Ep. 98: Delivering clean water
AEA Research Highlights
More than two billion people around the world do not have safe drinking water at home. Piped water infrastructure remains out of reach for much of the developing world, and cheaper alternatives like chlorine tablets have low take-up rates even when given away for free. In a , authors , , and explore a third option. Working with a private company in rural Odisha, one of India's poorest states, the researchers ran a randomized experiment across roughly 60,000 households to test the effectiveness of delivering treated water directly to people's doors. Burlig recently spoke with Tyler...
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Ep. 97: A short history of Asian immigration
AEA Research Highlights
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States and are on track to become the largest immigrant group by 2050. Yet, researchers have devoted much less attention to this population than to other immigrant groups. In a , author helps to fill that gap. She traces Asian immigration to the United States across three policy eras—1882–1943, 1943–1965, 1965–present—and explores how they affected the characteristics of those admitted, where they settled, and what work they were allowed to do. Postel recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the origins of...
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Ep. 96: W. E. B. Du Bois and the history of marginalism
AEA Research Highlights
W. E. B. Du Bois is remembered as a civil rights leader, sociologist, and author of The Souls of Black Folk. But before he became famous for his empirical studies of Black life in America, Du Bois was a graduate student at Harvard studying cutting-edge economic theory. In 1891, at age 23, he submitted a 158-page manuscript entitled to a Harvard prize competition. The manuscript sat in the Harvard archives for over a century, largely unexamined by trained economists. Author recently requested that Harvard digitize the manuscript so that he could analyze its contents. In a , he explores...
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Ep. 95: Diversifying college applications
AEA Research Highlights
Guidance counselors generally advise college applicants to diversify their applications across schools they believe to be safeties, matches, and reaches. Yet, prevailing economic theories of school choice suggest that such hedging strategies are suboptimal and that applicants should focus on applying to the best schools they have a chance of getting into. In a , authors and show how incorporating correlations among admissions decisions rationalizes the motive to hedge. Their findings highlight the tradeoffs applicants face under realistic assumptions and may offer insights into the...
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Ep. 94: Targeted supply-side enforcement in the controlled substance market
AEA Research Highlights
Between 1997 and 2011, opioid dispensing in the United States more than tripled, fueling what would become the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. This surge in the supply of opioids was concentrated among a small subset of doctors: roughly 1 percent of the doctors who prescribed opioids accounted for almost 50 percent of all domestic opioid doses prescribed. In a , author examined what happened when federal authorities cracked down on "rogue" doctors who overprescribed opioids. He found that removing a single doctor from the opioid supply chain reduced county-level...
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Ep. 93: Technological spillovers
AEA Research Highlights
The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in October 1957 led to a geopolitical crisis that reshaped American science policy. Within months, Congress established NASA, and by 1961, President Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon before the decade's end. The resulting investment was massive, and the program still serves as a model of government spending for advocates of public R&D. In a , authors and question whether the space race program succeeded as an economic policy that boosted economic growth and productivity. To estimate the space program's effects...
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Ep. 92: Housing supply skepticism
AEA Research Highlights
Most Americans that housing costs are too high, often blaming developers and landlords. Many feel that the problem can be solved with price controls, development restrictions, and mandates on providing below-market-rate units. But these ideas are at odds with standard economic policy prescriptions, which suggest that the way to bring down costs is by increasing the housing supply. In a , authors , , explore how the public thinks about housing markets through surveys of thousands of urban and suburban residents. They found that while people understand supply and demand in markets...
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Ep. 91: Reviewing residential segregation
AEA Research Highlights
Despite decades of civil rights legislation, many Black and White Americans, as well as other minorities, continue to live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, with significant implications for access to quality schools, jobs, healthcare, and economic opportunities. In a , authors and examine the complexities of measuring residential segregation, what causes segregation to persist, and why it matters so much for economic outcomes. Their work challenges conventional narratives about US segregation and offers a framework for understanding how residential patterns continue to shape...
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Ep. 90: Understanding the US net foreign asset position
AEA Research Highlights
For decades, the United States enjoyed what some called an exorbitant privilege—the ability to spend more than it earned without accumulating much debt to the rest of the world. But that privilege has ended. In a , authors , , and found that the United States started accumulating significant liabilities to foreigners after the Great Recession. The researchers say that a surge in the value of US corporations relative to companies in other countries is the driver of this development. Due to large international capital flows in recent decades, foreign investors now own about 40...
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Ep. 89: Measuring US income inequality
AEA Research Highlights
US household income has significantly, but much of that growth seems to be at the very top of the distribution. Just how much inequality has increased and why it is growing is a topic of debate among economists. Part of the challenge lies in a seemingly basic question: what exactly counts as income? In a , author disentangles the notions of income that economists frequently use and helps pinpoint what's really behind the rise in inequality. Gomez recently spoke with Tyler Smith about defining income, recent patterns in income inequality, and the best tools for reducing inequality....
info_outlineReligion is a deep source of tradition and meaning for many people around the world, especially those in developing countries. But religious practices can sometimes stand in the way of long-term economic growth, according to a paper in the American Economic Review.
Authors Eduardo Montero and Dean Yang found that ill-timed patron saint day festivals in Mexico lead to lower levels of development. In particular, celebrations coinciding with important agricultural seasons lowered household incomes, over the course of centuries, by roughly 20 percent.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean these festivals made people worse off overall. Montero and Yang say that it’s up to communities and their leaders to decide what the right balance is between cultural traditions and economic growth.
The authors recently spoke with Tyler Smith about patron saint day festivals and why they hampered long-run economic development in Mexico.