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AEA Research Highlights: Daily Summaries Delivered
by American Economic Association
A podcast featuring interviews with economists whose work appears in journals published by the American Economic Association.
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- 2 days ago30 min
Ep. 100: Environmental market design
Since the 1990s, developers in Florida who want to build on wetlands have been required to buy offset credits from "wetland mitigation banks," private restoration projects that convert degraded land, often former pasture, back into functioning wetland elsewhere in the same region. Like other environmental offset markets, the program has proved controversial. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Daniel Aronoff and Will Rafey found that wetland offsets generated roughly $2.4 billion in private gains from trade but also a significant increase in overall flood damage because wetlands were moved away from places where they protected existing homes. Rafey recently spoke with Tyler Smith about what the results mean for the design of environmental markets and wetland regulations.
- 3 weeks ago15 min
Ep. 99: The wrong side of the tracks
The place where a child grows up in America shapes their economic future to a significant degree. One long-suspected explanation is racial segregation, but proving whether segregation actually causes worse outcomes—rather than just correlating with them—has been challenging for economists. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Eric Chyn, Kareem Haggag, and Bryan A. Stuart provide evidence that racial segregation shapes the long-run economic prospects of American children. Using the placement of railroad tracks in the 19th century, they found that a one standard deviation increase in segregation—roughly the gap between Minneapolis and Philadelphia—cost a Black child from a poor family about $4,200 a year in income as an adult. While lower-income Black children were hit the hardest, segregation also hurt higher-income Black children and lower-income White children. Chyn recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why segregation hurts low-income kids in particular and what his findings imply for policymakers.
- Apr 9, 202621 min
Ep. 98: Delivering clean water
More than two billion people around the world do not have safe drinking water at home. Piped water infrastructure remains out of reach for much of the developing world, and cheaper alternatives like chlorine tablets have low take-up rates even when given away for free. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan explore a third option. Working with a private company in rural Odisha, one of India's poorest states, the researchers ran a randomized experiment across roughly 60,000 households to test the effectiveness of delivering treated water directly to people's doors. Burlig recently spoke with Tyler Smith about revealed-preference measurements of the value of clean water and steps governments might take toward reaching the goal of universal access.
- Mar 11, 202623 min
Ep. 97: A short history of Asian immigration
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States and are on track to become the largest immigrant group by 2050. Yet, researchers have devoted much less attention to this population than to other immigrant groups. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Hannah M. Postel helps to fill that gap. She traces Asian immigration to the United States across three policy eras—1882–1943, 1943–1965, 1965–present—and explores how they affected the characteristics of those admitted, where they settled, and what work they were allowed to do. Postel recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the origins of the US federal immigration system, the history of Asian immigration, and how current policy might shape immigration going forward.
- Feb 11, 202616 min
Ep. 96: W. E. B. Du Bois and the history of marginalism
W. E. B. Du Bois is remembered as a civil rights leader, sociologist, and author of The Souls of Black Folk. But before he became famous for his empirical studies of Black life in America, Du Bois was a graduate student at Harvard studying cutting-edge economic theory. In 1891, at age 23, he submitted a 158-page manuscript entitled A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory to a Harvard prize competition. The manuscript sat in the Harvard archives for over a century, largely unexamined by trained economists. Author Daniel Kuehn recently requested that Harvard digitize the manuscript so that he could analyze its contents. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, he explores how Du Bois anticipated the application of marginalist ideas in economics to the determination of wages. Kuehn recently spoke with Tyler Smith about Du Bois's contributions to wage theory, why these contributions went unrecognized, and how his time in Berlin redirected him toward the historical and empirical work for which he is known.
- Jan 14, 202621 min
Ep. 95: Diversifying college applications
Guidance counselors generally advise college applicants to diversify their applications across schools they believe to be safeties, matches, and reaches. Yet, prevailing economic theories of school choice suggest that such hedging strategies are suboptimal and that applicants should focus on applying to the best schools they have a chance of getting into. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors S. Nageeb Ali and Ran I. Shorrer show how incorporating correlations among admissions decisions rationalizes the motive to hedge. Their findings highlight the tradeoffs applicants face under realistic assumptions and may offer insights into the optimal design of admission processes. Ali and Shorrer recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how the admissions process can be correlated and the implications for students.
- Dec 3, 202520 min
Ep. 94: Targeted supply-side enforcement in the controlled substance market
Between 1997 and 2011, opioid dispensing in the United States more than tripled, fueling what would become the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. This surge in the supply of opioids was concentrated among a small subset of doctors: roughly 1 percent of the doctors who prescribed opioids accounted for almost 50 percent of all domestic opioid doses prescribed. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, author Adam Soliman examined what happened when federal authorities cracked down on "rogue" doctors who overprescribed opioids. He found that removing a single doctor from the opioid supply chain reduced county-level dispensing by 10 percent, with no negating increases in neighboring areas. Yet these interventions came with a trade-off—while overall drug mortality declined, heroin overdoses increased by 50 percent, likely as a result of existing users seeking alternatives. Soliman recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he untangled these complex enforcement effects and what his findings mean for combating drug epidemics that begin in the legal pharmaceutical market.
- Nov 5, 202518 min
Ep. 93: Technological spillovers
The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in October 1957 led to a geopolitical crisis that reshaped American science policy. Within months, Congress established NASA, and by 1961, President Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon before the decade's end. The resulting investment was massive, and the program still serves as a model of government spending for advocates of public R&D. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Shawn Kantor and Alexander Whalley question whether the space race program succeeded as an economic policy that boosted economic growth and productivity. To estimate the space program's effects on economic growth from 1947 to 1992, the authors used data on NASA contractor spending and a novel identification strategy based on declassified CIA documents that allowed them to determine which US industries in which counties specialized in space-relevant technologies before the space race began. Their findings complicate the conventional narrative about public R&D and provide important context for current proposals to replicate so-called "moonshot" models in other domains. Kantor and Whalley recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the local effects of space race spending and why they didn't translate into long-term productivity gains.
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A podcast featuring interviews with economists whose work appears in journals published by the American Economic Association.
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