AEA Research Highlights

More than 50 years ago, a revolution in seed and fertilizer technology bolstered food production and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America.

Unfortunately, this "Green Revolution" left sub-Saharan Africa behind. At the turn of the 21st century, many farmers still were struggling to produce enough food to feed their communities.

Then, in 2006, a number of African nations embarked on an ambitious plan to invest billions of dollars into their own green revolution.

In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, University of Michigan economist Dean Yang and co-authors Michael Carter and Rachid Laajaj examine the effectiveness of a temporary subsidy program in Mozambique. Running a randomized control trial, they found that giving farmers one-time vouchers for seed and fertilizer led to an immediate improvement in crop yields. And as word spread, other farmers not involved in the program got on board and amplified the effects ten-fold.

Yang spoke with the AEA's Chris Fleisher about that experiment in Mozambique, what it revealed about the impact of temporary subsidies, and how RCTs--considered the gold standard in experimental research—could still be improved.

At the turn of the 19th century, American universities were mostly under-resourced, regional schools. By World War II, they had become research leaders on the global stage, attracting the world's best scientists.

In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola say that the US universities' ascendancy in research started earlier than many people believe.

Just after the Civil War, two innovators found a successful formula. Johns Hopkins and Cornell made key reforms that started attracting the best research talent—and the large sums of money needed to keep it.

Today, reformers would like to tweak practices like tenure that helped create this virtuous circle. But Urquiola says they should keep a few important tradeoffs in mind.

Urquiola recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about the history of the US university system and what today's education policymakers can learn from it.

Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus has called climate change "the ultimate challenge for economics."

Economists increasingly have been trying to understand how rising tides and global temperatures will impact resource allocation around the globe, as well as the potential policy tools that can help curb damage to our natural world.

SMU professor Klaus Desmet says that a lot of those analyses are missing a critical factor: migration.

Desmet coauthored a paper in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics that examines how economic output will be affected over the next 200 years as humans move away from coastal areas threatened by rising sea levels. Although losses in vulnerable Southeast Asian cities such as Bangkok and Shanghai will still be very significant, their research shows overall GDP declines are substantially less than predicted by models that don't account for spatial shifts in economic activity.

The AEA's Chris Fleisher spoke with Desmet about the impacts of rising sea levels on the global economy and the trade-offs between short-run costs of migration and long-run benefits.

After a failed revolution in 1848, hundreds of Germans were expelled from their home country and settled in the US. It was not obvious that this eclectic group would play an important role in American politics and change the course of the nation.

Their words and leadership helped President Lincoln and the North win the Civil War, according to a paper in the American Economic Review.

Authors Christian Dippel and Stephan Heblich found that these German immigrants significantly boosted Union Army enlistments through newspapers, social clubs, and public speaking tours.

The story of these so-called Forty-Eighters offers important insights into how grassroots leaders shape social movements.

Dippel recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about getting around something economists call the "reflection problem," the legacy of the Forty-Eighters, and what their example offers today's leaders.

Democrats may control the White House and Congress, but Republicans have a clear advantage on the nation's highest court.

Sixteen of the last 20 appointments to the Supreme Court have been GOP nominees, including six of nine sitting justices.

Critics say that this has caused an imbalance of power that threatens the court's legitimacy. University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel questions, however, whether some of the reforms being discussed would help.

Hemel has a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives arguing that ideological polarization on the Supreme Court is nothing new. And while it's true that Republicans have dominated recent appointments, proposals like 18-year term limits would do little to address partisan fighting. In fact, term limits could make matters even worse.

Hemel spoke with the AEA's Chris Fleisher about the history of ideological division on the Supreme Court, proposals for creating a more balanced court, and what changes he believes hold the most promise for addressing those concerns.

Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are pushing today's technology frontier. And critical to their enterprises are economists who've honed their skills at universities.

In the Winter 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists Susan Athey and Michael Luca outlined this growing, mutual influence between economics and the tech industry.

Athey and Luca have spent their careers with one foot in academia and the other in the tech sector. Athey—in addition to being a professor at Stanford—served as chief economist at Microsoft and currently sits on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, and Ripple. Luca is a professor at Harvard and works with a variety of tech companies. His efforts at Yelp led to the creation of an economic research initiative there.

Athey says that economists have the training and tools to make meaningful contributions at tech companies, while also feeling intellectually challenged.

The AEA spoke with Athey and Luca about the many new opportunities for collaboration between tech companies with large amounts of data and economists looking to experiment in the digital economy.

In the US, most students enroll in their neighborhood school. But sometimes, they have a choice.

Families might be given vouchers for other public or private institutions further from their homes. Policymakers' hope is that kids in underperforming schools won't be limited by where they can afford to live.

Harvard professor Chris Avery says that the housing market is important to how school choice programs function. In the January issue American Economic Review, Avery and his co-author Parag Pathak update some of the economic models from a highpoint of school-choice research in the 1990s to consider how these programs affect where people live. Their results show how choice programs can actually undercut their own goals.

Avery spoke with the AEA's Chris Fleisher about the research on this issue, the challenges of detangling school assignment from family income, and the potential implications for educational reform.

Friedrich Hayek is one of the giants of 20th century economics. He did important work on everything from business cycles to psychology, earning a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974.

However, Hayek is perhaps best known for his book, The Road to Serfdom. Since its publication in 1944, many leaders and politicians have cited it as a proof that countries that experiment with socialism will inevitably end up as a totalitarian state.

Duke economist Bruce Caldwell says that the book's message was much more nuanced and often misinterpreted by later generations.

He sets the record straight in the September issue of the Journal of Economic Literature by expanding on Hayek's thinking and the intellectual climate in which Hayek was writing.

Just as important, Caldwell's research shows the importance of digging into the origins of economic debates.

Caldwell recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about the intellectual backdrop to The Road to Serfdom, the challenges of writing for a wider audience, and the history of economic ideas.

The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player below.

Schools are academic institutions. But they are not only that. They are also social spaces that are critical to children's development.

Whether inside the classroom or out on the playground, kids learn how to problem solve, to adapt, persevere, and resolve conflicts. And those schools that are best at fostering these skills are setting their students up for longer term success, according Northwestern professor Kirabo Jackson.

In the December issue of the American Economic Review: Insights, Jackson and co-authors Shanette Porter, John Easton, Alyssa Blanchard, and Sebastian Kiguel examine Chicago Public high schools to determine whether they could have a meaningful impact on ninth graders' social well-being, and how that affected longer-run outcomes.

Jackson spoke with the AEA's Chris Fleisher about that research, the challenges of helping kids develop in a remote learning environment, and why schools need to consider social support along with academics.

Simply giving cash with a few strings attached could be one of the most promising ways to reduce poverty and insecurity in the developing world. Today, over 63 countries have at least one such program.

And while these policies have been around for a few decades, little is known about how much so-called conditional cash transfers (CCT) improve people's lives over the long term.

A paper in the November issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy fills that gap by studying Indonesia's conditional cash transfer program over a six year period.

Authors Nur Cahyadi, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken, Rizal Adi Prima, Elan Satriawan, Ekki Syamsulhakim found that the Family Hope Program dramatically boosted school enrollment rates and the use of healthcare facilities.

But most importantly, they found signs that families permanently benefited from the extra support. Significantly fewer kids suffered from stunted growth when their parents got cash—an outcome that requires continuous investment throughout childhood.

Hanna recently spoke with the AEA's Tyler Smith about the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers, the risks of making conditions too strict, and what program designers should keep foremost in mind.