AEA Research Highlights

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 women than for men. They argue that gender differences in occupations and in childcare responsibilities are the main drivers.

The authors' findings highlight the impact that childcare policies may have on the career prospects of women, as well as on the overall economy.

Professor Albanesi recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why the COVID-19 recession poses unique challenges and what policymakers can do to help.

*Theme music by Podington Bear

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 that when a new president entered office, taxpayers in counties on the opposite side of the political aisle appeared less willing to share their earnings with the government.

Conversely, those who were politically aligned with the new president were more trusting of how their taxes would be spent.

Cullen and Washington spoke with Chris Fleisher about the challenges of researching tax evasion, the importance of public trust in government, and the implications of their findings in a hyperpolarized time.

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 attacking coalition forces during the initial stages of the drawdown to disguise their true strength, ramping up violence once security was left completely to Afghan forces.

Their insights shed light on why the late stages of the current withdrawal have been worse than expected.

Professor Wright recently spoke with Tyler Smith about NATO's withdrawal from Afghanistan and what the US can do to improve security transitions in the future.

**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 challenges and bribing scandals involving star athletes have cast a pall on the two most popular sports of men's basketball and football. The introduction of legalized gambling this year has intensified the pressure to pay players what they are worth, lest they fall prey to the influence of betters hoping to sway the outcome of a game.

Allen Sanderson and John Siegfried have been arguing for years that the system needs to change. In 2015, they published a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that made the case for opening college sports to the free market.

Sanderson and Siegfried spoke with the AEA about why they think college athletes should be paid, the potential consequences of doing so, and how the landscape could change over the coming decade.

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 education of children who would have traditionally supported them in old age. It also resulted in more of those children leaving home after marriage rather than continuing to live with their parents, as was the customary practice.

These findings have broader implications for how we understand the interplay between culture and policy, particularly in low-income countries.

Bau spoke with Chris Fleisher about the complexity of studying the intersection of culture and economics, the implications from her research for the wider push for pension reform in the developing world, and the unintended consequences from public policy.

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 undercut claims that racial bias is confined to a few bad apples.

Professor Mello recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about how economists study discrimination and what policies might help to address disparate outcomes for minorities.

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 Perspectives, Badgett and coauthors Christopher Carpenter and Dario Sansone provide an overview of the literature on LGBTQ individuals and some of the issues involved in advancing the subdiscipline. Getting reliable data is just one huge challenge that economists face.

Badgett spoke with Chris Fleisher about how the field has changed since her seminal papers on LGBTQ economics were published, her most surprising findings from researching this paper and latest book, and how she sees her role as an economist engaged in these issues.

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.

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 too. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Jones says that the rise of teams has made it more difficult to identify individual contributions. This can muddy tenure decisions, hinder grant funding opportunities, and even expand inequality in the field at a time when economics is trying to boost representation of women and minorities.

Jones spoke with the AEA's Chris Fleisher about the rise of research teams, the pros and cons of collaboration, and a few reforms that could help ensure coauthors are getting fair treatment.

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 days if they were sent to a private facility. The results undercut the industry's claims that private companies provide correctional services more efficiently and at lower cost to governments.

Professor Mukherjee recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about why private prisons tend to hold inmates longer and how private prison contracting could be reformed.