AEA Research Highlights

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...