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AEA Research Highlights

American Economic Association

A podcast featuring interviews with economists whose work appears in journals published by the American Economic Association.

science social sciences

All Episodes

22:30

Ep. 35: Work and childcare during the pandemic

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/09/01

COVID-19 has reshaped work in numerous ways. Many fortunate white-collar Americans spent the last year working from home. Others in service-oriented jobs lost work or spent their workdays behind masks and plexiglass. These pandemic-related changes have been especially hard on women, according to a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Economists Stefania Albanesi and Jiyeon Kim found that unlike in previous business cycles, employment losses during this recession have been larger for

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19:43

Ep. 34: The politics of tax evasion

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/08/18

Tax evasion costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars every year. But for some Americans, hiding income from the government is about more than keeping every possible penny they earned for themselves. It’s also a form of political protest. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, authors Julie Berry Cullen, Nicholas Turner, and Ebonya Washington investigate whether attitudes toward government cause Americans to evade paying personal income taxes. They found

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21:19

Ep. 33: Military handoffs

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/08/04

For a military intervention to end successfully, foreign forces have to hand off security to domestic forces. But historically, these transitions have rarely gone well. In a paper in the American Economic Review, political scientist Austin L. Wright examined the impact of NATO troop withdrawals from Afghanistan on insurgent violence and local perceptions of security conditions. He and coauthors Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro C. L. Souza, and Oliver Vanden Eynde found that the Taliban held back from

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23:12

Bonus: The case for paying college athletes

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/07/23

**Editor's note: This is a rebroadcast of an interview from 2019. College sports have become big business, and everybody’s making money except the players. The National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibits “student athletes” from receiving a cut of the millions of dollars in revenue that schools collect from games and product licensing. Instead, players get scholarships, the value of which pales in comparison to what they might earn on the open market. But that may be changing. Repeated court

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15:04

Ep. 32: How policy shapes culture

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/07/21

Culture is shaped by the conditions in which humans live. As societies modernize, their cultural traditions will change too. But it’s difficult to identify what is driving those changes and what role public policy may be playing. In a paper in the American Economic Review, UCLA professor Natalie Bau investigated how the introduction of a formal pension system affected traditional family arrangements in Indonesia and Ghana. She found that having access to a pension led parents to invest less in the

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12:35

Ep. 31: More than a few bad apples

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/07/07

Police officers have a lot of discretion in how they enforce the law, but they are not always evenhanded in how they employ their judgement. In a paper in the American Economic Review, Dartmouth College economist Steven Mello examined variations in speeding enforcement by officers with the Florida Highway Patrol.. He and coauthor Felipe Goncalves found that nearly half of the officers practiced racial discrimination and identified the types of officers who discriminated the most. The results

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25:24

Ep. 30: LGBTQ economics

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/06/23

A lot has changed since the first economics papers on LGBTQ issues appeared in the mid-1990s. The volume of research in this area has grown significantly. There is more awareness of an expanding array of identities and a broader push to root out discrimination within the economics profession. Lee Badgett wrote some of those early foundational papers more than two decades ago and has been at the forefront of studying the economics of LGBTQ populations. In a paper in the Journal of Economic

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27:59

Ep. 29: Making economic tools more reliable

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/06/09

Can economists trust their models? How does their data drive their conclusions? These are some of the big questions that motivate econometrician Isaiah Andrews. The Harvard professor was awarded this year’s John Bates Clark Medal for his contributions to econometric theory and empirical practice. And while Andrews works on some of the most technically difficult questions in economics, he says helping students is crucial to his success.

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24:30

Ep. 28: The Pros and Cons of Collaboration

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/05/26

There was a time not long ago when most economists tended to work by themselves. In 1960, fewer than one in five economics journal articles had more than one author. Today, about three quarters of all papers are produced by research teams. The shift toward collaboration has a lot of upsides for economists, including producing higher impact papers, sharing the division of labor, and enjoying creative partnerships. Northwestern University economist Benjamin Jones says that there are some downsides

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19:21

Ep. 27: American capitalism and incarceration

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/05/12

The first private prison in the United States opened in 1984 amidst the war on drugs and overcrowding in public prisons. Now a multi-billion dollar industry, private prisons incarcerate about 8 percent of all America's inmates. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Anita Mukherjee examined the impact of private prisons on the length of time that inmates serve. She found that inmates in Mississippi served an average of 90 extra

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23:45

Ep. 26: Creating Africa’s own Green Revolution

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/04/28

More than 50 years ago, a revolution in seed and fertilizer technology bolstered food production and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America. Unfortunately, this “Green Revolution” left sub-Saharan Africa behind. At the turn of the 21st century, many farmers still were struggling to produce enough food to feed their communities. Then, in 2006, a number of African nations embarked on an ambitious plan to invest billions of dollars into their own green revolution. In a paper in the American

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21:25

Ep. 25: Why the United States has the best research...

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/04/14

At the turn of the 19th century, American universities were mostly under-resourced, regional schools. By World War II, they had become research leaders on the global stage, attracting the world's best scientists. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola say that the US universities’ ascendancy in research started earlier than many people believe. Just after the Civil War, two innovators found a successful formula. Johns Hopkins and

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26:32

Ep. 24: Climate change and migration

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/03/31

Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus has called climate change “the ultimate challenge for economics.” Economists increasingly have been trying to understand how rising tides and global temperatures will impact resource allocation around the globe, as well as the potential policy tools that can help curb damage to our natural world. SMU professor Klaus Desmet says that a lot of those analyses are missing a critical factor: migration. Desmet coauthored a paper in the American Economic Journal:

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30:00

Ep. 23: How much do local leaders matter?

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/03/17

After a failed revolution in 1848, hundreds of Germans were expelled from their home country and settled in the US. It was not obvious that this eclectic group would play an important role in American politics and change the course of the nation. Their words and leadership helped President Lincoln and the North win the Civil War, according to a paper in the American Economic Review. Authors Christian Dippel and Stephan Heblich found that these German immigrants significantly boosted Union Army

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26:58

Ep. 22: Supreme polarization

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/03/03

Democrats may control the White House and Congress, but Republicans have a clear advantage on the nation’s highest court. Sixteen of the last 20 appointments to the Supreme Court have been GOP nominees, including six of nine sitting justices. Critics say that this has caused an imbalance of power that threatens the court’s legitimacy. University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel questions, however, whether some of the reforms being discussed would help. Hemel has a paper in the Journal of

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21:03

Bonus: Tech: economists wanted

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/02/17

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 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists Susan Athey and Michael Luca outlined this growing, mutual influence between economics and the tech industry. Athey and Luca have spent their careers with one foot in academia and the other in the tech sector. Athey—in addition to being a professor

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23:08

Ep. 21: The consquences of school choice.

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/02/03

In the US, most students enroll in their neighborhood school. But sometimes, they have a choice. Families might be given vouchers for other public or private institutions further from their homes. Policymakers’ hope is that kids in underperforming schools won’t be limited by where they can afford to live. Harvard professor Chris Avery says that the housing market is important to how school choice programs function. In the January issue American Economic Review, Avery and his co-author Parag Pathak

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25:26

Ep. 20: Rereading The Road to Serfdom

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/01/20

Friedrich Hayek is one of the giants of 20th century economics. He did important work on everything from business cycles to psychology, earning a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. However, Hayek is perhaps best known for his book, The Road to Serfdom. Since its publication in 1944, many leaders and politicians have cited it as a proof that countries that experiment with socialism will inevitably end up as a totalitarian state. Duke economist Bruce Caldwell says that the book's message was much more

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24:56

Ep. 19: Social well-being and academic success

AEA Research Highlights ·

2021/01/06

Schools are academic institutions. But they are not only that. They are also social spaces that are critical to children’s development. Whether inside the classroom or out on the playground, kids learn how to problem solve, to adapt, persevere, and resolve conflicts. And those schools that are best at fostering these skills are setting their students up for longer term success, according Northwestern professor Kirabo Jackson. In the December issue of the American Economic Review: Insights, Jackson

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16:38

Ep. 18: The promise of conditional cash transfers

AEA Research Highlights ·

2020/12/23

Simply giving cash with a few strings attached could be one of the most promising ways to reduce poverty and insecurity in the developing world. Today, over 63 countries have at least one such program. And while these policies have been around for a few decades, little is known about how much so-called conditional cash transfers (CCT) improve people's lives over the long term. A paper in the November issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy fills that gap by studying Indonesia’s

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