Search Results
Journal Article
Interview: Melissa Kearney
Over the past two decades, University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has been researching economic inequality and mobility, poverty, and children's well-being. She was first drawn to such topics, she says, by her own family's experiences.
Journal Article
Interview: Angus Deaton
When Angus Deaton was an undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, he found that the other students were better and more serious mathematicians than he was. He found his attention wandering from his math studies. He later recalled that his advisor, concerned by his lack of focus, finally told him to "take up what they clearly thought of as a last resort for ne'er-do-wells, a previously unconsidered option called economics."Roughly a half century later, in 2015, Deaton was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — recognized, in the words of the committee, ...
Working Paper
Firming Up Inequality
We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We ?nd that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves: the firm-related rise in the variance can be decomposed into two roughly equally important forces?a rise in the sorting of high-wage workers to high-wage firms and a rise in the segregation of ...
Journal Article
Interview: Ulrike Malmendier
Over the course of her career, much of the research of University of California, Berkeley economist Ulrike Malmendier has been in the areas of behavioral economics and behavioral corporate finance — looking at the effects of various psychological biases, such as overconfidence, on the decisions of consumers, investors, and executives.
Journal Article
Interview: Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen: On credentialism, the new math of causation, and the lasting economic influence of youthful experiences
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Briefing
School Quality as a Tool for Attracting People to Rural Areas
Many rural localities are interested in strategies for retaining residents and attracting newcomers. Recent research indicates that one promising strategy for rural development is maintaining and improving the quality of an area’s public schools. In this research, which is the first national study of the relationship between school quality and migration flows in and out of rural areas, better outcomes for students in a rural county’s schools were associated with higher migration into that county.
Journal Article
Cover Story: How the Pandemic Era Changed Price-Setting
For consumers, the prices of goods and services may seem to emerge from a black box. But behind those prices are complex judgments that firms are making about demand and about the competition, often based on limited information. Pricing decisions may also reflect uncertain assessments of the future costs of inputs. On top of that are seemingly irrational factors, like consumers' common preference for prices ending in a "9," perceiving $29.99 as markedly more appealing than $30.While price-setting is challenging even in normal times, shocks during the past few years, such as the pandemic and ...
Journal Article
Interview: Alan Auerbach
Alan Auerbach enrolled in college at Yale planning to focus on math and science. But in his second year, he figured he should sign up for a course in something else for the sake of the school's distribution requirements. So he tried introductory economics without having a clear idea of what economics was — and discovered he enjoyed it.
Journal Article
Interview: Pinelopi Goldberg
Pinelopi Goldberg: On developing countries, measuring economies by satellite, and the learning crisis.