research papers in economics.com

Take a look at the latest research from MIT Economics faculty, including published work and newly-released working papers.

Working Papers

Evaluating policy counterfactuals: a "var-plus" approach, incentive-compatible unemployment reinsurance for the euro area.

Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It

Cooking to Save Your Life

Published papers.

Repression and Repertoires

Climate change, directed innovation, and energy transition: the long-run consequences of the shale gas revolution.

Labs and Centers

Research news.

Through econometrics, Isaiah Andrews is making research more robust

Michael D Whinston receives the 2024 Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize

Browse Econ Literature

• Working papers
• Software components
• Book chapters
• JEL classification

More features

• Subscribe to new research

RePEc Biblio

Author registration.

• Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar NEW!

• Explanations

More services and features

Follow serials, authors, keywords & more

Public profiles for Economics researchers

Various research rankings in Economics

RePEc Genealogy

Who was a student of whom, using RePEc

Curated articles & papers on economics topics

Upload your paper to be listed on RePEc and IDEAS

New papers by email

Subscribe to new additions to RePEc

EconAcademics

Blog aggregator for economics research

Cases of plagiarism in Economics

About RePEc

Initiative for open bibliographies in Economics

News about RePEc

Questions about IDEAS and RePEc

RePEc volunteers

Participating archives

Publishers indexing in RePEc

Privacy statement

Corrections.

Found an error or omission?

Opportunities to help RePEc

Get papers listed

Have your research listed on RePEc

Open a RePEc archive

Have your institution's/publisher's output listed on RePEc

Get RePEc data

Use data assembled by RePEc

• Press & Events

Working Papers

Strauss, I., O’Reilly, T., Mazzucato, M., & Schulte, J. (2024).  Monetization risks in AI systems: A Bing Copilot case study . Submission to the European Commission. April 2024:  https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/about/europes-digital-future_en

Published Papers

Earlier work on algorithmic rents and disclosures.

Strauss, I., O’Reilly, T., and Mazzucato, M. (2024). Amazon’s Algorithmic Rents: The economics of information on Amazon . UC Law Science and Technology Journal , forthcoming.

O’Reilly, T. (2023). Breaking Bad: The journey from collective intelligence to algorithmic rents . Minderoo Centre Lecture, Cambridge University, October 10, 2023.

Rock, R., Strauss, I., O’Reilly, T., and Mazzucato, M. (2023). Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon allocate user attention as it pleases? . Information Economics and Policy . [R&R]

O’Reilly, T., Strauss, I., and Mazzucato, M. (2024). Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power . Data & Policy , Volume 6, e6.

Privacy Overview

Legal Heterodoxy in the Global South: Adapting Private Laws to Local Contexts

NYU Law and Economics Research Paper Forthcoming

Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming

33 Pages Posted: 17 Sep 2024

Kevin E. Davis

New York University School of Law

Mariana Pargendler

European Corporate Governance Institute; Harvard University - Harvard Law School

Date Written: September 06, 2024

How do private law institutions of developing countries differ from those of developed countries? A common view is that the legal systems of the Global South are often outdated, failed transplants of Global North models, or plagued by enforcement challenges. This book project offers a different perspective by focusing on legal innovation and adaptation in the Global South. We examine how countries in the Global South have embraced legal doctrines and solutions that deviate from approaches that currently hold the status of orthodoxy in richer countries, and pursue distinct and potentially broader public policy objectives or reflect different values, in response to conditions that are commonplace in developing countries. Our analysis points to reasons why the legacy of colonialism, limited fiscal capacity, economic dependence on richer countries and macro-economic volatility may encourage lawmakers in poor countries to develop heterodox doctrines. We explore different manifestations of legal heterodoxy across various areas of private law in a range of countries in the Global South. Recognizing legal heterodoxies in the Global South enlarges our understanding of legal experiences and possibilities, and contributes to our understanding about the driving forces and direction of legal evolution around the world.

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Kevin E. Davis (Contact Author)

New york university school of law ( email ).

40 Washington Square South Vanderbilt Hall, Room 335 New York, NY 10012-1099 United States 212-992-8843 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://rb.gy/401vha

European Corporate Governance Institute ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium

Harvard University - Harvard Law School ( email )

1563 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, nyu law & economics research paper series.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

New Institutional Economics eJournal

Comparative law & trans-national studies ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Law, Institutions & Economic Development eJournal

Law & society: international & comparative law ejournal, economic inequality & the law ejournal, law & economics ejournal, european private law ejournal.

Break Up Big Econ

The economics profession has become insular and status-obsessed, and not focused enough on making a positive impact on the world.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Economists generally agree that competition is good, and that markets with only a few dominant players are inefficient. We may need to take a hard look in the mirror. According to a new working paper , the recipients of major economics prizes, including the Nobel, have collectively spent half their career at just eight universities: Harvard (where I teach), Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Berkeley. Award-winning scientists in fields such as chemistry, engineering, and medicine, by contrast, represent a much more diverse range of institutions. By applying a metric commonly used in antitrust cases, the authors—the economists Richard B. Freeman, Danxia Xie, Hanzhe Zhang, and Hanzhang Zhou—showed that Nobel Prizes in economics are nearly five times more concentrated than in chemistry, physics, and medicine. Even more alarming, economics is the only one of the 18 fields studied in which concentration is increasing.

By our own metrics, the marketplace of ideas in economics is becoming less efficient and fair. The level of monopolization reflected in these data is both a cause and an effect of the field’s shortcomings. Our profession has become insular and status-obsessed, and not focused enough on making a positive impact on the world. Regular people think we economists are out of touch. Unfortunately, they have a point.

Why are economics prizes so much more heavily clustered among a tiny number of elite institutions than prizes in other fields? Academic output in the hard sciences consists of experimental results that can be objectively evaluated. In those fields, an idea’s merit is tied much more to its practical implications than to the perceived brilliance of the author. For example, the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for the development of lithium-ion batteries, which enabled the widespread usage of mobile phones and laptops and may one day help free humanity from our dependence on fossil fuels. The prize was shared by three scientists affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, SUNY Binghamton, and Meijo University, in Japan (ranked Japan’s 108th best by U.S. News & World Report ).

The allocation of prestige in economics, by contrast, has more in common with the humanities, which were left out of the recent study. The winners of major prizes in the humanities, such as the Kluge Prize, the Holberg Prize, and the Rolf Schock Prize in philosophy, have also been disproportionately affiliated throughout their career with the same eight elite institutions mentioned above, though the pattern appears to be less egregious than in economics. Unlike the sciences, the humanities are primarily interpretive, meaning they seek to understand and explain aspects of the human experience. This work is valuable, but it is much harder to judge objectively. Its subjective nature creates a halo effect whereby work written by a well-regarded scholar is widely assumed to be brilliant by default. (The judgment of this scholarship is also more easily influenced by political and ideological considerations. No one cares whether a battery is liberal or conservative; it just has to work.) The subjectivity of greatness in interpretive academic fields, combined with the halo effect, explains why they tend toward snobbishness and insularity.

Rogé Karma: A baffling academic feud over inequality

Economics has long chafed at its association with “soft” fields such as philosophy and history and thus spent most of the 20th century trying to imitate the hard sciences by becoming more mathematically rigorous. But this attempt didn’t work, because trying to explain the world via mathematical models is still fundamentally interpretive, requiring crucial assumptions about which factors belong in one’s formula at all. The shift instead plunged economics even deeper into esoteric theorizing and insider jargon.

The problem isn’t the use of math itself. Abstruse mathematics can lead to immense real-world benefits; the theoretical improvements in auction design by the Nobel laureates Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, for example, ended up saving the Federal Communications Commission and taxpayers billions of dollars . The problem is that examples like that one are not as common as they ought to be. In economics, professional incentives too often reward theoretical elegance over solving real-world problems.

The good news is that in recent years, the field has gradually become more empirical and data-driven. The development economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, for example, shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Their preferred tool is the randomized controlled trial, which provides clear and sometimes surprising answers about the most effective ways to improve people’s lives. Treating the intestinal worms that afflict many schoolchildren in Kenya is a fantastic public investment, boosting adult earnings and self-sufficiency so much that the rate of return on taxpayer investment was estimated at 37 percent. Conversely, popular and seemingly sensible initiatives are sometimes a complete flop, such as a $400 million United Nations program to reduce indoor air pollution by providing the poor with more efficient cooking stoves. (Several practical problems limited the stoves’ usefulness.) In these and many other cases, economists can make a positive impact through hands-on design and evaluation, helping to improve what Duflo calls the “plumbing” of the economy.

The bad news is that the empirical turn in economics may have made our concentration problem even worse. Empirical research is expensive. Ambitious new assistant professors now require hundreds of thousands of dollars in start-up funding to hire research assistants, run experiments, and produce and analyze data. But whereas science and engineering faculty are expected to eventually become self-sufficient by obtaining research money from other sources, especially the federal government, very little public money is available to economists. The discipline’s biggest federal funding source is the National Science Foundation, yet less than 1 percent of all NSF money goes to economists. Without public funding to balance the scales as it does in science and engineering fields, empirical economics research becomes clustered among the handful of universities rich enough to pay for it.

When only a few economics departments can afford to fund empirical research, it’s “publish or perish.” Some scholars who want to do cutting-edge empirical work end up succeeding despite the odds, but many more follow the well-worn path of writing mathematically sophisticated papers that get them tenure but have little effect on the real world.

Adam Ozimek: The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession

Three changes would make the economics profession more democratized and more useful. First, departments should reward research with practical value when hiring and promoting faculty. Second, we should create more prizes for public impact. The American Economic Association gives out more than a dozen awards each year, but none of them directly rewards economists for their contributions to society at large. A good but unusual model is the Edward Lazear Prize, awarded by the Society of Labor Economists. The inaugural winner of the prize was John Abowd, a distinguished labor economist who was also chief scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau and helped lead the effort to administer the census during the coronavirus pandemic.

Third, and most important, the federal government needs to increase its funding for economics research and change the way it’s allocated. The most prominent NSF programs for economists are the Career Award, a prestigious prize for younger scholars, and the Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which funds doctoral studies. An astounding 76 percent of the economists awarded the Career in the past decade were affiliated with one of the top eight elite institutions. GRFP awards are similarly concentrated. Congress should establish a new funding stream for economics research where demonstrated real-world consequences are the most important criteria.

With more funding and more public-focused priorities, the economics profession could come closer to fulfilling its potential to improve the functioning of markets, governments, and society. Maybe then it would no longer be called the “dismal science.”

Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

About the Author

More Stories

The Worst Way to Do College Admissions

The Single Biggest Fix for Inequality at Elite Colleges

An official website of the United States government.

Here’s how you know

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• American Job Centers
• Apprenticeship
• Demonstration Grants
• Farmworkers
• Federal Bonding Program
• Foreign Labor Certification
• Indians and Native Americans
• Job Seekers
• Layoffs and Rapid Response
• National Dislocated Worker Grants
• Older Workers
• Skills Training Grants
• Trade Adjustment Assistance
• Unemployment Insurance
• Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)
• WIOA Adult Program
• Advisories and Directives
• Regulations
• Labor Surplus Area
• Performance
• Recovery-Ready Workplace Resource Hub
• Research and Evaluation
• ETA News Releases
• Regional Offices
• Freedom of Information Act
• Office of Apprenticeship
• Office of Foreign Labor Certification
• Office of Grants Management
• Office of Job Corps
• Office of Unemployment Insurance (1-877-S-2JOBS)

Considerations Regarding Future Research on Use of Fees in Employment and Training Administration (ETA) Programs: Discussion Paper

Publication info, research methodology, country, state or territory, description.

This paper explores ideas for future research on application or user fees in programs administered by the Employment and Training Administration (in the U.S. Department of Labor). The paper briefly reviews federal law and regulations, related research studies, and key factors that can be used to guide possible research. The paper focuses on research related to use of fees with employers who, under title I of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, can be charged fees at the local level for certain customized services (such as for recruitment events and human resource consultation services). Possible research studies identified in the paper include: 1) a descriptive study of current use of fees by local programs (as well as of comparable commercial services to which employers have access); 2) a pilot or demonstration to test use of fees for employers in different circumstances and different types of services, and 3) a feasibility study on use of more rigorous methods (such as a randomized controlled trial or a quasi-experimental design) to test use of fees with employers.

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Please click here to see any active alerts .

Working Paper: Comparative Analysis of Service Area Boundaries and Disparities in Drinking Water Quality

Paper Number:  2024-07

Document Date:  9/2024

Author(s):  Wes Austin, Tina Bardot, Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi

Subject Area(s): Water Pollution, Water Supply, Water Resources, Distributional Effects

JEL Classification:

Q25, Q53, Q58, Y1

Keywords:  Drinking Water, Safe Drinking Water Act, Service Area Boundaries, Environmental Justice

Abstract:  Service area boundaries are the geographic delineation of a drinking water system’s customer base. A lack of precise service area boundaries may introduce errors in how measures of water quality are geospatially assigned in academic or regulatory work, potentially hindering our ability to locate and accurately characterize environmental justice concerns in drinking water. Many advances have been made in the collection and modelling of service areas, but there has been minimal systematic testing of the implications of employing distinct service area boundary types in the published literature. While it is generally understood that more accurate service area assignment methods will improve the precision of environmental justice analyses of drinking water quality, it is unclear how various assignment methods would impact the conclusions of empirical analyses or the potential magnitude of bias. This paper aims to fill this gap by summarizing a set of relatively novel environmental justice indicators in drinking water across all known service area assignment methods. We explore drinking water quality measures for arsenic, bacterial detection, disinfection byproduct formation, lead, nitrates, PFAS, and health-based violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. We summarize each drinking water quality metric across service area assignment methods including the use of county served, zip codes served, the EPIC/SimpleLab dataset, boundaries created by the U.S. Geologic Survey, and a national data layer produced by EPA’s Office of Research and Development. We find disparities in drinking water quality with respect to every drinking water quality metric included in this analysis, and we find that conclusions regarding the presence of a disparity depend on the service area boundary selected for at least one group of environmental justice concern for each drinking water quality measure. This paper helps to motivate the importance of collecting service areas as well as producing and maintaining a high-quality nationally consistent geodatabase of drinking water system service areas.

This paper is part of the  Environmental Economics Working Paper Series .

• Comparative Analysis of Service Area Boundaries and Disparities in Drinking Water Quality (pdf) (10.27 MB)
• Environmental Economics Home
• Overview of Environmental Economics
• Current EPA Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses (2016)
• Environmental Economics Reports
• Current Environmental Economic Topics
• EPA Datasets
• EPA Handbook on Land Cleanup and Reuse
• Peer Review of TSD: Social Cost of Greenhouse Gas Estimates (2023)
• Retrospective Study of the Costs of EPA Regulations

• Updated Terms of Use
• New Privacy Policy
• Your Privacy Choices
• Closed Captioning Policy

Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by  Factset . Powered and implemented by  FactSet Digital Solutions .  Legal Statement .

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2024 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. FAQ - New Privacy Policy

Online dating has unexpected influence on wealth gaps, research paper finds

Researchers found online dating trend has led to people marrying within the same income bracket.

UAW is 'fighting for working people' in America, 'income inequality': Dave Green

United Auto Workers 2B regional director Dave Green says the union's strikes will go on 'as long as we need to.'

From heartstrings to purse strings, online dating has changed the way we think about love and culture, but what if it's also changing the way we think about money?

A recent paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis and Haverford College found that online dating may have contributed to an uptick in income inequality in the U.S. over recent decades as an increasing number of people swipe left on potential mates who don't meet their criteria in select areas.

"Since the emergence of dating apps that allow people to look for a partner based on criteria including education, Americans have increasingly been marrying someone more like themselves. That accounts for about half of the rise in income inequality among households between 1980 and 2020," the researchers found, according to a report from Bloomberg .

LOOKING FOR LOVE ON LINKEDIN? DATA POINTS TO NEW TREND

The Tinder logo is being displayed on a smartphone screen in Athens, Greece, on May 30, 2024.  (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Researchers pulled data from 2008 to 2021 using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to assess changes in the ways men and women selected potential partners in the online dating age.

According to Bloomberg's report, these researchers found that women became more selective in terms of age while men became more selective in terms of education.

"But when the researchers compared that with data on married couples from 1960 and 1980, they found that people in the recent period increasingly went for partners with the same wage and education levels. And while many people married someone of the same ethnicity, people became less and less selective on race over time," the article continued.

THE FUTURE OF LOVE: BUMBLE FOUNDER SAYS AI COULD DATE FOR YOU

Online dating has changed the way the world thinks about relationships and, according to new research, even what household incomes look like. (iStock / iStock)

As people in similar income brackets continue to marry, households are less likely to have one low-income earner and one high-income earner and instead have partners belonging to similar income brackets.

Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría, economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote more about the research in a blog post earlier this month, explaining that the assessment targeted specific areas such as "to what extent people prefer someone like themselves," "how selective (picky) people are when searching for a potential partner" and "how income inequality has been affected by the degree of selectivity of people," to name a few.

Data indicated that online dating raised the Gini Coefficient – a popular measure used to assess income inequality – by three percentage points, the report found.

DATING APP REQUIRED USERS TO HAVE CREDIT SCORE OF 675 OR ABOVE TO JOIN: ‘FOR PEOPLE WITH GOOD CREDIT’

There are structural issues dating apps are dealing with: Megan Leonhardt

Barron's senior writer Megan Leonhardt reacts to Bumble's earnings taking a tumble on 'Barron's Roundtable.'

"We find that the corresponding changes in mate preferences and increased assortativeness by skill and education over this timeframe account for about half of the increased income inequality among households," the researchers stated in part.

They added in the conclusion, "We find that the increase in income inequality over the past half a century is explained to a large extent by sorting on vertical characteristics, such as income and skill, and their interaction with education."

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

AI can help get you more online dating matches

Yourmove.ai founder Dmitri Mirakyan and the ‘most right swiped-man’ on Tinder Stefan-Pierre Tomlin explain the benefits of using AI or human experts to optimize the online dating experience.