AEA Research Highlights

Ep. 103: When managers try to keep their best workers from moving into other departments

Most firms rely on managers to spot talented workers and to encourage them to move into bigger roles within the company. But managers are judged on how their own teams perform, giving them an incentive to hold on to their best people. In a paper in the American Economic Review, economist Ingrid Haegele provides the first empirical evidence that talent hoarding is prevalent and costly. Drawing on personnel records and surveys from a large European manufacturer with more than 200,000 employees, she finds that 75 percent of managers acknowledge hoarding. She says that the workers held back are disproportionately high-performing, with the effect falling hardest on women. Haegele recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how she measured talent hoarding, what it costs workers, and what firms might do about it.

Ep. 102: The economics of sanctioning a petrostate

In response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the G7 imposed a price cap of $60 per barrel on all Russian oil carried by tankers owned, insured, or serviced by Western companies. Many analysts expected the policy to backfire, with some warning that oil could reach $380 if Russia retaliated by cutting production. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Simon Johnson, Lukasz Rachel, and Catherine Wolfram argue that tightly enforced caps can actually raise oil output and push world prices down when factors like market power, uncertainty, and financial constraints are accounted for. Rachel and Wolfram recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why the textbook intuition on price caps fails in Russia's case and how their framework might be used to set caps in the future.

Ep. 101: Views on the dollar shortage controversy

In the fifteen years following the end of World War II, Western Europe's capital account surpluses were not sufficient to finance its trade deficit with the United States. Charles Kindleberger of MIT, who helped assemble the Marshall Plan, defined this gap as the "dollar shortage" and argued that it was a structural problem rooted in Europe's lagging productivity, one that could only be fixed by sustained US lending. Milton Friedman disagreed, treating the shortage as a simple consequence of overvalued fixed exchange rates that floating currencies would correct. The argument continued through scores of books and articles written by many other economists into the late 1950s, until Europe's productivity caught up, and the debate faded. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Harris Dellas and George S. Tavlas revisit the controversy and explain why it still matters. They find that Kindleberger anticipated much of what is now called the intertemporal approach to the current account, and they trace how two recent episodes of dollar shortages echo and depart from the original. Dellas and Tavlas recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the paper.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ep. 92: Housing supply skepticism

Most Americans agree that housing costs are too high, often blaming developers and landlords. Many feel that the problem can be solved with price controls, development restrictions, and mandates on providing below-market-rate units. But these ideas are at odds with standard economic policy prescriptions, which suggest that the way to bring down costs is by increasing the housing supply. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, Stan Oklobdzija explore how the public thinks about housing markets through surveys of thousands of urban and suburban residents. They found that while people understand supply and demand in markets like cars and agriculture, they struggle to apply the same logic to housing. The authors' results may help efforts to shape better economic messaging geared toward the general public. Elmendorf recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he and his coauthors measured public beliefs about housing markets and why these beliefs differ from economic consensus.

Ep. 91: Reviewing residential segregation

Despite decades of civil rights legislation, many Black and White Americans, as well as other minorities, continue to live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, with significant implications for access to quality schools, jobs, healthcare, and economic opportunities. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature, authors Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman examine the complexities of measuring residential segregation, what causes segregation to persist, and why it matters so much for economic outcomes. Their work challenges conventional narratives about US segregation and offers a framework for understanding how residential patterns continue to shape American inequality. Logan and Parman recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the patterns of segregation they uncovered, and what the key drivers might be.

Ep. 90: Understanding the US net foreign asset position

For decades, the United States enjoyed what some called an exorbitant privilege—the ability to spend more than it earned without accumulating much debt to the rest of the world. But that privilege has ended. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Andrew Atkeson, Jonathan Heathcote, and Fabrizio Perri found that the United States started accumulating significant liabilities to foreigners after the Great Recession. The researchers say that a surge in the value of US corporations relative to companies in other countries is the driver of this development. Due to large international capital flows in recent decades, foreign investors now own about 40 percent of US corporate equity, while US investors also hold a large amount of foreign companies in their portfolio. When American companies become more profitable and their stock prices soar, much of the gains flow overseas, without a corresponding flow to US investors from foreign companies, and this erodes the net foreign asset position of the United States. Atkeson recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how to interpret the US net foreign asset position and what its recent swings mean for American households.

Ep. 89: Measuring US income inequality

US household income has grown significantly, but much of that growth seems to be at the very top of the distribution. Just how much inequality has increased and why it is growing is a topic of debate among economists. Part of the challenge lies in a seemingly basic question: what exactly counts as income? In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Matthieu Gomez disentangles the notions of income that economists frequently use and helps pinpoint what's really behind the rise in inequality. Gomez recently spoke with Tyler Smith about defining income, recent patterns in income inequality, and the best tools for reducing inequality.

Ep. 88: Understanding international approaches to drug pricing

Drug prices have become a hot-button issue in the United States, with politicians across the spectrum agreeing that American consumers pay too much for prescription medications. But bringing down drug prices raises fundamental economic challenges that affect innovation, access, and healthcare costs worldwide. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Margaret K. Kyle examines how different countries approach pharmaceutical pricing regulation and the lessons to be learned from international experience. Her work reveals that while the United States does pay significantly higher prices for drugs, the story is more nuanced than a simple comparison suggests. Kyle recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why economists generally support market solutions but make an exception for pharmaceuticals, how "pay-for-performance" contracts and subscription pricing models could bring down costs, and why simple solutions like copying other countries' prices might backfire.

Ep. 87: The cultural roots of rebellion

Civil conflict has plagued much of Africa, with ethnically diverse countries experiencing particularly high rates of violence. Yet within these nations, patterns vary, leading to questions of why some groups rebel while others do not and why a given group rebels at certain times but not at other times. In a paper in the American Economic Review, author Eleonora Guarnieri untangles the factors that drive groups to rebel against their central government. She shows that when ethnicities become more culturally distant from those in power, their likelihood of engaging in civil conflict increases significantly. Her research suggests that conflicts arise as a result of ethnic favoritism in resource distribution and from fundamental disagreements over the types of public goods that central governments should provide. Guarnieri recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how she estimated the impact of cultural distance on civil conflict, and what her findings may mean for reducing violence across Africa's diverse societies.

Ep. 86: Reexamining air quality regulations

The Clean Air Act has been an essential tool for reducing air pollution in the United States. But standard estimation methods may overstate its impact, according to a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Authors Lutz Sager and Gregor Singer reexamined the 2005 regulations targeting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and found that improvements in air quality were closer to a 3 percent reduction in pollutants rather than the 10 percent suggested by conventional methods. However, they also found that the benefits from cleaner air may be larger than previous estimates suggested. Sager and Singer recently spoke with Tyler Smith about methods for properly estimating regulatory impacts that feature time trends and the implications for other measures based on estimates of air quality improvements.

Ep. 85: America's public safety net

The patchwork nature of America's public safety net has evolved over centuries, shaped by political winds and changing views on poverty. Understanding this complicated history may help shed light on the core tensions that continue to define debates about who deserves assistance and how it should be provided. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Christopher Howard explored how programs targeted at people with low incomes expanded from meager, local support in colonial times to the large-scale programs of today. He draws a distinction between two parallel systems: means-tested programs targeted specifically at low-income Americans and inclusive social insurance programs available to citizens across income levels. Howard recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the surprising political durability of some targeted programs, the dramatic success of Social Security in reducing elderly poverty, and the ongoing gaps in the public safety net that leave many Americans vulnerable.

Ep. 84: Media salience and polarization