The Economist explores the basics of free trade, its benefits and downsides, with Prof. John Van Reenen. “With free trade, you come into more contact with foreign companies, new ideas, new people and so on,” explains Van Reenen. “That’s mutually beneficial. And it is a political force for cooperation.”
Data USA, a website built by Associate Prof. César Hidalgo in collaboration with Deloitte and Datawheel, provides prospective college students with comprehensive data on U.S. universities, revealing “metrics on topics like the most popular degrees, the breakdown of faculty by gender, the student loan default rate, and the amount of federal funding universities receive,” writes Katharine Schwab for Co.Design.
Prof. Parag Pathak, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, speaks to The Wall Street Journal’s Michelle Hackman about his research on school choice. “What I sometimes find frustrating in conversations about student achievement is they often get sidetracked from the issue of school quality,” Pathak says. “Our job as researchers is exploring the nuances and subtleties.”
In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, two Sloan students and their co-authors argue that “business school leaders, instructors, and students must bring workers’ perspectives into the MBA curriculum.” They caution that, “an economy that delivers gains only to the top will suffer ills far worse than inefficiency.”
Using several comparative models, a new study led by MIT researchers reveals that China’s pledge to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 could cut down on as many as 160,000 premature deaths. “Politically, the research confirms why Chinese officials have their own internal reasons to cut CO2 even though the U.S. is abandoning Paris and disengaging internationally on climate,” writes Ben Geman for Axios.
A new study finds that a 4% reduction in China's carbon emissions by 2030 could save a total of $464.5 billion in healthcare costs, writes Chase Purdy for Quartz. “We have all these policy goals for a transition toward a more sustainable society,” says Associate Prof. Noelle Selin. “Mitigating air pollution, a leading cause of death, is one of them, and avoiding dangerous climate change is another.”
Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour talks with computer scientist Neha Narula to explain how Bitcoin works. “Part of Bitcoin’s threat model is that no single entity ends up getting a majority of the processing power in the network,” says Narula. “If somebody got 51 percent of the processing power in the network, they could theoretically rewrite history and change the state of transactions in the ledger.”
In this opinion piece for The Huffington Post, Sloan senior lecturer Otto Scharmer argues that GDP is an unqualified metric for measuring a country’s success. “We are trapped in a way of thinking that says “bigger is better,” that higher GDP is the solution to our problems,” writes Scharmer, even though we’ve seen that “GDP growth is no salve for deepening inequality across the globe.”
Writing in The Atlantic, Amy Merrick describes Walmart's increasing reliance on the gig economy and automation, arguing that "the U.S. economy is tilting further toward jobs that give workers less market power." Merrick cites research by Prof. David Autor, who explains that “the concern should not be about the number of jobs, but whether those jobs are jobs that can support a reasonable standard of living.”
Research co-authored by Prof. Christopher Palmer in Sloan found that loan rates vary substantially, even when two borrowers are relatively similar, due primarily to the variations in the lender’s markup. “You would never get away with this if you were selling milk,” Palmer told Jo Craven McGinty of The Wall Street Journal. “It would be the same price for everyone.”
Research led by Prof. Amy Finkelstein found that just 4% of “bankruptcy filings by non-elderly adults” were associated with medical expenses. “Medical bankruptcy…wasn’t nearly as common as anticipated,” writes Alex Kingsbury for The Boston Globe. “Public policy aimed at fighting it might not have the anticipated results, either.”
A study co-authored by researchers at MIT finds that hospitalizations only cause about 4 percent of bankruptcies among nonelderly adults in the U.S., reports Tom Murphy of the Associated Press. Researchers gathered data from “more than a half million adults under 65 in California who had a hospitalization between 2003 and 2007 that wasn't tied to childbirth.”
Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen and Sloan Fellow Kashif Qadeer write for The Wall Street Journal about flaws in the SEC’s methodology for requiring companies to disclose “pay ratios”, which is “the CEO’s compensation divided by the median employee’s.” They point out adjustments must be made especially “for companies that depend heavily on part-time workers.”
Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Sloan, writes for The Boston Globe about how the new tax act would create potentially major fiscal challenges for “cities with large unfunded liabilities for pension benefits and retiree health care.” He addresses several ways in which cities might make adjustments to mitigate the losses, citing data from JP Morgan.
A study co-authored by Prof. David Autor finds that over the past five decades, automation has helped increase total employment, but wages have not increased, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath. According to Autor, the findings help explain “why inequality between the world’s wealthiest and everyday workers has increased.”