The rise of the service economy

[Research Highlight]

October 16, 2020

Structural changes are reshaping growth, interest rates, and investment in the world’s economies.

Does When You Die Depend on Where You Live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina

By Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor

American Economic Review, November 2020

We follow Medicare cohorts to estimate Hurricane Katrina's long-run mortality effects on victims initially living in New Orleans. Including the initial shock, the hurricane improved eight-year survival by 2.07 percentage points. Migration to lower-mortali...

Assessing the quality of start-ups

[Page]

Economists are going beyond standard ways of judging the health of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Epidemiology's Time of Need: COVID-19 Calls for Epidemic-Related Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Eleanor J. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted scientific conversations and scientific divisions into the public consciousness. Epidemiology and economics have long operated in distinct silos, but the COVID-19 pandemic presents a complex and cross-disciplinary prob...

The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources

By Till von Wachter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career devel...

How economists can help combat COVID-19

[Research Highlight]

November 03, 2020

Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray says the tools of economics can help her field better understand the impacts of the disease.

Moving to a healthier place

[Page]

Hurricane Katrina forced New Orleanians to uproot and live somewhere else. What effect did that have on their health?

The promise of conditional cash transfers

[Research Highlight]

December 22, 2020

Rema Hanna discusses how giving families money affects child development in the long run.

Poverty and Migration in the Digital Age: Experimental Evidence on Mobile Banking in Bangladesh

By Jean N. Lee, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Abu Shonchoy, and Hassan Zaman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology ca...

Danger lurks below

[Research Highlight]

January 11, 2021

How much do leaky underground petroleum tanks harm our health and what should policymakers do about it?

Going Beneath the Surface: Petroleum Pollution, Regulation, and Health

By Michelle Marcus

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

This paper quantifies the health impacts of petroleum leaks from underground storage tanks, the effectiveness of tank regulation, and the role of information as a policy tool in the same setting. Exposure to a leaking underground storage tank during gesta...

The Impact of Paid Maternity Leave on Maternal Health

By Aline Bütikofer, Julie Riise, and Meghan M. Skira

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2021

We examine the impact of the introduction of paid maternity leave in Norway in 1977 on maternal health in the medium and long term. Using administrative data combined with survey data on the health of women around age 40, we find the reform improved a ran...

How IVF changed Israel’s marriage market

[Research Highlight]

February 05, 2021

Extending their “biological clocks” led young Jewish-Israeli women to delay tying the knot and invest in themselves.

The unemployment insurance tax hangover

[Research Highlight]

February 25, 2021

A tax spike on companies after layoffs is discouraging them from rehiring when business turns around.

Supreme polarization

[Research Highlight]

February 26, 2021

University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel discusses whether the nation’s highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and, if so, what to do about it.

Flexible decision-making and short-term forecasts

[Research Highlight]

March 04, 2021

How valuable are long-run predictions?

Open access

[Research Highlight]

September 17, 2020

Is there a way that companies can use consumer data while also respecting their privacy?

Beyond the lab

[Research Highlight]

February 16, 2021

Do experiments with student participants produce valid measures of behavior within the general population?

The Power of Social Pensions: Evidence from China's New Rural Pension Scheme

By Wei Huang and Chuanchuan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2021

This paper utilizes the county-by-county rollout of China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) and finds that, among age-eligible people, the pension scheme leads to higher household income and food expenditure, less farmwork, better health, and lower mortal...

Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance

By Gordon B. Dahl and Anne C. Gielen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2021

Using a 1993 Dutch policy reform and a regression discontinuity design, we find children of parents whose disability insurance (DI) eligibility was reduced are 11 percent less likely to participate in DI themselves, do not alter their use of other governm...