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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.
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
Interview: Daron Acemoglu
Daron Acemoglu is one of MIT's nine university- wide Institute Professors, the university's highest faculty rank. One of his predecessors, Robert Solow, developed a pathbreaking mathematical model of economic growth in the 1950s. Today, Acemoglu says hurray for economic growth — but is also concerned that choices made by policymakers and companies are channeling the gains from that growth away from workers. And as he sees things, the powerful AI technologies that have come to the fore in the past several years, embedded in products such as ChatGPT, should be regulated with the economic ...
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, ...
Journal Article
A promising way forward for homeownership: assessing the benefits of shared equity programs
In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, what programs can help low-income families become homeowners in a sustainable way? Shared equity programs offer one model, successfully balancing both affordability and asset building goals. In this article, researchers from the Urban Institute evaluate the effectiveness of 7 shared equity homeownership programs from across the country. They find that without exception, the programs provide long-term affordable homeownership, opportunities for low-income families to build equity, and sustainable tenure. This study suggests that shared equity programs ...
Journal Article
Interview: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé
Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé is probably one of the few top-level economics researchers without a college degree. A native of Germany, she enrolled to study economics at the University of Münster. After completing two years of her studies, she was offered a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States. She left temporarily — or so she thought.
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
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 ...
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: Steven Davis
As a student at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Ore., in the mid-1970s, Steven Davis took an elective course on economics that piqued his interest. When he went on to college at Portland State University, he initially picked economics as his major but figured he might switch to sociology or international relations. In the end, however, economics won out. "Those fields struck me as interesting," he says, "but economics seemed to offer a more useful set of tools for understanding social and economic issues."