MIT Sloan School of Management

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson write for Project Syndicate about how to structure U.S. international trade policies so that they benefit American workers and global stability. “Two new principles can form the basis of U.S. policy. First, international trade should be structured in a way to encourage a stable world order,” they write. “Second, appealing to abstract 'gains of trade' is no longer enough. American workers need to see the benefits. Any trade arrangement that significantly undermines the quality and quantity of middle-class American jobs is bad for the country and its people, and will likely incite a political backlash.”

Writing for Sports Business Journal, Sloan Lecturer Shira Springer explores how the success of the “Barbie” movie could be applied to women's sports. “The ultimate goals for competitions that feature female athletes: Build a fandom and a movement capable of organic growth, convert casual fans into avid fans, attract the previously indifferent and uninterested,” writes Springer. “‘Barbie”’ did that. Moviegoers didn’t simply watch the movie; many joined in the fun, the new fandom and the new movement.”

Oprah Daily reporter Michael Clinton spotlights Anh Vu Sawyer MBA ‘20 and her personal, professional and academic journey to becoming a successful social entrepreneur. Vu Sawyer’s company, “which she called Anh55 after her name and birth year, is in many ways a natural extension of her own story: engaging immigrant and refugee communities in producing a line of sustainable clothing for women over 40 that’s both affordable and stylish.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Roberto Fernandez examines the obstacles facing women seeking to advance their careers in tech, reports Sarah Shemkus for The Boston Globe. The researchers found “recruiters were more likely to reach out to men and had longer conversations with male candidates,” writes Shemkus. “And women needed more impressive resumes to make the cut for recruiter outreach.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Yahoo! Finance Live host Julie Hyman about President Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence regulation. “This is big, it's bold, it's broad,” says Aral. “It has a number of provisions. It has provisions for safety, for privacy, for equity, for workers, for competition and innovation, and leadership abroad. And it really targets those foundation models, the big AI companies in terms of their safety and security standards.”

A study co-authored by Prof. Anna Stansbury finds that “as the share of graduates in the UK workforce has expanded over the past 25 years, the wage premium they command relative to non-graduates has fallen,” reports John Burn-Murdoch for Financial Times. “We can thus infer that in the aggregate, Britain’s supply of skilled workers is outstripping demand in the form of skilled jobs,” writes Burn-Murdoch.

Prof. Fiona Murray and her colleagues have found that female STEM PhD students are less likely than their male counterparts to receive mentorship from top inventor advisors, reports Women We Admire. The researchers “emphasize the importance of early intervention and encouragement for female PhD students aspiring to become inventors. Programs that actively support female professors in their patenting endeavors can indirectly lead to a surge in female inventor PhDs, thereby plugging the leaky pipeline.”

Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Catherine Wolfram write for The Washington Post about how to prevent petrostates from benefitting from war. “We need to break the cycle of petrostates benefitting from fomenting violence,” write Johnson and Wolfram. “And when we punish one petrostate, we need to be careful not to reward another.”

MIT researchers have found that users of a tool developed to fight misinformation on X were “much more likely to fact-check posts expressing political views that differ from their own,” reports Victoria Elliott and David Gilbert for Wired.  Prof. David Rand explains, “while around 80 percent of the tweets that users chose to annotate were, in fact, misleading, users overwhelmingly tended to priorities political content.” 

In an article for The Hill, Prof. Arnold Barnett and Arnaud Sarfati MBA ‘21 examine whether Americans can trust the polling system in the U.S. “To put it simply, believe the polls, and pay particular attention to the local polls in toss-up states,” they write. “Pollsters that were broadly successful in the last presidential election are unlikely to fail colossally in the next one.”

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have published a study examining how extended “silence and a deliberative mindset create value in negotiation,” reports MSNBC reporter Selena Rezvani. “Our research suggests that pausing silently can be a simple yet very effective tool to help negotiators shift from fixed-pie thinking to a more reflective state of mind," says Prof. Jared Curhan. "This, in turn, leads to the recognition of golden opportunities to expand the proverbial pie and create value for both sides.”

Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Catherine Wolfram write for The Los Angeles Times about the impact of high oil prices on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russia is earning fistfuls of money from its oil sales, and using the revenues to buy tanks, pay soldiers and keep the war out of the minds of ordinary Russian citizens,” explain Johnson and Wolfram. “High oil prices enable Putin to test Western democracies’ resolve, and the dysfunction on Capitol Hill plays into his hands. That makes maintaining the oil price cap, with added protections, all the more important for reducing Putin’s ability to continue fighting.”

Prof. Thomas Kochan and Prof. Thomas Malone speak with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about the recent deal between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which will “protect movie screenwriters from losing their jobs to computers that could use artificial intelligence to generate screenplays.” Kochan notes that when it comes to AI, “where workers don’t have a voice through a union, most companies are not engaging their workers on these issues, and the workers have no rights, no redress.”

MIT has been named to Times Higher Education’s 2024 World’s Best Universities list, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. “The largest edition of the World University Rankings 2024 includes 1,904 universities—up from 1,799 last year—from 108 countries and regions, assessing research-intensive universities across 18 performance indicators covering their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and internationalization,” writes Rodriguez.

In an article for Forbes, Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota SB '08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores the “strategies to enhance supply chain visibility in biopharma.” “As the biopharmaceutical industry continues to grow and evolve, the supply chain's role becomes ever more critical,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Investing in these detailed strategies ensures resilience and positions companies for growth and innovation in a rapidly changing landscape.”