AEA Research Highlights

There was a time not long ago when most economists tended to work by themselves.  In 1960, fewer than one in five economics journal articles had more than one author. Today, about three quarters of all papers are produced by research teams. The shift toward collaboration has a lot of upsides for economists, including producing higher impact papers, sharing the division of labor, and enjoying creat...

The first private prison in the United States opened in 1984 amidst the war on drugs and overcrowding in public prisons. Now a multi-billion dollar industry , private prisons incarcerate about 8 percent of all America's inmates. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy , University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Anita Mukherjee examined the impact of private prisons on the leng...

More than 50 years ago, a revolution in seed and fertilizer technology bolstered food production and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America. Unfortunately, this "Green Revolution" left sub-Saharan Africa behind. At the turn of the 21st century, many farmers still were struggling to produce enough food to feed their communities. Then, in 2006, a number of African nations embarked on an ambit...

At the turn of the 19th century, American universities were mostly under-resourced, regional schools. By World War II, they had become research leaders on the global stage, attracting the world's best scientists. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives , economists W. Bentley MacLeod and  Miguel Urquiola say that the US universities' ascendancy in research started earlier than many peop...

Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus has called climate change " the ultimate challenge for economics. " Economists increasingly have been trying to understand how rising tides and global temperatures will impact resource allocation around the globe, as well as the potential policy tools that can help curb damage to our natural world. SMU professor Klaus Desmet says that a lot of those analyses are...

After a failed revolution in 1848, hundreds of Germans were expelled from their home country and settled in the US. It was not obvious that this eclectic group would play an important role in American politics and change the course of the nation. Their words and leadership helped President Lincoln and the North win the Civil War, according to a paper in the American Economic Review . Authors Chris...

Democrats may control the White House and Congress, but Republicans have a clear advantage on the nation's highest court.  Sixteen of the last 20 appointments to the Supreme Court have been GOP nominees, including six of nine sitting justices. Critics say that this has caused an imbalance of power that threatens the court's legitimacy. University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel questions, ho...

Companies like Amazon , Microsoft, and Google are pushing today's technology frontier. And critical to their enterprises are economists who've honed their skills at universities. In the Winter 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives , economists Susan Athey and Michael Luca outlined this growing, mutual influence between economics and the tech industry. Athey and Luca have spent their c...

In the US, most students enroll in their neighborhood school. But sometimes, they have a choice. Families might be given vouchers for other public or private institutions further from their homes. Policymakers' hope is that kids in underperforming schools won't be limited by where they can afford to live. Harvard professor Chris Avery says that the housing market is important to how school choice...

Friedrich Hayek is one of the giants of 20th century economics. He did important work on everything from business cycles to psychology, earning a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974.  However, Hayek is perhaps best known for his book, The Road to Serfdom . Since its publication in 1944, many leaders and politicians have cited it as a proof that countries that experiment with socialism will inevitably...

Schools are academic institutions. But they are not only that. They are also social spaces that are critical to children's development. Whether inside the classroom or out on the playground, kids learn how to problem solve, to adapt, persevere, and resolve conflicts. And those schools that are best at fostering these skills are setting their students up for longer term success, according Northwest...

Simply giving cash with a few strings attached could be one of the most promising ways to reduce poverty and insecurity in the developing world. Today, over 63 countries have at least one such program.  And while these policies have been around for a few decades, little is known about how much so-called conditional cash transfers (CCT) improve people's lives over the long term. A paper in the Nove...

It's well documented that women earn less than men for doing the same job. But the pay gap is just one way in which women are economically disadvantaged. In some countries, women cannot work without their husband's permission. They have restricted access to credit and are effectively penalized for having children. And this discrimination is not just governed by social norms; it is codified in the...

More and more of the wealth in the richest countries is going to their richest citizens. And there are no signs that it's stopping. But how inequality has grown—who it's affecting and why—has changed significantly over the last four decades, according to a paper in the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives . Authors Florian Hoffmann , David S. Lee , and Thomas Lemieux say that since 2...

Epidemiology used to be a quiet discipline whose experts were not much used to being in the public eye.   Then COVID-19 happened. Suddenly, epidemiologists everywhere were being called into service to track the virus and formulate a plan to combat its spread. But Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray says there are a lot of questions about the pandemic's impact that are beyond her field'...

The GOP has owned the US South, winning a majority of the region's votes in every presidential election for the past 40 years . But it wasn't always this way. The so-called "Solid South" used to vote reliably Democratic. So what happened? Most scholars believe it was backlash to Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. Still, even today, the question is not completely settled . Researchers Ilyana Ku...

The gap between red and blue America has been expanding for decades , and the consequences of this increasing polarization are clear to close oberserves of Washington But why Americans have grown so far apart in the first place is still a complicated, unanswered question. Part of the story appears to be the sudden rise of China as an export powerhouse, according to a paper in the October issue of...

Populism's rise has sparked fundamental questions for advanced democracies around the world. Perhaps the biggest question is why it's happening. Some research points to economic explanations. Americans who gravitated to President Trump's nationalistic appeals and British voters who approved leaving the European Union were frustrated by job losses associated with globalization. And that anxiety mad...

The IRS knows that taxpayers hide a large chunk of their wealth overseas. According to the best estimates, Americans hold more than a trillion dollars in offshore tax havens.  But it's not easy to find those secret accounts and make tax dodgers pay their fair share. In the August issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy , Daniel Reck says that an array of enforcement efforts in 2008...

The US spends nearly $50 billion a year on job-creating business incentives. Unfortunately, a lot of this money doesn't go to the places that need it most. Upjohn Institute senior economist Tim Bartik says that policymakers must do more to invest in distressed regions. In the Journal of Economic Perspectives , he argues that policymakers could get more bang for their buck by targeting needy commun...

Black, Latinx, and Native American people are badly underrepresented in economics.  In 2017, they were 30 percent of the US population, but earned fewer than 10 percent of economics PhDs. The question now facing economists is why minorities are opting for other careers. To find out, Gary Hoover of the University of Oklahoma reached out to minorities still in the profession, as well those who ultim...

This week marks the centennial of women's enfranchisement in the United States and women have never been so politically powerful—or politically divided with men. The "sex gap" in partisanship and voter turnout continues to widen. Once willing to defer the work of politics to men, women now have a 4 percentage point advantage in voter turnout. The partisanship gap has also grown. Women are 12 perce...

The amount of money in politics seems to grow every year. Spending by outside groups reached a record of half billion dollars in the 2016 elections cycle, and lobbying expenditures regularly exceed $3 billion annually. But economists Marianne Bertrand and Matilde Bombardini argue that a lot of corporate influence is still overlooked. In the July issue of the American Economic Review , they estimat...

Even before there was President Trump, there was "the wall." America has spent billions on border enforcement, which includes a barrier between the US and Mexico. And the current administration's nationalistic promises to put "America first" have given the border wall heightened symbolic importance. But it's not clear just how effective it is in actually preventing migrants from entering the US. B...

The world has been adjusting to the information age for the last 50 years now. And so have its autocracies, according to our guest today. Daniel Treisman , political scientist at UCLA, says that illiberal leaders are building modern authoritarian regimes with a new set of tools to keep themselves in power. In the Fall 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives , Treisman and his coauthor S...