AEA Research Highlights

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.