In an article for the Financial Times about the best economics books of 2017, Martin Wolf highlights new works by Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Peter Temin. Wolf writes that in Temin’s “important and provocative book, [he] argues that the US is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with ever fewer households in the middle.”
Prof. David Autor has been named to the Bloomberg 50 list, which spotlights the thought leaders who defined global business in 2017. In describing why Autor was selected, Peter Coy highlights a pair of influential working papers this year in which Autor documents how the rise of superstar companies has impacted American workers.
In an op-ed for the Deseret News, graduate student Ryan Hill describes a House-passed tax bill as “devastating” to graduate students, highlighting a provision that designates tuition waivers as taxable income. “The new tax deeply undermines our nation’s commitment to basic research and technological innovation,” writes Hill.
Writing for the Financial Times, Associate Prof. Tavneet Suri explains the importance of measuring the benefits of philanthropy in sub-Saharan Africa. This data “could help resource- or skills-constrained African companies to leverage the benefits of impact measurement tools, to better understand their positive impact on poverty,” Prof. Suri explains.
Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Arianne Cohen spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s research examining adaptive markets. Cohen explains that, “Lo’s hypothesis says people act in their own self-interest but frequently make mistakes, figure out where they’ve erred, and change their behaviors. The broader system also adapts.”
Jeanna Smialek of Bloomberg News highlights a new study co-authored by Profs. David Autor, Christopher Palmer, and Parag Pathak that shows a link between crime reduction and gentrification. According to the study, in Cambridge “a sudden end to rent control in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent, a drop driven by property crime,” explains Smialek.
As the population ages and the labor force decreases, the U.S. can remain one of the world’s youngest populations with continued immigration, write Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, and research associate Luke Yoquinto. “There is broad agreement that slashing the raw number of immigrants to the U.S. would be an economic mistake.”
Noah Smith of Bloomberg writes that the foreign trade theory proposed by Prof. Cesar Hidalgo and his research team suggests that a country’s future growth is determined by how many different products it makes. This forecasting method is based on “the level of regulation or the amount of investment in education,” explains Smith.
Writing for Reuters, Mark Miller highlights Prof. Paul Osterman’s new book, which examines labor market trends for caregivers. Osterman finds that by 2030 there will be a national shortage of 151,000 paid direct care workers and 3.8 million unpaid family caregivers. By 2040, the shortfall will be much larger.”
New York Times reporter Austin Frakt writes that MIT researchers have found that hospitals that spend more on emergency care had better patient outcomes. “Hospitals that score well on patient satisfaction, follow good processes of care and record lower hospital mortality rates,” says Prof. Joseph Doyle, “do seem to keep patients alive and out of the hospital longer.”
Writing for CNBC, Ali Montag highlights MIT’s MicroMasters programs and how they offer students around the world a new path to a graduate degree. Montag notes that passing students from the MicroMasters in data, economics and development policy, “are eligible to apply for a master's program on campus at MIT.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber writes for The Washington Post that the Senate’s health care bill could make the opioid epidemic worse by proposing a, “rollback of the Medicaid expansions that had finally slowed the rapid growth of this devastating problem.”
The Economist reviews Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s latest book, which examines how new digital technologies will impact businesses. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, “believe that the latest phase of computers and the internet have created three shifts in how work happens.”
Forbes reporter Kevin Murnane writes about how MIT researchers have used a computer vision system to examine how several American cities physically improved or deteriorated over time. Murnane writes that the study “provides important support for nuanced versions of traditional theories about why urban neighborhoods change over time.”
Washington Post reporter Robert Samuelson highlights a study co-authored by Prof. David Autor that finds that new technologies can lead to productivity increases that often generate more jobs. Autor and his colleagues found that “every 10 percent gain in productivity resulted in a 2 percent gain in employment spread over four years.”