Money reporter Penelope Wang writes about a new study by Prof. James Poterba that examined why Americans often did not have enough money saved for retirement. The researchers found that, “how much subjects had the first year their assets were measured showed the strongest determinant of the amount of the wealth they had at the end of life.”
Professor Yasheng Huang writes for The New York Times about the role of the government in the recent downturn in Chinese markets. “The current mess is entirely due to the active encouragement by the authorities to invest in the markets and to lax regulations," Huang writes.
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Professor Amy Finkelstein’s survey of low-income Oregonians in which she determined that those given access to Medicaid spent more on healthcare than the uninsured. “There’s overwhelming evidence from our study and others that when you cover people with health insurance, they use more health care,” said Finkelstein.
Megan Turchi writes for Boston.com about ‘The Good Jobs Score,’ a method for evaluating food retailers based on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and productivity, developed by Professor Zeynep Ton. Ton hopes “the score will bring attention to some of the drivers of success that are rarely included in annual reports.”
Research led by Professor Paul Osterman in 2013 indicates that policymakers’ focus on the “skills gap” among American workers may be misplaced, writes David Scharfenberg for The Boston Globe. According to the study, “employers, for the most part, are simply not demanding the high-level talents that the skills gap rhetoric would suggest.”
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the growing influence of MIT economists in policy positions and in policy discourse. “M.I.T.-trained economists, especially Ph.D.s from the 1970s, play an outsized role at policy institutions and in policy discussion across the Western world,” Krugman explains.
According to The Economist, a new paper from Prof. Daron Acemoglu compared growth rates and levels of political freedom, and found that countries undergoing a democratic transition grow faster than their autocratic counterparts. Acemoglu found that permanent democratization, “leads to an increase in GDP per person of about 20% in the subsequent 25 years.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Chris Jacobs writes about a study co-authored by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that examines the utility and efficiency of Medicaid coverage. The study “found that beneficiaries valued Medicaid at 20 cents to 40 cents on the dollar,” writes Jacobs.
Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Zweig writes about anti-poverty research, highlighting an MIT study that showed intervention methods can be effective at alleviating poverty. Prof. Esther Duflo says that, “We are trying to promote a culture of learning that will permeate governments and NGOs and businesses to such an extent that it will become par for the course.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Zumbrun writes about a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that found that cell-phone records can indicate if a person has been laid off. The researchers found that “people’s social lives and mobility contracted following a layoff.”
Nobel laureate John Nash, who taught at MIT from 1951 until 1959, died Saturday at age 86, writes Erica Goode for The New York Times. “John’s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,” says Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton.
Tina Rosenberg writes for The New York Times about a study by J-PAL researchers examining the effectiveness of a poverty intervention program. Researchers found that participants in the program, “ate more, were more certain about access to food, held more assets, had more income and savings, spent more time working, and enjoyed better mental and physical health.”
A new study by MIT researchers has found that anti-poverty intervention methods can be effective, reports Carolyn Johnson for The Boston Globe. Interventions resulted in “fewer skipped meals, more income from livestock and farming, and a durable, though small, increase in how much they consume each day.”
Professor Esther Duflo has been awarded Spain's Princess of Asturias social science prize for her work studying poverty in developing countries, the Associated Press reports. The organizers of the prize said that Duflo has “profoundly changed strategies for education, health and employment in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Daron Acemoğlu argues that reform rollbacks in Turkey have caused the country to lose ground on economic progress. Acemoğlu explains that, “modest improvements in economic and political institutions can trigger rapid productivity growth.”