In an article for the Pacific Standard about dispelling rumors and conspiracy theories, Nathan Collins highlights research by Prof. Adam Berinsky examining how information sources impact voters. “People speaking against their interests [are] more credible,” Berinsky explains. “What’s more credible: the surgeon general or McDonald’s saying you shouldn’t eat French fries?”
Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Benjamin Olken speak with NPR’s Jason Beaubien about their efforts to improve Indonesia’s Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, program. "There's a certain tendency among both social scientists and policymakers to assume that the solution to a complex problem has to be complex,” says Banerjee, “and I don't think that's always true."
Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with WBUR’s Carey Goldberg about her study showing only a small amount of Medicare spending goes end-of-life care. Finkelstein explains, “there is very little Medicare spending on people with high probability of dying. And part of that is just that it's very, very hard to predict who is going to die.”
STAT reporter Orly Nadell Farber writes about a new study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that challenges the widely held assumption that a large portion of Medicare spending goes towards end-of-life care. “We spend money on sick people — some of them die, some of them recover,” says Finkelstein. “Maybe some recover, in part, because of what we spent on them.”
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith profiles Prof. Parag Pathak, who was recently awarded the John Bates Clark medal for his work using economic theory to improve the allocation of students to New York City public schools. “Pathak isn’t just a theorist,” writes Smith, “in keeping with economics’ age of data, he also does a lot of empirical work.”
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.”
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.”
Sean Illing of Vox speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her insights on how the digital world is impacting our human relationships. “I’m not anti-technology,” said Turkle. “I’m pro-relationships and pro-conversations and pro-communities and pro-politics. I want people to be media-savvy and to use it to their best advantage.”
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.”
Research led by Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa finds that cave art may be symbolic of early human languages. “The cognitive functions needed to transfer acoustic sounds to pictures are the same cognitive functions needed in language,” senior researcher Cora Lesure tells Sarah Gibbens of National Geographic.
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.”
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.”
Times Higher Education reporter Nicola Ingram examines Prof. Peter Temin’s latest book, which examines the state of the U.S. economic system. Temin, “provides an engaging commentary on the complexities of policy developments and their impact on workers’ conditions, as well as the problematic voting behaviour that seals their fate.”
In an article for The Atlantic, Gillian B. White writes about Prof. Peter Temin’s new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy.” White writes that in his book Temin argues that “following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system.”