply constraints.
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@Noahpinion
@mattyglesias
serious question: why not refer to the group you're taking about, when you're talking about them? Why do we need catch-all acronyms for disparate groups with disparate interests, cultures, histories, etc.
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Disagree. I think the just-so stories in the book are mostly diversions. Institutions definitely not random--in their academic work, endogenous institutional formation based on rational power-seeking elites is a key part of the framework.
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Big shouts out to my thesis committee
@guygrossman
@ArthurvBenthem
Nina Harari and Santosh Anagol who sat through 2+ hrs of theory and data on insurgents, militants, and oil theft gangs for my thesis proposal defense today.
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Things are very, very scary in Khartoum right now. Our family is sheltering in place at home, their area has been heavily affected by fighting. Please keep Sudan in your prayers.
We are mapping all the locations where the clashes in Sudan are happening, both in the capital Khartoum and beyond. You can see the latest maps and videos here.
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@ryxcommar
This meme is going to end up being unironically shared in the dark recesses of boomer Facebook groups.
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I see almost nothing on my TL about the crisis in Sudan. And I follow a lot of internationally-aware folks.
There’s no obvious narrative to spin about the West or Russia. Just a local power struggle with civilians caught in the crossfire.
People just don’t care.
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@dieworkwear
@urban_comp
How to achieve good drape with lighter fabrics? All of my winter trousers drape beautiful but my summer fabrics never hold a crease or fall well.
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Here's my unsolicited unpopular opinion: the first year is completely fine and we shouldn't change the curriculum at all. We should, however, change the culture.
First year PhD students in economics: first year is hard for many of us. You may be thinking about quitting. It’s your life, friend, but let me give you a few tips of advice. First, you should try to calculated expected utility from staying for four more years vs leaving. 1/n
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So while colonialism matters a lot, its legacies generally bad but also mixed. And it’s unclear whether it matters more than pre-colonial history. It all matters, and we're only now beginning to empirically tease out all the mechanisms.
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But the key is the interaction between geography and long-run institutional development. The resource curse literature suggests that natural resources seem to be only a curse in the context of weak institutions.
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Am I alone in feeling this when I read major poli sci journals?
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The disparity in police response to today’s rioters relative to BLM is by far the most disturbing aspect of today’s events. This type of politically-motivated selective law enforcement is a direct and insidious threat to the rule of law.
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I can’t repeat this enough. The global “extreme” poverty line is not a neoliberal World Bank / Gates conspiracy. It is literally just a weighted average of the poverty lines set by the GOVERNMENTS of the world’s poorest countries.
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Serious question: is there any heterodox stuff that actually falls under the purview of rigorous research that pushes the frontier of our knowledge? Or is it all regurgitating Sraffa and critical theory and bloviating on twitter?
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Nunn (2012) finds long-run positive impacts of missions, particularly protestant ones, on female education.
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That NYC picture is so beautiful
That San Jose picture is so horrifying.
And now I understand why the valley sucks so much.
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@m_ballesteross
They don't tell you this but...you don't actually get your PhD unless someone on Stackexchange has scolded you for duplicating an existing question or not providing a MWE.
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Here's my thread for
#DIYCSAE
@Oxford_CSAE
Foreign investors are usually more productive than local firms. But in markets w/corruption, crime, & conflict, does conventional wisdom still hold?
What is the tradeoff btw the technical edge of FDI and the advantages of local firms?
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Every JMP last year
"In this paper I demonstrate a novel and important empirical result with clear quasi-experimental identification. I then construct and estimate a completely useless structural model in order to signal that I am not just a reg monkey."
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“It’s a republic, not a democracy”, I yell as I circle a polling place in Philadelphia in my F-150 with an assault rifle pointed out the window...
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A picture of me rocking a traditional outfit and Hausa cap has been the Instagram profile pic for a Nigerian fashion brand for the past 9 months.
What have you done with your life?
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