Relaxed copyright protections during WWII spurred more scientific innovation and boosted academic careers in the US, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Sorting truth from fiction on the internet can be difficult, but people regularly overrate their ability to do so, according to a paper in the ����� Review. The authors argue that this overconfidence may help explain why fake news is so prominent.

The income gap between rich and poor has grown substantially in recent decades, but it's unclear whether consumption inequality has followed the same pattern. A paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics digs into spending data to better understand the disconnect.

DNA databases have become essential for finding suspects. But they also provide a powerful tool for deterring crime, says Jennifer Doleac, whose paper appeared in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics. We spoke with her about how DNA registration reduces recidivism.

There's a sharp drop in the number of heterosexual couples at the point where a wife earns more than the husband. A lot of people believe it's related to gender norms, but a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics offers another explanation.

Funding changes to NYC public schools led to significant declines in demand for private schools, highlighting the tradeoffs policymakers must consider when passing educational reforms, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

South Africa has one of the highest jobless rates in the world. Giving small business owners there access to better information about labor laws may help boost the country’s employment, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Consolidation among advertising intermediaries has recently eroded Google’s revenues from sponsored search ads, according to a paper in the ����� Review. The findings may offers lessons for antitrust regulators.

Enrico Moretti says inventors are more productive when surrounded by other top talent in their field. We spoke with him about his latest paper on agglomeration economies and why they'll remain important in a post-pandemic world of more remote work.

Air pollution is known to have negative impacts on physical health. Now there is evidence that it also increases aggressive behavior, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

There are many impediments to universal healthcare in the developing world. But governments themselves and their bureaucracies may be a key barrier, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

A lot of people take fast, reliable internet for granted. But limited access to home broadband may be reducing employment and earnings among poorer Americans, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Ronald Reagan’s tenure as the host of G.E. Theater in the '50s and '60s won him electoral support during his political campaigns, evidence of how entertainment media can shape voter decisions, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

The transition to electric cars may be the next step in the fight against climate change. But a simple ban on gasoline car sales would be a mistake, says Stephen Holland, whose paper appeared in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. We spoke with him about why and what should be done instead.

Trade liberalization was one of the "Washington Consensus" policy goals for Latin American countries. However, there was significant variation in how nations responded to that policy, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Bureaucrats aren't always to blame when an efficient institution falls into dysfunction. Lawmakers who want to be seen as reformers overload them with hastily written Kafkaesque policies that make it more difficult for bureaucracies to perform their duties, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Medicaid coverage for children more than pays for itself in the long run, according to a paper in the ����� Review. Kids who grow up with Medicaid become healthier adults who are more likely to work and less likely to rely less on welfare.

The settlement patterns of mass migrations in 20th-century America were heavily influenced by social networks, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics. The authors constructed an index to measure just how much for each US county.

Across US industries, oligopolies have grown significantly over last 50 years, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics. But for now, they’re getting bigger through more productivity that’s benefiting the overall economy.

Father Coughlin had a devoted following of 30 million listeners who tuned in to hear his populist tirades in the 1930s. We spoke with Tianyi Wang on what his paper in the ����� Review reveals about Coughlin's influence and the persuasiveness of popular media figures.

A paper in the ����� Review: Insights developed a new way to identify technological breakthroughs that uses natural language processing techniques to detect textual connections among patents.

Leaded gasoline wasn’t phased out of US auto racing until 2007. This regulatory exemption had large negative health effects on communities living near race tracks, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

White students exposed to more racially diverse schoolmates in elementary and middle school were less likely to register as Republicans, providing evidence for the contact hypothesis, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

Unlike previous downturns, employment losses during the COVID-19 recession were larger for women than for men, says Stefania Albanesi, whose paper appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. We spoke with her about why the pandemic has posed unique challenges for mothers.

Twenty years ago, economists rarely shared their data or code. Now, research transparency transparency is becoming a professional norm, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Wisconsin school districts that adopted a flexible pay scheme for teachers instead of scheduled increases based on seniority were able to attract and retain better talent, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Black and Hispanic Americans suffered from higher rates of COVID-19 death at younger ages, indicating more “years of potential lost life” than standard mortality measures suggest, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Given the option, most taxi drivers would rather let Uber take a portion of their fares than buy a lease up front for the right to drive, even when the latter is better financially, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Negative attitudes toward the government leads to higher rates of personal income tax evasion, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. We spoke with two of the paper's authors about the implications of their research during this hyperpolarized time.

Women's suffrage led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially Blacks and Southern Whites, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Chile’s sudden stop in 1998 had lasting effects on the country’s productivity, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics. But the authors show that standard macro models are too pessimistic about the impact of such financial crises.

Moving from the least healthy location in the US to the most could increase life expectancy at age 65 by over a year, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Brazil's affirmative action policy for public universities created an unfair system in which high-achieving minority students sometimes faced a harder path to acceptance than lower achieving whites, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Two decades after intervening, the US military mission in Afghanistan is finally coming to a close. We spoke with political scientist Austin Wright, whose paper appeared in the ����� Review, about the withdrawal and what the US can do to improve security transitions in the future.

The expansion of the telegraph network in 19-century China kept rice prices more stable when there was a local shock, evidence of how improved communication between markets can tame price volatility, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

An alternative savings scheme where Malawian workers could defer part of their wages for several months was especially popular with people who had self-control issues and helped many make lasting improvements in their homes, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Muslim visibility around the holy month of Ramadan increases the vote share of both far-right and far-left parties in Germany, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Tech savvy scalpers are causing problems for online booking. But switching from first-come-first-served rules to a so-called batch system may stop them, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

To what extent does policy shape culture? We spoke with Natalie Bau about her paper in the ����� Review on the effect that pension reform had on traditional family arrangements in Ghana and Indonesia.

High pollution emitters sometimes game the system by putting out more emissions on days when regulators' air quality monitors aren't operating, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Moving to a better neighborhood can have a lasting impact on children’s educational attainment. Better school systems are likely the biggest reason why, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Biological factors, such as childbearing and breastfeeding, can’t explain earnings inequality between men and women after the birth of a child, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

Ties between royal European families, particularly through marriage, secured peace between dynasties and played a big role in the decline in war after 1800, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Police officers have a lot of discretion when writing speeding tickets, according to a paper in the ����� Review. We spoke with author Steven Mellow about how that leads to higher discrimination against minorities and what might fix it.

Proponents of bankruptcy reform legislation in the early 2000s argued that lenders would pass along their higher debt recovery to consumers in the form of lower interest rates. A paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics found that rates did in fact decline.

There have been thousands of changes to US sales tax rates, but does it actually change how consumers shop? A paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics explores this question.

Foreign interventions are ubiquitous, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature. The authors give a unified picture of the tools that countries use to influence their neighbors and why they choose them.

Going to a demonstration makes people more likely to protest in the next one, but only if enough of their social network also goes, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

A lot has changed about how economists study LGBTQ populations since Lee Badgett wrote the foundational papers in the 1990s. We spoke with her about her research and some of the issues involved in advancing the subdiscipline. Her paper on LGBTQ economics appears in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Female academics were disproportionately affected by COVID-19 disruptions, experiencing larger declines in research time compared to men, according to a paper in ����� Papers & Proceedings.

India’s most popular sport may offer insights into reducing caste prejudices. A key feature of positive integration is having people work toward shared goals, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Racially heterogeneous counties in the US South tend to have harsher sentencing practices than more homogeneous ones, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

How do consumers sort through the massive growth of creative new products? A paper in the ����� Review investigates the relative impacts of professional critics’ reviews and crowd-based ratings on consumer welfare in the market for books.

We spoke with this year's John Bates Clark Medalist Isaiah Andrews of Harvard about his start in econometrics, how the profession can improve diversity, and his advice for young economists.

Reframing offers of financial aid—without increasing the amount of support—boosted college applications and enrollment at the University of Michigan among low-income, high-achieving students, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Introducing a primary system in Sierra Leone boosted the likelihood that voters elected leaders who were more aligned with their preferences, especially in regional strongholds, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Thousands of poor households pass up heavily subsidized health insurance on state exchanges. Carefully crafted letters can raise those take-up rates and attract healthier enrollees, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Many policymakers worry that generous unemployment insurance keeps people out of the job market. But extended benefits during the Great Recession had no effect on employment, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

An increasing amount of research is being done by teams these days than by individuals. We spoke with Ben Jones about his paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on the pros and cons of collaboration and few reforms that could help ensure coauthors get fair credit for their work.

It's not just parents who have an impact on their children's educational outcomes. Extended family affect future generations as well, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Disclosure theory says that businesses in competitive markets will reveal the quality of their products—good or bad. That often fails to happen because buyers aren’t skeptical enough, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Political corruption isn’t just bad governance. It may also erode ethical standards in the rest of society, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Policymakers often evaluate anti-poverty programs by just one measure—income. A paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics says well-being is important to consider, too.

Inmates sent to private prisons serve 90 extra days on average, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. We spoke author Anita Mukherjee about why that is and how private prison contracting could be reformed.

Why do the poor pay more? A paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy investigates how socioeconomic standing interacts with spatial frictions among supermarket shoppers in Jerusalem.

Production announcements from OPEC have a profound impact on oil prices and the US economy, even when current oil supplies don’t change, according to a paper in the ����� Reviewg.

Relaxing borrowing constraints on underwater homeowners was an important tool for relieving households after the Great Recession, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics. It may have made monetary policy more effective as well.

The Green Revolution of the mid-20th century left sub-Saharan Africa behind. We spoke with Dean Yang about his paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics that measured the potential effects from temporary subsidies to help farmers boost crop yields.

Winning the lottery boosts the odds that a family will send a child to college, but only if they win big, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

A paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics found that kids in the Netherlands whose parents had their disability support reduced in the 1990s were less likely to use disability insurance as adults and completed more schooling.

US universities lead the world in research, but their ascendancy started earlier than many people believe. We spoke with Miguel Urquiola about his paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that explores which schools propelled them to the top and what policymakers can learn from that history.

Firms have to balance the benefits of spending on scientific research against the costs from that science "spilling out" to rivals. A paper in the ����� Review investigates how this tradeoff affects R&D investment.

French-led health campaigns that forcibly treated sub-Saharan Africans a century ago fed deep mistrust in Western medicine that continues today, offering important lessons for modern vaccination efforts, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Switzerland saw a large surge in skilled foreign workers after opening its border to the EU. But contrary to standard models, it boosted the wages of highly educated natives, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

The spread of e-commerce has given many hope that it can help spur production across China’s countryside. But it may not be a promising blueprint for rural development, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

Rising sea levels will reshape coastal communities in significant ways over the next 200 years as humans move further inland. We spoke with Klaus Desmet about his paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics that analyzes which cities are most threatened and why migration is critical in assessments of how climate change will impact the global economy.

“Desk-clearing” behavior by drug approval agencies before the holidays leads to lax reviews and increased safety issues, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

Facebook may be driving more polarization in the US, but a simple nudge could help improve Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of each other, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

A measure of inequality in Europe today appears to be about the same as it was 700 years ago. But the wealth of the rich has fluctuated significantly over the centuries, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature.

The NFL's 'Rooney Rule' was supposed to boost the hiring of minority head coaches. But these soft affirmative action policies don't work because of noise in the evaluation process, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

Are grassroots leaders just the flag-bearers of their causes or do their abilities to influence others shape movements? We spoke with Christian Dippel of UCLA Anderson School of Management about a group of 19th century German rebels to answer that question in today's Research Highlight.

Laid-off Brazilian workers who received lump-sum severance payouts didn’t save that money carry them through the lean months ahead. Instead, they ramped up their spending, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

In most financial markets, securities are traded in isolation. Would it be better to bundle transactions together? A paper in the considers this question.

Evidence from Switzerland suggests that workers are much less sensitive to income changes than previously thought, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Modelers across diverse scientific fields keep trying to push their predictions further into the future. But that may not always be valuable, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Is there a way to make Supreme Court confirmations less polarized and partisan? Daniel Hemel has a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that says decoupling the departures of justices from additions to the court could help.

American colleges have increasingly international student bodies. Whether those foreign students stay in the US after graduating largely depends on economic opportunities back home, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Unemployment insurance is an essential safety net for millions of Americans, but how it’s financed discourages employers from hiring, especially after recessions, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

US business isn’t as dynamic as it used to be. Fewer startups with high-growth potential may be part of the problem, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Critics of lab experiments question whether they yield insights applicable to the real world. A paper in the ����� Review provides a more complete accounting of the data that counters those concerns.

Economists have documented a substantial long-run rise in US income inequality. But a large portion of it may be a shift in how the richest individuals report their earnings, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

When Israel offered to fully cover IVF treatments, the policy did more than extend women's reproductive timelines; it caused them to delay marriage as well, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Field experiments in India showed that modest interventions improved officer interactions with the community. But the interventions that worked weren't the ones police reformers recommended, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Redrawing political boundaries didn’t help resolve Indonesia’s ethnic tensions, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics. But the episode sheds light on the relationship between conflict and diversity.

School choice programs aim to help low-income students by giving them educational options beyond where they can only afford to live. A paper in the ����� Review says this may actually undermine the goals of choice, even when low-performing schools improve.

The children of immigrants climb the income ladder faster than kids with US-born parents, especially among the poorest families. This is as true today as it was a century ago, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Can countries on the precipice of genocide be pulled back? Slowing or stopping relatively small armed groups controlled by elites could go a long way towards halting such deadly spirals, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Immigrant workers have lower unemployment and find jobs faster than natives. But this can actually do more to increase wages and employment for native-born Americans, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics.

About 60 percent of all underground storage tanks have experienced leaks and remediation costs over $1 billion a year in state and federal funds. Regulation and information sent to residents can help protect public health, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

It’s been over 75 years since The Road to Serfdom was published. We spoke with the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy Bruce Caldwell about Hayek’s famous book and the history of economic ideas.

Higher education enrollment has grown dramatically since WWII, but the factors that drive attendance have shifted as well. Academic ability has become a much better predictor of college attendance than family background, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics.

Millions of people in extreme poverty are moving from the countryside to the city. Mobile banking can help keep their families connected and relieve global poverty, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

It’s more costly to fill a prescription than ever. Letting managed care organizations administer Medicaid plans could be a powerful tool to bring down drug prices for poorer Americans, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Schools aren't just academic institutions. They are also social spaces that foster students' socioemotional development. We spoke with Northwestern's Kirabo Jackson about how this matters for kids' long-run outcomes.

If anticompetitive practices are a threat to innovation, then forcing a dominant company to license its technology for free may be one effective remedy, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

From affirmative action and elite high schools, to the effectiveness of border walls, to rethinking how economists study racial discrimination: here are the 10 most-read #ResearchHighlights of 2020.

Giving cash to poor families helped alleviate stunting in Indonesian kids—an outcome that requires continuous investment throughout childhood—says Rema Hanna in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Changes to Denmark’s welfare benefits had a big impact on migration to the country, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights. The findings show that social insurance programs and immigration are intimately related issues.

Liberalizing reforms to Kenya's food system didn't create perfectly competitive markets. One reason is due to tacit collusion among wholesale traders, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Teens who excelled at math went on to have more productive research careers, but their professional success was also tied to where they were born, according to a paper in the ����� Review: Insights.

During the Cultural Revolution, young intellectuals were forced into the countryside. It was tragic for many, but it unintentionally helped increase education in rural China, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Gendered laws hinder women's economic opportunities around the globe. We spoke with Penny Goldberg of Yale University about her research on which countries are the most and least progressive, and the reforms that could create a more equitable economy.

Information campaigns directed at the broader public helped stop conflict over newly discovered natural resources in Mozambique, according to a paper in the ����� Review. The findings help uncover the roots of the resource curse.

Attending Chicago’s selective high schools haven’t helped students with disadvantaged backgrounds get into better colleges. It may have hurt their chances, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Your choice of where to live affects more than personal finances and lifestyle—it can actually have an impact on your long-term health, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

Research contests are a common way to spur innovation, but they don't always produce something the organizers can use. A paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics proposes a new model that they say realigns incentives in a better way.

Inequality has increased over the last four decades, but the reasons for its growth have changed, says Florian Hoffmann in the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Every year governments in developing countries lose money to graft through antiquated payments systems. E-governance reforms can help stop leakage of public funds, according to a paper in the October issue of the .

Religion can hinder economic development when it stands in the way of teaching "economically useful" knowledge, according to a paper in the ����� Review..

An experiment with voters in Pittsburgh demonstrated just how quickly social norms eroded after the 2016 election, according to a paper in the ����� Review..

Many companies may look unproductive compared to their peers, but it could actually be a result of large swings in demand and the high costs of adjusting capacity in some industries, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Economists have an important role to play in working with epidemiologists to assess COVID-19's spread and design an effective response to it, says Eleanor Murray in the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

When politicians had hiring discretion in Brazil, public sector jobs often went to the least capable but most politically connected applicants, according to a paper in the October issue of the ����� Review.

America has never been the melting pot that many people thought it was, according to a paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics. The author found that economic disparities between immigrant groups persisted for much longer than previously thought.

What happens when we take away the 'legal' part of 'legal tender?' A paper in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics investigates whether worthless tokens alone were enough to establish trust among individuals, to encourage even large groups of people to cooperate when all other institutions were absent.

As companies grow, local supervisors play a bigger role in how individual plants get run, leading to wider variation in management practices., according to a paper in the May issue of the ����� Review

Complexity and bureaucracy keep savers stuck in expensive pension funds. Eliminating them would have saved Chilean workers roughly 40 percent in fees, according to a paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

The Protestant Reformation created competition between Christians and Jews in money lending that resulted in anti-Semitic prejudices that persisted for centuries, according to a paper in the ����� Review.

UK industrial policies created jobs in hard-pressed areas relatively cheaply, but only through small manufacturers, and not large corporations, according to a paper in the January issue of the ����� Review.

Borrowers could save hundreds of dollars a year if they just paid off their most expensive credit cards first. And yet, they don't, according to a paper in the March issue of the ����� Review.

Arbitrary differences between what coworkers earn appear to have significant effects on retention. Earning as little as a dime more per hour is associated with staying on board significantly longer, according to a paper in the February issue of the ����� Review.

Civilian allegations of officer misconduct could be a useful tool in helping to identify the worst offenders on a police force, according to a paper that appears in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

India has 63 million more men than women, despite rapid growth in incomes. Land reforms helped to spur this gender imbalance in West Bengal, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Polygynous husbands and wives cooperate less than monogamous ones and may contribute resources to the household with less altruistic motives, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Immigration judges ruled less favorably on hot days, even when the temperature inside was comfortable, according to researchers at University of Ottawa and University of Manitoba. Their paper underscores another challenge of adapting to climate change.

What is the relationship between "underemployment" — the fraction of college graduates working in low-skilled jobs — and the unemployment rate? A paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics explores the dynamics.

The US government spends over 12 percent of GDP on education, healthcare, and childcare for its citizens. Momentum is growing to make these and similar so-called “in-kind” programs more flexible, with some people even arguing that they be turned into cash benefits. But cash programs can be worse at assisting those who need help the most, according to paper in the April issue of the ����� Review.

Researchers have raised questions about the accuracy of the the Census Bureau's household surveys, concerns that if proven true, would fundamentally change our understanding of the nation’s economic health and government programs aimed at helping the most needy. A paper in the April issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics attempts to measure just how skewed the Census’ household survey, called the Current Population Survey, is from reality and assess the implications.

Developing countries like China and India have grown rapidly enough to pull some of their population out of extreme poverty and reduce global inequality by many measures. But economists have struggled to harmonize income measurements across countries and gather data on the incomes of the richest people in the world. A paper in last year’s ����� Papers and Proceedings combined survey, national accounts, and tax data to better estimate the growth of global incomes and inequality.

In-state tuition is a powerful incentive for high schoolers to attend their state’s schools, but it creates a substantial loss for many students across the US, according to a paper in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

A worker with an alcohol problem may struggle to stay sober on the job, even if they want to. MIT economist Frank Schilbach says financial incentives can encourage self control.

Public health campaigns were credited with causing a huge drop in TB deaths in the early 20th century. A paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics says there is good reason to question that narrative.

The Internet has created created new economic opportunities and connected buyers and sellers around the world. But the digital age has also disrupted developed economies and left some people behind. In the February issue of the ����� Review, economists Jonas Hjort and Jonas Poulsen asked if the Internet has created winners and losers in developing countries as well.

VAT cuts may do little to decrease prices, with store owners pocketing most of the cut, according to research published in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. The authors Youssef Benzarti and Dorian Carloni estimated the impact of a VAT cut for French sit-down restaurants in 2009. They wanted to know how much prices decreased after the cut, as well as how much store owners, consumers, suppliers, and employees shared in the windfall.

Fed up with swelling class sizes and stagnant paychecks, teachers walked out of their classrooms in Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginia to demand adequate compensation for the value they brought to their schools. Those educators may be even more undervalued than they realize. A paper in the March issue of the ����� Review says that good teachers can have an impact beyond their own classrooms, helping boost outcomes for students they never even met.

Stereotypes are stubborn and beliefs about gender differences are still commonly held by many people, shaping their economic and social decisions. A paper in the March issue of the ����� Review explores the extent to which social stereotypes about differences between men and women affect their beliefs and performance.

How did Roosevelt's devaluing the dollar help the US recover from the Great Depression? The relief it brought to farmers played a critical role, according to a paper in the February issue of the ����� Review.

What are the spillover effects from immunizing middle school students? We spoke with Emily Lawler of the University of Georgia about the effects of Tdap vaccine mandates on overall public health.

Delhi classrooms with poorer students led to less discrimination and more altruism among richer students, according to an RCT by Gautam Rao of Harvard University. A figure from his paper in the ����� Review is featured in this chart of the week.

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 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists Susan Athey and Michael Luca outlined this growing, mutual influence between economics and the tech industry.

Many small oil drillers in Texas curtailed production or shut down after a new insurance rule made it more costly to engage in risky business practices, according to a paper in the February issue of the ����� Review.

For all America’s partisan divide, there’s a popular belief that the courts exist on some lofty apolitical plane. But judicial politics do, in fact, appear to influence sentencing decisions in ways that perpetuate racial and gender disparities, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

If chains set prices uniformly across the country, who does that benefit? Consumers or retailers? According to researchers at Yale and the US Department of Labor, context and competition play a big role.

Female economists have lower placements out of graduate school, fewer top-5 publications in the beginning of their career, and are less likely to get promoted, according to researchers at Princeton University.

For most of human history, urbanization has gone hand in hand with economic growth. The world’s great cities like London, New York, and Tokyo became capitals of commerce for their booming national economies. But today’s fastest growing cities are different. In the January issue of ����� Journal: Macroeconomics, authors Remi Jedwab and Dietrich Vollrath say that the emergence of poor megacities is a consequence of plummeting urban mortality rates after World War II. This mortality decline may have doubled the urbanization rates in developing countries.

Economists generally accept that global integration has contributed to income inequality and that there might be several potential channels that cause it. In the February issue of the ����� Review, authors Peter Egger, Sergey Nigai, and Nora Strecker study the role that labor income taxes have played on driving income disparities.

Protectionism is on the rise. And if 1930s Britain is any guide, it could profoundly shape how trade flows around the world, according to a paper in the February issue of the ����� Review.

Escalating college costs have caused many students to think hard about the value of higher education. But policymakers are also concerned about whether they're getting enough bang for their buck with financial aid programs. A paper in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy attempts to measure the returns of the Cal Grant program.

Job-search requirements in the Netherlands got people off welfare without reducing benefits to the most vulnerable, according to a paper featured in this chart of the week.

The unemployment rate often gets the most attention during recessions. But a paper in the January issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics says that swings in part-time labor explain nearly half of the changes in hours worked.

A month into his first term as president, Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The $800 billion stimulus package passed along starkly partisan lines, with all House Democrats voting in favor while receiving no support among Republicans. Whether it worked is debatable, but a paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy says it helped stimulate votes for Democrats.

Social interactions are important in fostering criminal networks. A paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics says schools can become breeding grounds for those partnerships. The researchers found that disadvantaged teens who lived near each other and attended the same school were more likely to be arrested for committing crimes together. The effects were especially pronounced for young men of the same race and age.

State policy uncertainty may do more than cause businesses to put off investments. In the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, Cameron Shelton and Nathan Falk say investment may flee to neighboring states permanently.

China’s central bank appears to have lost important controls overs its financial sector between 2009 and 2015 because of shadow banking, according to a paper in the December issue of the ����� Review.

Fifty years ago, Sesame Street launched with a high-minded goal to close the gap in early childhood education. University of Maryland professor Melissa Kearney says, by many measures, the groundbreaking TV show delivered. Her paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics with Phillip Levine is featured in today's research highlight.

Global income inequality among OECD countries is the highest it has been for the past half century. There are a lot of factors behind this — technological change, access to education, and policy differences, among other things. More recently, researchers have begun to look into the role that international trading behavior has played in furthering the gap between rich and poor. A paper in the January issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics says that per-shipment costs — which affect the size and frequency with which exporters ship goods — vary widely between countries and are, indeed, correlated with economic output.

Both liberals and conservatives find reasons to criticize the food-stamp program SNAP. Households not using food-stamp benefits for groceries could undermine SNAP’s central goal of increasing food security for low-income families. A paper published in the December issue of the ����� Review finds that SNAP has a larger effect on food spending than would be predicted by traditional economic theory.

A paper in the December issue of the ����� Review examines some of the factors that may drive patient choices to pursue expensive fertility treatments.

US cities have more than $200 billion dollars collectively in unfunded pension liabilites, but there is wide variation. A paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics highlights the political and economic factors driving unfunded liabilities.

How should policymakers think about the costs of fighting climate change? In the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Ken Gillingham of Yale and James Stock of Harvard say that the long-run costs could be the most important.

How do patents affect future innovation? Maybe not at all, according to a paper in the ����� Review that is featured in today's chart of the week.

Plenty of questions remain about the value of attending a selective college, including whether an elite education narrows the gap between disenfranchised people and their privileged peers, or perpetuates it.

A paper in the January issue of the ����� Review says top universities do in fact help their graduates climb to the top of the corporate ladder . . . but only if you’re a wealthy man.

We spoke with economists at the annual meeting in Atlanta about everything from the US Census to development in Africa. Watch video interviews with poster presenters and keep coming back to see new ones every day this week.

Yellow-vest protests erupted across France in 2018, ostensibly over a planned increase in the fuel tax. Some environmentalists, though, have quietly cheered fuel-price increases. They argue that taxes on gasoline deter more fuel consumption and therefore reduce the emission of CO2 and other pollutants. Environmentalists aren’t wrong, but there may be better ways to reduce emissions than taxing gasoline, according to a paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Economists tackled gender issues, education, globalization, and more in 2018. These were our 10 most-read research highlights

Would a 5-cent tax on disposable plastic bags be enough to convince consumers to bring reusable ones when they go shopping? In the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, Tatiana Homonoff examines the extent to which small incentives can change how people behave, and whether penalties for bad behavior are more effective than rewards for good behavior.

A lot of assumptions must be made to calculate the social cost of carbon emissions, and the past few administrations have taken very different approaches. In the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Maximilian Auffhammer lays out some of the complexities involved in quantifying the economic damages from climate change.

East Asian countries — such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore — grew faster than anywhere else on the planet after World War II. Yet international investors lent more money to slower growing Latin American countries throughout the 20th century. A paper in the December issue of the ����� Review says the key to this puzzle is understanding East Asia's labor markets.

Competitive elections help keep politicians from granting special favors to their party allies, according to a paper featured in today's chart of the week.

In developing countries, it's hard to identify who would benefit most from targeted aid. Should antipoverty programs then just be universal? The ����� interviewed Rema Hanna of Harvard and Ben Olken of Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the trade-offs of a universal basic income in today's research highlight.

Environmental regulations to improve air quality expanded at all levels of government after the 1970s. Researchers know that cap-and-trade and abatement-technology requirements reduced acid rain and smog in places like Los Angeles and New England. But economists have struggled to tally up all the regulations on US manufacturers and their impact on air pollution at a national level. A study published in the December issue of the ����� Review documents how several air pollutants have declined across the country and which factors played a role.

High-poverty, middle-income countries comprise a "missing middle" that should not be overlooked in efforts to lift people out of extreme poverty, according to a paper in the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Tough-on-crime laws in 18th century England backfired because juries were less likely to convict when they felt the punishment didn't fit the crime, according to a paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

Sci-Fi writers, pundits, and business leaders worry that robots are taking our jobs, and soon there won’t be any left for humans. A paper in the June issue of the ����� Review suggests those fears may be overblown, or at least very uncertain.

The political left and right are both questioning the wisdom of free-trade policies after decades of consensus. Some argue that “special” industries — like steel and tungsten — need to be temporarily shielded from international trade to catch up with competitors. Yet, economists have had trouble finding good examples to test this so-called infant-industry argument. A paper in the November issue of the ����� Review looks back 200 years to the Napoleonic Wars, and finds evidence that countries can foster industries by temporarily protecting them from foreign competitors.

Holiday shoppers are about to spend billions of dollars over the next few weeks, and retailers will be dangling can’t-lose deals to capture buyers. But savvy shoppers know that a suspiciously low-priced TV may not be the bargain it seems. What if it’s of such poor quality that it breaks in three months? If the shopper doesn’t already trust the brand, they may not be willing to put down the cash.

A paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics considers the extent to which “satisfaction guaranteed” offers can overcome these transactional standoffs, and whether sellers’ moral obligations to provide fair value can offset their incentives to cheat customers.

Health care providers have clinical guidelines to help them determine when a hospital patient should be discharged. Unfortunately, financial considerations may influence those decisions.

A paper in the November issue of the ����� Review examines whether long-term acute-care hospitals strategically discharged Medicare patients when it was most lucrative to do so, which may not have been in the best interests of the patient.

Does economics have a credibility problem? We asked Berkeley's Ted Miguel, who wrote a paper about this for the Journal of Economic Literature. Miguel says that journals have a tendency to publish "significant" results -- as opposed to "null" results that show no effect. Also, economists may inadvertently bias their results. Still, he says there are reasons to be optimistic.

The Afghan people are awaiting the final results of their 2018 parliamentary elections. During the election, the Taliban and other insurgents murdered candidates and rocketed polling stations. They killed or wounded over 170 people, according to some reports.

The Taliban's election violence might seem random, but actually it has been carefully designed to undermine Afghanistan's government while avoiding civilian casualties, according to a paper in the November issue of the ����� Review.

Cartels are illegal in much of the world, which makes it difficult to determine just how many of them exist or how long they stick around. A paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics attempts to fill in the gaps in our understanding and underscores the importance of maintaining a competitive business environment.

A paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy identifies one important driver of heroin overdoses across the US: the reformulation of OxyContin.

A paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics looks at how local economic shocks induced by trade liberalization affected crime across Brazilian regions. Authors Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Rodrigo Soares, and Gabriel Ulyssea, say that regions exposed to larger tariff reductions (and thus more foreign competition) as a result of liberalized trade agreements also had a temporary increase in homicides.

Innovation is seen as universally good. New ideas make our lives easier and more productive. This should apply to financial innovation as well. But a paper by Francesco Ferrante published in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics highlights some large risks that may outweigh any benefits. One financial innovation in particular, securitization, likely played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis.

An old investing puzzle known as the 'Halloween strategy' does actually beat the 'buy-and-hold' approach, says authors Ben Jacobsen and Sven Bouman in a paper from 2002 in the ����� Review featured in today's chart of the week.

Democrats lost their hold on Southern voters decades ago. Was it all a backlash to civil rights, or is there an economic argument to be made? In the October issue of the ����� Review, researchers Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington use newly available Gallup poll data to study this question. They conclude that whites’ backlash to the Civil Rights law explains almost entirely the shift toward the Republican Party.

In nearly half of two-parent families in the US, both mom and dad work full time. Yet, workplace policies here and in other countries haven’t kept up. Parental leave benefits are usually far more generous for mothers than fathers. As policymakers look to balance these disparities by offering equal leave to both genders, such policies can backfire by creating even more instability for families, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

A paper in the October issue of the ����� Review examines how reforms to California's workers compensation program affected medical spending and, in turn, impacted labor market outcomes for injured workers. The paper highlights important consequences of such medical spending cuts for workers’ livelihoods.

Developed countries have recognized the insights of behavioral economics. But for all the accolades, economists still don’t know why default options — maybe the most important policy insight from behavioral economics — work or whether they can help developing countries. A paper in the October issue of the ����� Review clarifies the impact of default savings options in developing countries.

Many parents, teachers, and schools push to sort students by academic achievement — a policy known as “tracking.” For example, thirty-five of the fifty flagship state universities in the US offer residences restricted to honors students. But universities that use residential tracking may be doing so at the expense of lower-achieving students for very little benefit to higher-achieving students, according to a paper in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

In the October issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics, Don Schlagenhauf and co-authors Shi Qi and Daphne Chen investigate how lowering the corporate tax rate affects entrepreneurs’ choice of legal structure for their company, and what that means for employment growth.

For the middle class, wages have recovered from the Great Recession. But veterans may not be as fortunate. In the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, economists Mark Borgschulte and Paco Martorell show that recessions saddle young veterans with earnings losses that can persist for more than a decade.

Tiny entrepreneurial ventures are ubiquitous in many African and South American countries, yet generate little or no profit. Thus, understanding how these “microenterprises” could become more profitable and grow could be critical to improving the welfare of the urban poor.

A paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics investigates whether business training helped entrepreneurs in Kenya boost their profits.

If you live in a higher-income country, you probably have access to bank accounts and retirement plans like 401(k)s. People living in lower-income countries, however, have to find creative ways to save. Jewelry, animals, or cash under their mattress might serve as a savings vehicle. A paper in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics shows that using bank accounts and digital payments have a large impact on the amount people save.

Cities around the US have taken wrecking balls to public housing. But not much is known about what happens to the people who are forced to leave. In the October issue of the ����� Review, Eric Chyn examines the long-term outcomes for children who left Chicago public housing that was slated for demolition.

Generally, economists and politicians assume that a large program, such as SSDI, will have no trouble reaching its target audience. Who wouldn’t sign up to receive $1,200 a month from a program they’ve been paying into their entire career? A paper in the August issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy argues that policymakers shouldn’t be confident the message will reach everyone without a concerted effort.

Critics derided raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour as a job killer and claimed to have the evidence to support it. But the impact that wage pressures have on employers’ hiring decisions is far from certain. A paper in the September issue of the ����� Review looks at what is likely to happen in three cities — Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — that passed laws increasing the minimum wage to $15.

In the August issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, Andrew Barr and Sarah Turner find that providing information about the benefits and costs of education to people receiving unemployment insurance (UI) increased their likelihood of enrolling in school by as much as 4 percentage points during the first six months of unemployment.

The economics profession has a gender imbalance and departments everywhere are trying to figure out how to boost women in their ranks. Many have established family friendly policies that give new parents additional time to publish and establish themselves as researchers before they come up for tenure. Unfortunately, some “tenure clock stopping policies” are making the problem worse, according to a paper in the September issue of the ����� Review.

The ����� spoke with one of the paper's authors, Kelly Bedard, about the issue and what might be done about it.

As health care providers extend their reach, new questions emerge about how consumers will be affected, especially when it comes to the cost of care.

In the August issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, UCLA economist Matt Schmitt says that hospital prices can increase even when a merger doesn’t reduce competition in a market. His findings offer new insights for policymakers and consumer advocates to consider as an increasing number of local and regional hospitals get gobbled up by larger health care providers based hundreds of miles away.

A paper in the August issue of the ����� Review considers the impact that government old-age support programs have on late-life labor supply, as well as some of the associated costs and benefits.

Can China's media thrive while being a propaganda arm for the government? A paper in the September issue of the ����� Review says that China is making a political-economic trade-off with state run media that undercuts its own goals for prosperity and growth.

Money is obviously an important incentive to work, but jobs also provide meaning for a lot of people. We spoke with Columbia Business School professor Stephan Meier about how economists think about nonmonetary incentives in the workplace. The interview is featured in today's Research Highlight.

Authors of a new JEP paper used Facebook data to create a "Social Connectedness Index," the first comprehensive measure of friendship networks on a national level. Their research reveals insights into how people live socially and economically and is featured in today's chart of the week.

Tribalism among government employees can have very real-world impacts on public safety, according to a paper in the August issue of ����� Journal: Economic Policy.Figure 1 from the paper shows that police officers were more likely to commit offenses following the first multiparty elections in 1961, which sparked the rise of ethnic politics in Kenya.

Policymakers have debated the best way to rein in Medicare premiums while maintaining generous benefits for the elderly, especially for those covered under the private Medicare Advantage plans that account for a substantial portion of beneficiaries.

A paper in the ����� Review examines the impact of one Medicare reform 18 years ago that sought to help the elderly by providing bigger subsidies to private insurers. Would insurers pass the money along to their beneficiaries via lower premiums and more robust benefits, or keep the profit for themselves?

A wave of female candidates has inundated political races around the US with hopes to upend the gender imbalance in government. Victories in the most high-profile races could have a real impact on other women’s political candidacy, as well as have ripple effects beyond the communities they serve, according to research that appears in the latest issue of ����� Journal: Economic Policy.

In the August issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, Yale economist William Nordhaus revises an earlier model to project climate change in an era of minimal environmental policies.

Everybody charged with a crime in America has the right to legal counsel. If they don’t have the money, the state will pay for an attorney. But that doesn’t mean they get the best defense, or even a good one. Maybe the problem is in how they are matched with attorneys in the first place. Instead of assigning attorneys to represent defendants, what if defendants themselves were able to choose?

Bad idea, says researcher Behrang Kamali. In a paper that appears in the August issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics, Kamali says that letting defendants pick their state-funded attorney could actually backfire and stick them with an even worse defense.

Personal banking accounts are a common convenience in rich countries like the US, something millions of households use for depositing paychecks and storing cash for the proverbial rainy day. Bank accounts could be a critical wealth-building tool in developing countries as well. The challenge is getting more people to use them.

A paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics explored whether offering temporary high investment returns on bank accounts in Kenya was enough to encourage more aggressive savings practices years later.

National policies vary for the commercial rights to university-based innovations. In some countries, researchers enjoy full rights to their discoveries. That’s not the case in the US, where universities typically hold majority rights and professors own a smaller share of the pie.

Unfortunately, the US may not have the best model for connecting the ivory tower to the marketplace, according to a paper in the July issue of the ����� Review.

Senate votes are almost never surprising, especially during hyper partisan times when everybody votes along party lines. When a legislator actually breaks rank, the reaction can be a mix of awe and breathless admiration for a “maverick” who is willing to put principles before politics. But decisions to defect may be based on more than idealism. Indeed, the likelihood that someone strays from their party may even depend on the spelling of their last name, according to a paper in the July issue of the ����� Review.

Anti-immigration advocates have long argued that tightening our borders is about protecting American jobs. Liberal immigration policies, they say, flood the market with cheap labor, suppressing wages and employment. But a paper in the June issue of the ����� Review finds that one of the largest attempts to help American workers by establishing immigration barriers did not accomplish its goals.

Trade deals have important consequences that spill over outside of the countries that agree to them, according to a paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics. The paper highlights the important and overlooked benefits that result from free trade agreements, gains thtat are not currently being weighed by policymakers who want to stoke trade wars.

We're told that we live in a flat world in which technology makes geography less important to where jobs are located. And yet, the productivity gap between rich and poor countries has grown dramatically over the past two centuries and continues to expand. It is called the Great Divergence. A paper in the July issue of ����� Journal: Macroeconomics says access to technology isn’t the main issue anymore. Rather, it is how intensely countries use the latest tools to become more productive.

Government spending on infrastructure is vital to economic growth in many countries, but it's difficult to measure the impact and also who reaps the biggest rewards. A paper in the July issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics looks at evidence from Mexico to answer these questions.

Children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning. But there’s some good news: fast action to address the problems early on can mitigate the long-term damage to kids’ health and development, according to a paper published in the July issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Stock market participation varies widely from country to country, and that variation may have something to do with cultural attitudes about gender.

Candidates for public office are desperate to find new ways to reach voters at a time when much of the political conversation has moved online. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have been the social media platforms of choice, but Harvard professor Vincent Pons says face-to-face interaction still matters.

In ����� Papers and Proceedings, authors Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, Li Yang, and Gabriel Zucman examined the evolution of private wealth, public property, and income disparity since each communist country began transitioning toward market-oriented economies.

To what extent do our discriminatory actions harm our economic self-interest? And at what point do we decide the price we pay for our prejudice is too high?

A recent paper in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics puts a price on ethnic prejudice and finds that discriminators are willing to forego 8 percent of their earnings to avoid working with someone of a different ethnicity. And it wasn’t just majorities discriminating against minorities: minorities paid a premium to avoid working with a majority person.

Over the past few decades, US manufacturing employment has plummeted. And yet, value added -- a firm's net output after accounting for their intermediate inputs -- keeps rising. Some economists attribute this to technology and automation. Others point to the role of import competition from China. In the Spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Teresa Fort, Justin Pierce, and Peter Schott argue that these forces are difficult to separate. And, the impact of trade and technology may even vary across sectors, firms, and regions.

Economists need a better way to study global firms that dominate international trade. Researchers Andrew Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen Redding, and Peter Schott might have found that better way. In the June issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, the researchers develop a framework that specifically looks at global firms. The resulting insights can help economists to better understand what these firms looks like, how they behave, and why only a few have an outsized role in international trade.

In much of the world, elections are neither fair nor free. It’s easy to imagine that violence and intimidation are at the root of this statistic or that bias only matters in places without much election oversight. Yet, even subtle forms of bias can sway well-monitored elections. In fact, in India’s 2014 parliamentary elections, the diversity of polling station officials (or lack thereof) was enough to influence the outcome. In the June issue of the ����� Review, author Yusuf Neggers examines this 2014 election and how, more broadly, diversity can mitigate the effects of bias.

Last December, Congress passed the largest US tax overhaul in three decades. It touched a lot of areas of the tax code, but the reform’s crown jewel was slashing the corporate-tax rate.Economists have sought to estimate what effect, if any, lowering the corporate tax burden from 35 percent would have on business investment. An empirical analysis in the May issue of ����� Journal: Economic Policy finds that a tax cut would, in fact, spur increased investment and payouts while lowering corporate debt.

Whether Brexit, offshoring, or China’s growing middle class, globalization is at the core of many issues today. But often, globalization gets too much credit for changing the world — and potentially too much blame. This is especially true of global income inequality. A common narrative frames globalization as the cause of inequality: by shifting low-skilled jobs from wealthier countries to poorer countries, economic integration has increased inequality within countries while lowering inequality between them. However, the story is more complex, and economists and policymakers tend to see globalization differently, according to a review essay in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Over half of all people living with HIV are women. Of all HIV-positive women, 80 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This so-called feminization of HIV has its roots in countries' legal systems, finds Siwan Anderson in the June issue of the ����� Review.

Cafes opening in a neighborhood are a reasonably good sign that an area is gentrifying, according to a paper in ����� Papers & Proceedings. So are groceries, laundromats, wine bars, and vegetarian restaurants.

Researchers Edward Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca use data from the business listing platform Yelp to study how changes in the local business environment relate to the demographics of its residents. The paper offers insights into how researchers can use digital platforms to better understand how neighborhoods evolve in real time and has implications beyond economics.

Parag Pathak is this year's winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. The 37-year-old MIT professor has worked to improve the assignment of students to public schools, notably in Boston, and also evaluated the impacts of school choice systems on student outcomes.

The ����� spoke with Pathak about his research, the influence of his mentor and former ����� president Al Roth, the criticisms against economic theorists, and the opportunities to shape public policy.

One in nine people struggle to access food for good nutrition. This food insecurity isn’t just a problem in developing countries. It’s a big issue in the United States, as well, especially for minority and immigrant households. To address the issue, policymakers need to focus on more than just reducing the number of households that are considered food insecure. They need to consider the severity of the problem, as well, according to a new paper in ����� Papers and Proceedings.

There’s a lot that economists still don’t know about how price discrimination works, especially in competitive markets. In a paper published in the May issue of the < a href='/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20160252'>����� Journal: Microeconomics, economists at the University of Toronto looked at how competition in the airline industry affected the ticket prices for various classes of passengers.

Economic activity has expanded around the world, reaching nearly every part of the Earth. In a paper in the Spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Matthew Weinzierl discusses economics’ final frontier: space.

Everyone benefits from giving workers the incentive to build their skills. Employers, society, and workers themselves all gain from having a more highly skilled workforce. But to get this workforce, researchers need to understand the complex interplay among reputation, human capital development, and incentives.

A paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics explores the nuances of this issue. By comparing two models, author Gonzalo Cisternas explains exactly how skill development happens, why certain types of workers may underinvest in their skills, and the ways in which big data can mitigate this problem.

David Huffman has dedicated much of his career to studying risk preference, which he says is essential to understanding the economic decisions we make. Huffman has co-authored a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives about the role that cognitive ability plays in a person’s risk tolerance. He and his co-authors Thomas Dohmen, Armin Falk, and Uwe Sunde, say there appears to be a relationship between higher intelligence and avoiding harmful risky situations. But that doesn’t mean smart people are shrinking violets. They sometimes prefer risk, but only when the upside makes it worthwhile.

A paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy examines how a voucher program’s design influences whether a low-income household moves to a higher quality neighborhood.

The link between immigration and crime has been a cornerstone of recent immigration policy. However, this connection is largely false; immigration is not known to drive up crime rates, and it may even lower them.

A paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy goes one step further: citizenship status may not be an important factor when looking at immigration and crime, but employment status is.

Sales taxes may seem like a timeless and fundamental part of American life. However, they, along with many other state functions, are legacies of the Great Depression. The Great Depression sparked the rise of state governments at the expense of local governments. In the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, authors Daniele Coen-Pirani and Michael Wooley develop and test a hypothesis to explain why.

A key role of government is to maintain law and order. Beyond the obvious concerns for justice and public safety, there are economic consequences, as well. A paper by Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics examines the impact on a nation’s economy when the state fails to protect companies from criminal threats.

Many families have received their annual tax refund by now. At the same time, many high school seniors have made their college decisions. These two events might not seem related, but according to researchers Dayanand Manoli and Nicholas Turner, they can be.

In a new paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, the researchers show that having some extra cash-on-hand in the spring of senior year increases college enrollment rates for low-income families.

School reformers have for decades argued over how best to close the achievement gap. For some experts, the issue comes down to money, although many economists have been skeptical of the focus on resources alone. Throwing money at the problem was a crude way to address an issue that required more nuanced policy.

But maybe education funding matters after all, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

King coal has surrendered its throne. Once a dominant part of electricity generation in the United States, coal’s share of the market has plunged dramatically over the past decade amid rising competition from other fuel sources.

A paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy examines the role that natural gas and wind have played in coal’s demise. Authors Harrison Fell and Daniel Kaffine say that natural gas has made coal a more expensive option for powering the grid, pushing it to the margins and leaving it vulnerable to renewable competitors.

Worldwide, the agricultural sector tends to have the lowest incomes. And yet, many farmers do not switch jobs. There’s a popular view about why people stay in agriculture: the barriers to switching jobs are just too high. A new paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics disagrees. Authors Berthold Herrendorf and Todd Schoellman find that these barriers are relatively small and fall short of explaining the wage gap between agriculture and other industries.

The abolition of serfdom spurred a new era of economic development in Russia -- but its resulting land reform undid much of that progress, according to a paper published in the April issue of the ����� Review.

Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people and wrought more than $100 billion in property damage when it struck the Louisiana coast in August 2005, highlighting the region's fragility and raising questions about whether one of the nation's most historic cities and its residents would recover.

The answer is still uncertain for the city, itself. However, the individual survivors have bounced back surprisingly well and actually improved their economic fortunes more than they might have over the long-run had the storm never happened, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Seven years ago, Japan was rocked by the most violent earthquake the island nation had ever seen. The trauma of the event no doubt had profound impacts on the survivors. But how? Would it make them more cautious and conservative, or emboldened by having survived? The answer may depend on their gender, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Financial integration makes crises less likely but more severe if they happen, according to researchers Fabrizio Perri and Vincenzo Quadrini. This video summarizes their research, which was published in the April issue of the ����� Review.

The most basic function of a bank is safekeeping — simply having a place to put your money. Of course, access to this fundamental service does not mean that people will use it.

In a paper in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, authors Pascaline Dupas, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Robinson, and Diego Ubfal help participants open simple, low-interest accounts in Uganda, Chile, and Malawi. By paying bank fees and assisting with paperwork, the authors remove many of the barriers to having and using these accounts. Most people never use their accounts.

When the government of Chile reached out to Claudia Martínez, Esteban Puentes, and Jaime Ruiz-Tagle to evaluate their largest entrepreneurship program, the researchers were not sure what they would find. After all, most programs like these take place in settings where the default employment is agricultural work. Santiago’s dynamic labor market provided a new context to test the effectiveness of training and funding for entrepreneurs. The Micro-entrepreneurship Support Program (MESP) worked. However, it did not work entirely as expected. They document their findings in a paper that appeared in the April issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

In the February issue of the ����� Review, researchers Kamila Sommer and Paul Sullivan consider the implications for the US housing market if the home mortgage interest deduction were to be scrapped. They find that getting rid of this $90 billion subsidy to homeowners would actually improve overall welfare by lowering home prices and expanding opportunities for homeownership among younger and lower-income households.

In India, Muslim children are far more likely than Hindu infants to survive past their first birthday even though Muslims tend to have lower consumption, wealth, educational attainment, and worse access to state services. This pattern has confounded economists. In the April issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics, authors Michael Geruso and Dean Spears attempt to answer this puzzle by looking beyond individual households to the actual neighborhood environment.

Pregnancy is stressful enough for women under the best circumstances. A sudden tragedy would further strain an expecting mother’s physical and mental health. That stress may impact the fetus, too, and have far reaching consequences for a child’s mental health, according to a paper in the April issue of the ����� Review.

Authors Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater spoke with the ����� about how they approached their research and some potential policy implications.

Information can spread around the world faster than ever before. The Internet enables companies to learn about price changes almost instantaneously, and big data helps firms to predict consumer demand.

As economists try to understand the potential impacts of this technology, one researcher is looking to history for answers. In the March issue of the ����� Review, Claudia Steinwender examines how the 1866 transatlantic telegraph cable affected cotton price volatility.

A paper in the March issue of the Journal of Economic Literature makes the case for more interdisciplinary work between economics and social neuroscience. Sharing tools, methodologies, and insights can strengthen both disciplines. After all, they are fundamentally connected. “When we study society, whether or not we want to, we are studying the brain,” author Carlos Alós-Ferrer said in an interview with the �����.

A paper in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy says that physicians are sensitive to patients’ financial situations and will prescribe less expensive medications for lower-income people, as long as there is a well-known generic option available. The research highlights a flaw in how insurance companies are trying to incentivize patients to choose less expensive drug options and points to a potential benefit of providing more information to doctors about patient costs.

Russian men are well known to have a fondness for vodka, and unfortunately, those hard drinkers pay for their alcohol abuse with their lives. Government efforts to reduce alcohol consumption have had varied success.

A paper in the January issue of ����� Review: Applied Economics considers whether an alcohol tax could help reduce consumption.

It can be hard to put research into words — let alone pictures. So in 2014, Jonathan Schwabish wrote “An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data.” Four years later, his advice, critiques, and insights into the world of data visualization are still as relevant as ever.

We recently spoke with Schwabish about what economists and other social scientists can do to make their research more accessible, both within academia and more broadly. We also discussed why communication is so important today, his best tips for making charts, and how the field of data visualization continues to evolve.

Some art owners cannot bear to part with their pieces, only consigning one to auction if they are in financial distress. Others sell all the time; they are simply looking to turn a profit. These attitudes have implications far beyond individual art owners, find authors Stefano Lovo and Christophe Spaenjers. In a paper in the March issue of the ����� Review, they show how the combination of two factors — emotional attachment to art and reactions to the business cycle — explain the co-movement of the art market and macroeconomy.

Third party certifications can be an important tool for consumers, and in theory, the more information certifiers provide about a product's quality the better. But researchers Rick Harbaugh and Eric Rasmusen say that crude measures of quality can be more beneficial for the public. This video summarizes their paper published in the February issue of ����� Journal: Microeconomics.

Author Daniel Hamermesh believes that not everyone will be happy about his latest research, but he’s not bothered by that: “It’s our job to make people think about things,” he says. With this article, Hamermesh hopes that economists will start to recognize citation counts as one of the best measures of research quality, despite the traditional importance of journal and institutional reputation in assessing economists’ contributions to the field.

The paper, which appears in the March issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, examines the role of citations within the economics profession. Because citations capture how much literature builds on a piece of scholarship, they act as a market-based measure of research importance.

Before the Great Recession, homeowners became accustomed to tapping their ever growing equity to maintain a certain standard of living. Then the bubble burst and the tap shut off, exposing homeowners to an even deeper cavity of negative equity than they would have experienced had they left their investment alone. It would drive many families into default. A paper in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy poses the question of whether setting limits on home equity loans would have made a difference.

The phrase “affordable housing” can seem like an ironic joke when applied to America’s most expensive places to live. But many cities — New York, Boston, Seattle, Denver, and San Diego, among others — are grappling with how to rein in housing markets where prices are only affordable to the financial elite.

The issue is of key concern for economists studying how to help low- and middle-income populations build wealth. Policies that encourage people to build emergency savings, buy health insurance, or invest in tax-deferred college plans for their children are irrelevant if people are putting all of their money toward rent or a mortgage payment. Expensive cities are "like sand castles before the tide," according to a paper in the winter Journal of Economic Perspectives

When policymakers need to encourage energy conservation, they face a difficult decision. They can appeal to their constituents’ sense of morality, which is often seen as ineffective, or they can increase the price of energy, which is likely to be unpopular.

Authors Koichiro Ito, Takanori Ida, and Makoto Tanaka examine these options in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. They find that, although both strategies induce short-run reductions in electricity usage, economic incentives have a larger and more persistent effect than moral suasion.

If you give high school students cash incentives to perform well on exams, their scores will increase. Of course, these higher grades have two possible explanations: increased learning or increased cheating. The first was the goal of Aligning Learning Incentives (ALI), an experiment designed to encourage student learning throughout high schools in Mexico.

It worked, but the second explanation played a role, too. A paper in the February issue of the �����s Journal: Economic Policy examines the prevalence of cheating throughout this program. Authors César Martinelli, Susan Parker, Ana Cristina Pérez-Gea, and Rodimiro Rodrigo find that cheating happened in most classrooms, but it happened significantly more when students had the chance to earn money.

A paper in the December issue of the Journal of Economic Literature offers important historical context about the impact that immigrants have had on the American workforce and society. Researchers Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky say that immigrants a century ago did not assimilate into the culture as quickly as previously believed and that today’s immigrants do not have the negative economic or social impact that many politicians proclaim. The ����� spoke with Boustan about the impact that immigrants have had on the economy and what our experience can teach us about the larger cultural debate being argued today.

One out of every five inmates in the United States is awaiting trial. They have not yet been found guilty of a crime. However, they are behind bars, and this means they are more likely to be convicted. In the February ����� Review, authors Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal Yang examine data from over 420,000 criminal defendants from two large urban areas -- Philadelphia and Miami -- and found that pretrial detention significantly increases the probability of being found guilty, mostly via plea deals.

Debates about inflation and unemployment are nothing new. Ever since the 1950s, economists have been trying to understand the exact relationship between these two concepts. Given the current return to this debate, examining the history of these ideas — as a new paper in the February issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives does — is critical to how we view them in a modern context and apply them to economic policy.

The European Commission is designed to represent the EU’s interests — not those of individual countries. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that its members allow national interests to influence their decision-making. In the February issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, authors Kai Gehring and Stephan Schneider lend empirical support to the claims that the nationality of the Agricultural Commissioner plays a role in budgeting.

What do you assume about a restaurant that refuses to disclose its inspection report? Probably that it's got something bad to hide. But a paper that appears in the February issue of ����� Journal: Microeconomics found that many of the best restaurants — the A+ establishments — choose not to disclose their inspection scores to the public, contradicting what common sense and classical economic theory predict.

Offshoring is costly and politically unpopular, but it may be the best option when widespread company shut-downs begin. A paper in the February issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics by Mitsuru Igami uses the hard disk drive industry to explain why.

The AIDS epidemic has ravaged sub-Saharan Africa and caused a rapid decline in life expectancy, which has fallen by 14 years in southern Africa. But expanded access to effective drug treatment has begun to reverse the trend. One of the most effective drug treatments in slowing the progression of AIDS is known as antiretroviral therapy, or ART. When the treatment was made available for free in 2003 in Malawi, where the epidemic has been particularly severe, it improved the health of individuals living with the disease.

But the AIDS therapy did more than that. The prospect of having a longer life also encouraged individuals to invest more in themselves and their communities, according to a paper in the January issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Ten years ago, millions of Americans were losing their homes to foreclosure and policymakers didn’t know how to help them. Part of the problem was that lawmakers didn’t understand why homeowners were unable — or unwilling — to repay their mortgages. Was it more tied to rising unemployment or the massive losses in the housing market? Were homeowners not paying their mortgages because a breadwinner had lost their job or were they just so underwater that they were making a rational choice to walk away from an investment they knew they would never recoup?

A paper that appears in the January issue of the ����� Review suggests that job loss played a larger role in the problem than previously thought.

In economics papers, coauthors are typically listed in alphabetical order. Only about fifteen percent of two-author pairs reverse the order, signifying that the first author contributed more than the second. However, when listed alphabetically, it is impossible to tell whether the first author did more work or the authors shared the work equally.

A new paper in the February issue of the ����� Review proposes a solution. On their title page, the coauthors list their names in an unusual way: Debraj Ray ® Arthur Robson. The symbol indicates that the order of their names is random. Ray is not listed first because his name comes first in the alphabet or because he contributed more. He is listed first because the two authors flipped a coin.

Perhaps nowhere has the discussion around sexual assault been more heated than on college campuses, which for years have struggled to prevent these attacks against women and also create policies to hold offenders accountable.

In the January issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, Montana State University professor Isaac Swensen and his co-authors Jason Lindo and Peter Siminski consider the extent to which a school’s party culture increases sexual violence against women. We spoke with Swensen about their paper. You can read the highlights of that conversation and listen to an extended audio version on our website.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters examine the academic performance of students who participated in a Louisiana school choice program in a paper that appears in the January issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics. Figure 3 from their paper shows the distribution of students who change enrollment because they won a voucher lottery and compares their performance on standardized tests to those who lost the lottery.

Get Out The Vote campaigns are a staple of the voting process in developed countries, particularly in the United States. These campaigns motivate potential voters to register and vote on election day, and researchers have studied them extensively. However, in developing countries, motivation is not always the obstacle to voting. Groups excluded from the public sphere, such as women, face different challenges. Whether safety concerns, cultural traditions, or mobility constraints, these obstacles have received less attention from economists.

In the January issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, a paper by Xavier Giné and Ghazala Mansuri highlights the role of information in female voting behavior in Pakistan. We spoke with Mansuri about what happened when researchers gave women basic information on the voting process and the secrecy of their ballots.

Economists have traditionally measured the gap in well-being between rich and poor countries based on how much citizens consume. When taking into account differences in leisure time, the gap is even larger. Not only do citizens of wealthier countries have higher incomes, but they also work less, according to a paper in the January issue of the ����� Review.

A paper in the January issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics considers whether social media could hold institutional corruption in check when mainstream media is unable — or unwilling — to do so. Could bloggers perform the role that state-owned media does not, and if so, how big of an impact could they have?

“I think it becomes relevant for almost all countries,” said co-author Ruben Enikolopov, associate professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in a Skype interview. “But this part about bloggers that expose corruption because they cannot speak about this in traditional media is more relevant for countries that have a low level of media freedom.”

Policymakers in the U.S. have considered creating a carbon market, among other ways of reducing carbon emissions. These ways include subsidizing green innovation directly, regulating carbon emissions, and implementing a tax on carbon. All of these have been controversial and often seen as too costly to try.

However, the size of the carbon tax necessary to meet significant climate goals is smaller than previously thought. In a new paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics, author Stephie Fried models the effect of a carbon tax on the entire economy. She finds that, when accounting for innovation, the size of the carbon tax needed to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent in 20 years decreases by 19.2 percent. This also implies that governments can allocate fewer permits in a cap-and-trade market to achieve the same permit price.

There has been a hollowing out of the US labor market over the past few decades; most of the job expansion has happened at the extremes. Wage and employment growth has been dominated by highly paid and lowest-paid positions. Meanwhile, middle-wage jobs requiring moderate skills training have become a smaller share of overall employment. This phenomenon has been well documented since the 1980s. However, in a paper that appears in the January issue of The ����� Journal: Macroeconomics, researchers Zsófia Bárány and Christian Siegel say the polarization began much earlier, possibly back to the 1950s or 1960s.

In 2003, New York City adopted a coordinated matching system for placing students in high schools. However, there has been very little research on whether this admissions process is actually good for students. In the December issue of the ����� Review, authors Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Nikhil Agarwal, and Parag Pathak evaluate New York City’s matching system. They find that it did make students better off, lending empirical support to the market-design-inspired process.

The Research Highlight series provides an overview of current economics research, focusing on why it is interesting and relevant to our everyday lives. The top ten highlights* of 2017 cover everything from online education to historical trade. Several address themes of gender and education — both as they relate to the economics profession and more broadly. You can listen to, watch, and read the best research highlights of 2017 below. And, you can check out more on our website.

The World Bank’s goal is to eradicate extreme poverty everywhere by 2030. But the outlook may not be as rosy as many people imagine. NYU Abu Dhabi economist Robert C. Allen says that we haven’t made as much progress as we believe and that the World Bank is underestimating extreme poverty worldwide, especially in much of the developing world. He published a paper about it in the December issue of the ����� Review in which he also offers a new — and controversial — way to measure poverty.

A global population boom in the post-World War II era had many intellectuals wringing their hands over a looming crisis. So, they set to work. By 1976, 40 countries had explicit policies to reduce fertility rates. Many more nations would direct government support for family planning in the decades that followed.

A paper that appears in the fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives examines the effectiveness of these global population-control policies. Co-authors Tiloka de Silva and Silvana Tenreyro say the interventions generally worked, especially in the developing countries where they were implemented.

Whether replacing a light bulb or buying a car, investing in energy-efficient products can help people to reduce their carbon footprint while saving money. So why do consumers still opt for energy-inefficient goods?

In a new paper in the December issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, co-authors Todd Gerarden, Richard Newell, and Robert Stavins explore why people are slow to switch — even when it’s in their best interests to do so.

Today's workers have more flexibility than ever before. But how much do employees really want to work non-traditional hours? A paper in the December issue of the ����� Review by Alex Mas and Amanda Pallais says that most workers prefer to have a standard schedule rather than unpredictable hours set by their employer. This video summarizes their research.

Finding a new job is hard. Returning to an old job is easier, but most people consider these “recalls” uncommon — a relic of the 1970s manufacturing industry that few encounter today.

However, over 40 percent of the unemployed return to their previous employer after a jobless spell. In a new paper in the December issue of the ����� Review authors Shigeru Fujita and Giuseppe Moscarini study these recalls and what they mean for the U.S. economy. They find that recalls are largely responsible for getting people out of unemployment, but for those who are not recalled, finding work is even harder.

In the Fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Canice Prendergast describes how he and other experts in 2005 helped the national hunger relief nonprofit Feeding America design a better way to distribute food donations to local food banks. Their solution was to transition Feeding America from a centralized allocation system to one in which food allotments were auctioned off using a “fake” currency called “shares.”

Lise Vesterlund has dedicated much of her career to understanding altruism and what motivates people to donate to charities. She recently published a paper called “Why Do People Give?” with her co-authors Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, of IUPUI and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and Huan Xie, of Concordia University, in the ����� Review

Vesterlund says that it is critical for nonprofits to understand donor motivations in order to design successful fundraising campaigns. She also says that a number of common strategies, like some types of charity auctions, are ineffective ways for nonprofits to raise money.

In a new paper in the fall issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, James Berry, Esther Duflo, Harini Kannan, Shobhini Mukerji, Marc Shotland, and Michael Walton discuss the challenges of scaling up RCTs and how to overcome them. The challenges include corruption, changing costs of implementation, and context dependence.

Not everyone pays their taxes — at least not in full. As the Paradise Papers recently documented, offshore tax havens allow wealthy companies and individuals to avoid paying higher rates.

The debate on wealth taxes raises this concern as well: will taxing assets induce evasion? Or, might it even cause people to reduce their savings and lower their wealth? In a new paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, author David Seim uses evidence from Sweden to find out.

The push to deregulate utilities has supposedly been about giving more choice for consumers. Introduce competition into local markets, and households could pick the energy company offering the best price.

In practice, however, consumers are a bit slower to change even when they could be paying substantially less for electricity.

A paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy looks at what happened when Texas deregulated its electricity market in 2002. Authors Ali Hortacsu, Seyed Ali Madanizadeh, and Steven L. Puller found that consumers tended to stick with their old electricity provider for years even after they were given the option to switch to a less-expensive retailer.

When Pope John Paul II visited Brazil in 1991, a common thread running throughout his speeches was the importance of family and of having children. His words had an impact on many Brazilians, even if only for a little while.

A paper that appears in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics says that the Pontiff's pro-childbearing message was persuasive enough to shift the sexual beliefs and behavior of many individual Brazilians. Contraceptive use declined, the frequency of unprotected sex increased, and nine months later there was a noticeable increase in births.

The paper offers novel insights into how economists can measure the influence of prominent figures.

People vote based on two factors: their opinions on what is best for society and how informed they are. In a new paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics, author Joseph McMurray shows how this portrayal of voters is able to explain much of the strange behavior we see at the ballot box — more so than models of voters acting on self-interest alone.

For most people, the end of the year is approaching. For government agencies, the year ended weeks ago. As the 2017 fiscal year came to a close, departments with expiring budgets rushed to use up their yearly allotment of government funds. After all, failing to spend all of their resources would seem wasteful.

However, in a new paper in the November issue of the ����� Review, authors Jeffrey Liebman and Neale Mahoney find that this end-of-the-year spending surge can result in waste as well.

The impact of spending more on students may be bigger than we realize

A paper that appears in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy says that increasing per pupil spending can have long-run impacts on a child’s education and the chances they will enroll in and graduate from college.

Author Joshua Hyman found that spending an additional $1,000 (or 10 percent) per student in the fourth through seventh grades led to a 7 percent increase in college enrollment and an 11 percent increase in students earning a degree.

China’s collectivization movement in the 1950s had profound and radical consequences for its 550 million peasants.

Yet, people who had to turn over their private property to the collective weren’t the only ones who sacrificed. Millions of draft animals gave their lives for the cause, according to a paper that appears in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics.

Peasants were forced to turn over their land and sell their draft animals to the collective. Unwilling to accept the low prices they were offered, many peasants chose to slaughter their animals and keep the meat and hide. Authors Shuo Chen and Xiaohuan Lan estimate that collectivization resulted in the deaths of 7.4 to 9.5 million draft animals, or a loss of 12-15 percent.

The Netherlands has long been a laboratory for progressive policies, such as their regulated tolerance of soft drugs. The country’s approach to “sin industries,” such as the drug and prostitution markets, is known for being open-minded. Of course, this approach can also be pragmatic: if the government can’t prevent illegal activity from happening, they can at least make it safer through a combination of legalization and regulation.

In a paper in the November issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, authors Paul Bisschop, Stephen Kastoryano, and Bas van der Klaauw examine the effect that creating public zones for legalized prostitution had on citywide crime. The zones could have acted as a criminal hotspot, facilitating interactions among petty criminals and organized crime. Or they could have had the opposite effect

Anybody who watches cable news is well aware of America’s political divide.

At times, liberals and conservatives seem to be living in separate realities. But who’s to blame for this widening rift? A lot of people point to the media itself.

In a paper that appears in the September issue of the ����� Review, Ali Yurukoglu examined the impact that politically slanted cable news outlets like Fox News or MSNBC were having on American voters’ political tastes. He and co-author Gregory Martin found that Fox News’ influence was significant enough to pull voters to the right and potentially change the outcome of a tight election. What’s more, the conservative media outlet’s influence grew as its coverage became more partisan.

You can listen to our interview with Yurukoglu and read an edited transcript on our website

Financial crises have a bad reputation. It’s mostly warranted; after all, the last one cost the U.S. $648 billion and 5.5 million jobs.

However, not all crises are the same. In a new paper in the October issue of the ����� Review, authors Christina Romer and David Romer explore the aftermaths of financial crises in twenty-four OECD countries. On average, countries experience a moderate decline in output. But when looking closer, the outcomes vary significantly among the countries.

One and a half million college graduates were unemployed in China. Rural poverty persisted throughout the country. And, the government lacked a pool of highly educated employees who were also familiar with rural life.

With a single program, China began to tackle these three issues. Beginning in 2006, China’s College Graduate Village Officials (CGVO) program placed recent college graduates — mostly aspiring government workers — in rural communities to improve local governance and alleviate poverty.

In the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, coauthors Guojun He and Shaoda Wang evaluated two components of the CGVO program. They found that college graduates successfully implemented the Subsidizing Poor Households program and the Renovating Dilapidated Rural Houses program, which helped more poor households to register for subsidies and increased the subsidies the households received.

The health of the broader economy when a startup is born can have significant and lasting effects on the growth of a fledgling firm.

A paper that appears in the October issue of the ����� Review says that firms that were launched during recessions not only got off to a slower start, but also added employees at a slower clip many years later. The findings by authors Vincent Sterk and Petr Sedláček offer important insights into how the decisions that startups make about when to launch influence aggregate job growth.

Families matter in politics.

It’s everywhere in the optics and sloganeering, with candidates talking about family-friendly policies, boasting of their “family values,” or how they “put families first.”

But it’s not just about messaging. In many countries, a candidate’s family is a very practical part of winning public office.

A paper in the October issue of the ����� Review says that candidates from families that are central in a community (i.e., connected to other families that are similarly well-positioned) are more likely to win elections than competitors outside the network.

When air pollution becomes a problem, we find ways of protecting ourselves. We spend less time outside, shut the windows, or use asthma medication.

These solutions are called defensive investments. They help us to avoid harm, but they can be costly — in terms of both time and money.

In the October issue of the ����� Review, Michael Greenstone and his co-authors Olivier Deschênes and Joseph Shapiro look at what happened to asthma medication usage, one common but expensive defensive investment, when a cap-and-trade program reduced air pollution throughout the Northeast.

Greenstone recently spoke with the ����� about the success of the NOx (Nitrogen Oxides) Budget Trading Program, America’s air quality, and why defensive investments should matter more to economists and policymakers.

Listen to the interview on our website.

In 2007, Connecticut’s GDP per capita doubled that of West Virginia. This is fairly common; states have a wide range of GDPs per capita, and their growth rates are just as diverse. South Dakota’s GDP per capita increased by 187 percent between 1970 and 2007. Meanwhile, Michigan’s grew by only 77 percent.

In a new paper in the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics, authors Eric Hanushek, Jens Ruhose, and Ludger Woessmann explain that state differences in knowledge capital can account for some of this variation in GDP per capita.

In the 1930s, Denmark's health board sent trained nurses into homes to help new mothers care for their babies. The program not only reduced infant deaths, but also improved the health of those children when they reached middle age, according to a paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics/

In the mid-19th century, shortages of food and workers in Brazil pushed immigration to the forefront of the political agenda. The country needed talented people to settle and develop rural communities. Brazil’s political leaders hoped that the solution lay in a massive influx of Europeans immigrants coming to the country.

A paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, examines historical data to estimate the impact that a state-sponsored settlement program had on local communities in the state of Sao Paulo. The program was designed to lure high skilled immigrants — through the prospect of owning land — to uninhabited agricultural communities that would produce food for growing urban areas.

When the Brazilian government banned mahogany logging in 2001, they seemed to have achieved an environmental victory. The new regulation took effect, and exports of mahogany dropped dramatically.

Then something strange started to happen. Exports classified as “other tropical timber species” were on the rise — just as mahogany exports began to decline. Mahogany exports were continuing to leave the country in the guise of other species, creating an illicit market that accompanied prohibition. Soon thereafter, Greenpeace and other environmental groups denounced this illegal mahogany trade.

Prohibition was failing to shut down the mahogany market, but that was not its only problem. In a new paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics, authors Ariaster Chimeli and Rodrigo Soares show how prohibition spurred an increase in violence.

Women’s role in the US economy has exploded since WWII. In fact, the employment rate for women of prime working age more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century.

There are a lot of reasons for this, including increased educational investment and changing attitudes about gender equality. But a paper in the October issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics offers yet another explanation. Researchers Rachel Ngai and Barbara Petrongolo say the rise of the service sector increased demand for women workers.

Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?

This is one of the hundreds of questions from the World Values Survey, which documents values, norms, and attitudes throughout the world. In a new paper in the September issue of the ����� Review, authors Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, and Romain Wacziarg investigate whether your answers — one measure of culture — have anything to do with your ethnicity.

Economists generally believe that international trade makes countries wealthier. They say that, on the whole, countries benefit from trade — even if some people within each country lose out. However, this consensus is beginning to break apart as economists increasingly highlight the negative aspects of globalization.

While economists debate the consequences of modern globalization, the past provides a cautionary tale. The first wave of globalization took place during the late nineteenth century. As much of the world industrialized and innovated, it also grew more connected.

In a new paper in the September issue of the ����� Review, author Luigi Pascali examines the driving forces behind this first wave of globalization and its repercussions. He finds that the steamship played an important role in spurring trade, resulting in an era of globalization and rising inequality.

Fox News has become practically synonymous with Republican politics, driving the conservative right’s agenda and being the president’s news source of choice.

Since its founding in the 1990s, the conservative news channel’s influence has only grown as its perspective has drifted further to the right. It is so persuasive, in fact, that it may even have the power to swing tight elections, according to a paper in the September issue of the ����� Review.

Authors Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu estimate that Fox News effectively boosted the GOP vote share by 3.59 percentage points in the 2004 presidential election and 6.34 percentage points in 2008.

We have never had greater access to entertainment. There are music streaming services, e-books, podcasts, on-demand movies and television shows, available to be consumed on our phones or computers for little or no cost.

He published a paper about this phenomenon in the summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. We interviewed him about his research, which you can listen to on our website.

In developing countries, governments typically encourage entrepreneurship by funding business trainings, associations, and other costly programs. However, there is another strategy: giving money directly to the people who can use it.

In a new paper in the August issue of the ����� Review, David McKenzie found that funding entrepreneurs is highly effective. He analyzed the Youth Enterprise With Innovation in Nigeria (YouWiN!) business plan competition, which attracted over 24,000 applications throughout Nigeria.

The possibility of a trade war with China is back. As President Trump continues to advocate for new tariffs, his policies evoke the uncertainty that used to characterize the United States’ trade relationship with China.

Before China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the United States would often threaten to revoke their most favored nation status, especially following the Tiananmen Square protests. This uncertainty made China hesitant to invest in exporting goods that could, one day, face an average tariff of thirty-one percent.

When China joined the WTO in 2001, their most favored nation status became permanent. In a new paper in the ����� Review, authors Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão show that, with this new certainty, China began to export more goods and lower their prices. This was especially true for goods that originally faced a high tariff threat.

By now, most students have gone back to school. But for some, going back does not mean returning to a physical location.

As more and more college students take classes online, they are able to learn remotely and work around their own schedules. Many aspects of these online course, such as syllabi and textbooks, are identical to their in-person versions. However, conversations and projects happen over discussion boards, and standardized videos replace the lectures.

These online courses may be convenient, but they come at a cost. In a new paper in the September issue of the ����� Review, authors Eric Bettinger, Lindsay Fox, Susanna Loeb, and Eric Taylor examined data from a large for-profit college and found that online courses hindered students’ success.

Everybody needs a safe place to put money besides a mattress or a piggy bank. Unfortunately, there are just not enough safe places anymore.

Global demand for simple, safe assets like government bonds and notes has outpaced the supply coming from advanced economies like the United States. The consequences could be severe, restraining the global economy and causing wealth to decline as the shortage intensifies, according to a new paper in the summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

We should immediately invest one percent of the global GDP into projects that will reduce the impact of climate change.

This was the conclusion that Lord Nicholas Stern, a prominent climate economist, came to in 2006. Since then, the one percent figure has been a controversial topic among economists. However, the controversy is no longer about whether climate change is real — or even whether we should do something about it — but exactly what those actions should look like.

In a new paper in the September issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, Geoffrey Heal gives a whirlwind tour of what climate change and its solutions look like from an economist’s perspective. He covers everything from geoengineering to sustainability to international negotiations

The economics profession has a diversity problem. It’s not a new problem. Yet, the profession’s gender imbalance has been a topic of intense debate lately.

Swarthmore professor Amanda Bayer has spent much of her career working to promote diversity in economics and last year published a paper about the issue in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. She spoke with the ����� about the severity of the gender gap in economics, why addressing it is more than an issue of fairness, and her own experiences as she advanced her career. You can listen to the interview on our website or read an edited transcript.

Child stunting is about more than malnutrition. It’s about favoritism.

In a new paper that appears in the September issue of the ����� Review, authors Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande find that a preference for the oldest son — who is expected to take care of aging parents, inherit property, and perform post-death rituals — might be responsible for much of the child stunting in India.

Many retailers are struggling to find new ways of driving sales amid a race to the bottom on price with discount stores and online competitors like Amazon

A paper that appears in the August issue of the ����� Review says that bonus programs can be an effective way for companies to motivate team members to achieve common goals. Even more, the strategy can be lucrative for both the company and its employees.

The public sector has experienced massive changes in the past 40 years. Not only are there fewer public companies than there were in the 1970s, but they are older, larger, and generally less profitable.

A paper that appears in the Summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives takes a look at the evolution of the US public corporation and asks whether these institutions are “in trouble.” The outlook is not overwhelmingly positive.

Sweden’s national parliament had a greater share of seats held by women than anywhere else in the world -- and it was facing an identity crisis. It was 1993 and efforts to boost women into office experienced a setback in the election two years earlier, when the share of parliamentary seats held by women fell 5 percentage points to 33 percent.

Facing pressure from feminist organizers who were concerned about losing more ground, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party intraoduced quotas to put more women on election ballots. It worked, and in ways that many people had not imagined.

A paper in the August issue of the ����� Review examines how the program not only helped women gain power among the party leadership but also improved the competence of male colleagues.

Farmers in developing countries can earn more by growing strawberries. So why do farmers grow wheat instead?

In the August issue of the ����� Journal: Microeconomics researchers Kala Krishna and Lena Sheveleva explain how a simple Catch-22 makes farmers more likely to produce the less valuable crop. Check out a video summarizing their research.

Hurricane Katrina caused approximately $108 billion in property damage. With this much damage, it is reasonable to expect that homeowners would go into debt as they made repairs.

However, the opposite may be true. A new paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy analyzes household finance after the hurricane. The authors find that people in most flooded areas actually lowered their debt, primarily by paying off their mortgages.

The teen birth rate in the US has steadily declined over the past two decades and this year hit an all-time low, thanks largely to efforts to expand access to contraception

But not all contraceptives are equal. And the ones medical professionals most want to see teens use are those that are long-acting but not permanent.

A new paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy takes a look at how efforts to expand access to contraceptives such as subdermal implants and intrauterine devices contributed to the decline in teen pregnancies.

Mafioso-turned-informant Leonardo Messina did not think highly of Italian politics.

In a conversation with the Parliamentary Committee on the Mafia, he described how politicians would publicly criticize the Mafia but then turn to them for help getting elected. When asked if the denouncements ever worried the Mafia, he replied, “No...The whole thing is a farce!”

A new paper in the ����� Journal: Economic Policy quotes this conversation, which originally appeared in a 1992 Committee report. Anecdotal evidence like the Messina testimony has long supported the idea that the Mafia played a role in Italian elections. This is the first paper to empirically prove it.

The women's suffragist Susan B. Anthony once said that the bicycle had done "more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." More than a century after Anthony said this, a government program in India is proving her point. A study that appears in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics looks at the impact of a program that sought to close the education gender gap by giving bicycles to girls, thus making it easier for them to get to school. You can listen to our interview with one of the co-authors, Karthik Muralidharan, on the ����� website.

Many theoretical models assume that investors are completely rational. A study that appears in the August issue of the ����� Review offers a more realistic model of how investors think. In the model, investors use their feelings about an asset's recent performance to predict its future price.

Hurricane season is upon us and forecasters are predicting that the Atalntic Basin will suffer at least three that will be especially destructive. A study that was just published in the August issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy explores the costs of recovering from hurricanes and finds them to be higher than we thought.

Could you recall what you paid for a gallon of milk without looking at a receipt? How about what you paid a year ago? Consumers usually overestimate how much average prices rise, and yet when shopping they tend to trust their memories rather than pay attention to the official statistics. A study appearing in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Macroeconomics explore how consumers estimate inflation and the implications for federal policy makers.

Picking a college is one of the most important decisions in a young person’s life. It will shape their experience over the next four years and likely determine their first job. New research suggests that the stakes could be even higher than we thought. A study appearing in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics explores how a college’s reputation affects what the authors call “the big sort.” Watch a video summarizing their findings.

Automakers were precariously close to collapse when, in the summer of 2009, Congress passed a law intended to give the industry a jump start. Dubbed “cash for clunkers," the government was offering roughly $4,200 to people if they traded in their old gas guzzler for a newer fuel-efficient car. A study appearing in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics says the program was a failure and the efficiency requirement was largely to blame.

Conversations about immigration tend to focus on the countries receiving immigrants. But what happens to the countries immigrants leave behind? A study appearing in the July issue of the ����� Journal: Applied Economics shows how emigrants who left Moldova passed their newly formed political beliefs back to their former communities.

Real estate agents who represent buyers seem to have a conflict of interest, one that often puts clients' financial well-being at odds with agents' desire for a bigger payday. After all, the more the agent can convince a buyer to spend on a property, the bigger commission the agent will receive. A new study appearing in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics takes a look at the phenomenon of "steering" in residential real estate.

Can a temporary affirmative action program reduce racial gaps in higher education and the workplace in the long run, or will discrimination and racial disparities emerge again once policies disappear? A new study appearing in the ����� Journal: Applied Economics examines the evidence.

Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim Ijaz Khwaja take a look at schools in Pakistan and what happened when families started receiving report cards that scored their child's academic progress as well as how local schools performed. In short: Things dramatically improved. Their paper appears in the June issue of the ����� Review.

School vouchers remain controversial more than a half century after Milton Friedman proposed the idea. Listen to an interview with , who examined the evidence on school voucher programs in an article that appears in the June issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.

We have published over 100 graphics, data visualizations, and interactive features as part of our Research Highlight series to help spread the word about great economics research appearing in our journals. Here is a sampling of staff favorites from the past year.

Resource extraction can be a double-edged sword for developing economies. In a study appearing in the June 2017 issue of the ����� Review, researchers , , , and and sought by Congress to give testimony on the issues of the day. This could be due in part to the increasingly empirical nature of economics research.

Aided by internet connections that allow datasets to be assembled from disparate sources and cheap computing power to crunch the numbers, economists are more and more often turning to real-world data to complement and test theoretical models.

If American workers had access to public health insurance, would they be as eager to hold a job? In a study appearing in the May 2017 issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, researchers , , and take a look at what happened when Wisconsin extended public health insurance to low-income childless adults in 2009.

In 2010, only 10 percent of the non-oil private sector workforce in Saudi Arabia was made up of Saudis. In response, the government developed Nitaqat, a policy that created hiring quotas to motivate companies to hire local workers rather than low-cost expatriates. In the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy, Jennifer Peck looks at the effects of this policy on Saudi companies.

Mothers tend to work fewer hours and .

It's called the "motherhood penalty," and while economists are well-aware of the phenomenon, they have struggled to understand why it exists.

explores the motherhood penalty in a paper that appears in this month’s issue of the ����� Review. By studying women who have had in vitro fertilization, he and his co-authors Petter Lundborg and Astrid Wurtz Rasmussen found that having a child can have a profound impact on a woman's career and reduce her earnings for at least a decade.

Surging demand for raw materials from fast-growing countries like India and China during the 2000s was welcome news for mineral-rich African countries. The resulting commodities boom was partially responsible for a strong decade of growth across the continent. But new research indicates that even as Africa’s economy was booming, it was also afflicted with a "resource curse."

It's a reality of city living – the desirability of your home or property depends a lot on how your neighbors upkeep theirs.

Landowners in urban areas add fewer building upgrades and replace aging buildings more slowly than their neighbors want. That’s because they have to pay all the costs for any upgrades, but share the benefits with neighbors.

The "spillovers" that come with close proximity are part of – but the fact that the benefits can't be fully captured by owners means they don't do it as much as we would like. It also means that, absent any coordination, a growing city won’t reach its full potential. Even if conditions are improving and it would make sense to upgrade to bigger and better buildings, everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Could it get so bad that a huge destructive event that forced everyone to build from the ground up would actually be a good thing?

than previous generations.

This may be a testament to advances in modern medicine, but a rapidly aging population potentially is a serious

Economies with a lot of older workers face a number of challenges, including that those people will be less productive and also drop out of the labor force, which could drag down economic growth. This comes at a time when declining fertility rates have contributed to a shortage of middle-age workers in Europe and some Asian countries.

You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.

Anybody who’s seen a TV police drama recognizes that line. It’s part of the that officers recite to criminal suspects upon their arrest.

Being able to consult with an attorney is usually critical for the person being detained, potentially determining the difference between freedom or a jail sentence.

Also important is when the attorney enters the process. The sooner a suspect can talk with a lawyer, the more likely they are to walk away free.

But that’s not the only consequence, according to a paper in the May issue of the ����� Journal: Economic Policy. The paper takes a broader look at the societal implications of the right to legal counsel for criminal suspects. The authors discovered some surprising evidence about how expanded rights can actually lead to higher crime rates.

Chinese workers were dying at an alarming rate and provincial government officials realized that something needed to be done.

Years of increasingly severe jobsite accidents had claimed the lives of workers in coal mines, chemical plants, and other industries. So, in 2004, China created a program aimed at motivating local government officials to reduce accidental deaths. The program included safety targets called "death ceilings" which if exceeded, could stand in the way of a promotion for whatever official was held responsible.

and examine this program in a paper that appears in the April issue of ����� Journal: Applied Economics. They say it's highly likely that Chinese officials manipulated how deaths were reported in order to stay beneath the ceilings.

The United States and many countries in Europe have become increasingly concerned with getting more women to work at a time when female labor force participation is stagnating.

Subsidizing child care and paid maternity leave are just a couple of the ideas that policy makers have considered. But to what extent can income taxes encourage more women to join the workforce?

From Tennessee to Oregon to New York, tuition-free community college is gaining steam in states and cities across the country. But if “14 is becoming the new 12” in education policy, what will happen to the students who are gaining access to higher ed for the first time?

There's a perception that country folk are nicer. They're polite to their neighbors and more altruistic than people in the city, more likely to be a Good Samaritan and help a stranger in need.

But are they really? If you needed help, where do you think someone would come to your aid more quickly? A city street or a lonely country road?

uses game theory to explore that question in a new paper that appears in the ����� Journal: Microeconomics. And he says that, depending on the situation, a stranded traveler would get help faster on the city street.

Bergstrom spoke with the ����� about his paper, why parables like that of the Good Samaritan are useful in game theory research, and some real-world examples of this stranded traveler scenario and how they have played out.

Some and have reputations for being “recession proof,” but how accurate is this conventional wisdom? Who is most secure – and who has the most reason to sweat – when the economy hits a rough patch?

In a study presented at the ����� Annual Meeting in January during a paper session on Income Inequality and Income Risk in the 21st Century, authors , , , and sift through earnings data from the U.S. Social Security Administration covering tens of millions of workers over time to answer this question.

In recent weeks, Department of Homeland Security officials for a stark decline in border apprehensions of mothers traveling with children since December. And a more by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has resulted in a , especially for those without criminal records.

It's a reminder that immigration control doesn't begin and end at border walls or checkpoints. And some states are eager to complement this federal immigration crackdown with laws of their own.

In April, the social media network Facebook relied on a much older form of mass communication to spread an important message.

The Silicon Valley behemoth published that advised readers on how to evaluate news reports and separate truth from fiction.

The move, which was followed recently by a similar effort in , came as and amid a groundswell of concern that leading up to the U.S. presidential election last fall.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. is at a as more and more people are joining the workforce, but the GDP numbers are painting a . Despite more workers working more hours, the U.S. economy isn’t producing much more than before.

This recent period of slow – which actually dates back to before the recession – is for GDP failing to catch back up to its pre-recession trend, and is an increasing for economists who study long-run economic growth.

But there’s a theory with traction in some corners of Silicon Valley that this slowdown is a statistical artifact, an illusion created by the inability of GDP measures to capture the enormous value of cheap and free services proliferating online.