research papers on economics

Browse Econ Literature

• Working papers
• Software components
• Book chapters
• JEL classification

More features

• Subscribe to new research

RePEc Biblio

Author registration.

• Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar NEW!

Some searches may not work properly. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Explanations

More services and features

Follow serials, authors, keywords & more

Public profiles for Economics researchers

Various research rankings in Economics

RePEc Genealogy

Who was a student of whom, using RePEc

Curated articles & papers on economics topics

Upload your paper to be listed on RePEc and IDEAS

New papers by email

Subscribe to new additions to RePEc

EconAcademics

Blog aggregator for economics research

Cases of plagiarism in Economics

About RePEc

Initiative for open bibliographies in Economics

News about RePEc

Questions about IDEAS and RePEc

RePEc volunteers

Participating archives

Publishers indexing in RePEc

Privacy statement

Corrections.

Found an error or omission?

Opportunities to help RePEc

Get papers listed

Have your research listed on RePEc

Open a RePEc archive

Have your institution's/publisher's output listed on RePEc

Get RePEc data

Use data assembled by RePEc

• Utility Menu

• Google Scholar

Research papers

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by declining shares of the labor force employed in agriculture, increasing labor productivity in agriculture, and declining labor productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, this study disaggregates firms in the manufacturing sector by average size, using two newly created firm-level panels covering Tanzania (2008–2016) and Ethiopia (1996–2017). The analysis identifies a dichotomy between larger firms with superior productivity performance that do not expand employment and small firms that absorb employment but do not experience much productivity growth. Large, more productive firms use highly capital-intensive techniques, in line with global technology trends but significantly greater than what would be expected based on these countries’ income levels or relative factor endowments.

We advance principles for the construction of a stable and broadly beneficial world order that does not require significant commonality in interests and values among states. In particular, we propose a ‘meta-regime’ as a device for structuring a conversation around the relevant issues, and facilitating either agreement or accommodation. Participating in this meta-regime would impose few constraints on states, yet in favourable circumstances could facilitate significant cooperation. It could also encourage increased cooperation over time even among adversaries, as participation in the meta-regime builds trust. We apply these ideas to several issue areas, including US–China competition.

We distinguish between ideational and interest-based appeals to voters on the supply side of politics, integrating the Keynes-Hayek perspective on the importance of ideas with the Stigler-Becker approach emphasizing vested interests. In our model, political entrepreneurs discover identity and worldview “memes” (narratives, cues, frames) that invoke voters’ identity concerns or shift their views of how the world works. We identify a potential complementarity between worldview politics and identity politics and illustrate how they may reinforce each other. Furthermore, we show how adverse economic shocks (increasing inequality) lead to a greater incidence of ideational politics. We use these results to analyze data on 60,000 televised political ads in U.S. localities over the years 2000 through 2018. Our empirical work quantifies ideational politics and provides support for key model implications, including the impact of higher inequality on the supply of both identity and worldview politics.

We discuss the considerable literature that has developed in recent years providing rigorous evidence on how industrial policies work. This literature is a significant improvement over the earlier generation of empirical work, which was largely correlational and marred by interpretational problems. On the whole, the recent crop of papers offers a more positive take on industrial policy. We review the standard rationales and critiques of industrial policy and provide a broad overview of new empirical approaches to measurement. We discuss how the recent literature, paying close attention to measurement, causal inference, and economic structure, is offering a nuanced and contextual understanding of the effects of industrial policy. We re-evaluate the East Asian experience with industrial policy in light of recent results. Finally, we conclude by reviewing how industrial policy is being reshaped by a new understanding of governance, a richer set of policy instruments beyond subsidies, and the reality of de-industrialization. 

Using Fontana et al.’s (2019) database, we analyze levels and trends in the global distribution of authorship in economics journals, disaggregating by country/region, quality of journal, and fields of specialization. We document striking imbalances. While Western and Northern European authors have made substantial gains, the representation of authors based in low-income countries remains extremely low -- an order of magnitude lower than the weight of their countries or regions in the global economy. Developing country representation has risen fastest at journals rated 100 th or lower, while it has barely increased in journals rated 25 th or higher. Fields such as international or development where global diversification may have been expected have not experienced much increase in developing country authorship. These results are consistent with a general increase in the relative supply of research in the rest of the world. But they also indicate authors from developing countries remain excluded from the profession’s top-rated journals.

Dani Rodrik Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University 79 J.F. Kennedy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 [email protected]

Mastodon: @[email protected] Blog

Faculty Assistant: Jessica De Simone [email protected] 617-495-1415

Working Papers Series in Theoretical and Applied Economics

About the journal.

Working Papers Series in Theoretical and Applied Economics is a series of papers in theoretical and applied economics that represents original research on a broad array of topics in economics and finance as well as related fields from faculty and students at the Department of Economics at the University of Kansas. 

Current Issue

Working papers, shrinkage estimation and forecasting in dynamic regression models under structural instability, stein-like common correlated effects estimation under structural breaks.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• 15 April 2024
• Correction 22 April 2024

Revealed: the ten research papers that policy documents cite most

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla 0

Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it — only to reject it after review. He went on to submit it to The Quarterly Journal of Economics , which eventually published the work 1 in November 2003.

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00660-1

Updates & Corrections

Correction 22 April 2024 : The original version of this story credited Sage, rather than Overton, as the source of the policy papers’ citation data. Sage’s location has also been updated.

Autor, D. H., Levy, F. & Murnane, R. J. Q. J. Econ. 118 , 1279–1333 (2003).

Article   Google Scholar  

Costanza, R. et al. Nature 387 , 253–260 (1997).

Willett, W. et al. Lancet 393 , 447–492 (2019).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Steffen, W. et al. Science 347 , 1259855 (2015).

Rockström, J. et al. Nature 461 , 472–475 (2009).

Download references

Reprints and permissions

Related Articles

US election debate: what Harris and Trump said about science

News 11 SEP 24

Energy storage overcapacity can cause power system instability and blackouts, too

Correspondence 10 SEP 24

Update regulator guidance to show that animal research really is no longer king

The grassroots organizations continuing the fight for Ukrainian science

Career Feature 11 SEP 24

Carbon pricing reduces emissions

News & Views 24 JUL 24

Megastudy shows that reminders boost vaccination but adding free rides does not

Article 26 JUN 24

Faculty Positions at SUSTech School of Medicine

SUSTech School of Medicine offers equal opportunities and welcome applicants from the world with all ethnic backgrounds.

Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Medicine

Postdoctoral Fellowships Worldwide

IBSA Foundation for scientific research offers 6 fellowships offers of € 32.000 to young researchers under 40 years.

The call is open to people from research institutes and universities from all over the world.

IBSA Foundation for scientific research

Staff Scientist - Immunology

Staff Scientist- Immunology

Houston, Texas (US)

Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

Institute for Systems Genetics, Tenure Track Faculty Positions

The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health has tenure track faculty positions (assistant professor level) at the new SynBioMed Center.

New York City, New York (US)

NYU Langone Health

Faculty Position

The Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology (ICOB), Academia Sinica, Taiwan, is seeking candidates to fill multiple tenure-track faculty position

Taipei (TW)

Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, Academia Sinica

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Financial Literacy and Financial Education: An Overview

This article provides a concise narrative overview of the rapidly growing empirical literature on financial literacy and financial education. We first discuss stylized facts on the demographic correlates of financial literacy. We next cover the evidence on the effects of financial literacy on financial behaviors and outcomes. Finally, we review the evidence on the causal effects of financial education programs focusing on randomized controlled trial evaluations. The article concludes with perspectives on future research priorities for both financial literacy and financial education.

Related Topics

• Working Paper
• Money and Finance

More Publications

When affordable housing moves in next door, malleable constitutions: reflections on state constitutional reform, two centuries of american macroeconomic growth from exploitation of resource abundance to knowledge-driven development.

We need your support today

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Vox is here to explain this unprecedented election cycle and help you understand the larger stakes. We will break down where the candidates stand on major issues, from economic policy to immigration, foreign policy, criminal justice, and abortion. We’ll answer your biggest questions, and we’ll explain what matters — and why. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

• Future Perfect

Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet

561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak.

by Kelsey Piper

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever?

As I’ve written before , the answer is 1) no, not really, and 2) we can also solve climate change without that, and that will be better for everyone — especially those who are already poor — so we should do that instead.

But this idea has stuck around in the form of the “degrowth” movement , which argues that “economic growth” as an objective inevitably leads to environmental destruction and that we should focus away from economic growth and toward ways to improve quality of life without it.

Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

Degrowth has always been a bit of a moving target. Even mainstream economists will agree that GDP alone doesn’t measure whether a life is meaningful and fulfilling, but they will also point out that as countries get richer, they also get healthier and happier . Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability?

I think a lot of people find something appealing about the rhetoric of degrowthism: anti-consumerism, a simpler life, local food, etc. But widespread adoption of all of those things would do approximately nothing about climate change or the other environmental issues the movement cares so much about.

And while degrowth positions itself as a policy platform, it’s political poison . As soon as you start getting into details, it’s hard to come up with anything that polls worse than a steadily shrinking economy and the end of the conveniences of modern life. That makes it a policy agenda without any proposals about how it would become a law, an agenda that would sink any politician who attached themselves to it. (Not that you’re likely to find one.)

All of this combines to make the degrowth literature — which has by this point become an enormous body of work — frustrating. Degrowthers understandably expect people who want to criticize their movement to engage with its literature. One of the most frequent responses to criticism is that the critics have engaged with only a tiny fraction of the degrowth literature out there. That’s true, but at the same time, no one can seriously engage with hundreds of papers.

But the fact that there’s so much written about degrowth doesn’t mean there’s good answers hidden somewhere in the pile of papers. I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that the movement’s contributors are effectively in an academic echo chamber, publishing papers that only they read and that don’t address any of the reservations of their critics.

A new fiercely critical review of the degrowth literature , published in the journal Ecological Economics , sums up everything that’s gone wrong. But it also offers the degrowth community the serious critical engagement it will need if it wants to move from idle speculation to a workable policy program.

What’s wrong with the degrowth literature?

The authors analyzed 561 papers about degrowth in an effort to describe where the field is at today. What they uncovered was profoundly discouraging.

Their major takeaways: Of the 561 studies, “the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis … most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies … Data analysis is often superficial and incomplete … studies tend to not satisfy accepted standards for good research.”

It’s rare to see a critique this stark of an entire field’s academic literature in a respected journal that is itself within that field ( Ecological Economics publishes papers on degrowth). And, to be clear, these are some extremely damning critiques. They paint a picture of a field that’s unserious about the actual standards of academic work, one flooded with papers (many of them in reasonably respected journals) but conducted totally without reference to everything we actually know about how climate, development, and policy work.

Reading this review, one comes away with the impression that the degrowth literature is fundamentally unserious. The authors of the review say, “[O]ne is inclined to infer that degrowth cannot (yet) be considered as a significant field of academic research.”

The review describes paper after paper with meaninglessly tiny sample sizes: sociological interviews with 10 volunteers who make handicrafts for a charity in a town in Germany, 12 interviews with residents of a town near Barcelona about tourism , eight interviews with environmental justice leaders in Croatia . Even a healthy field will have the occasional paper with a tiny sample size or that’s methodologically shaky, but the popularity of these tiny sample-size qualitative interview-based studies is typical of a field in its infancy that hasn’t yet nailed down its core questions or methodologies.

Degrowthism isn’t ready

All of this is a significant problem. If a policy proposal is intended to solve a problem like climate change, it needs to be put into effect worldwide within the next decade or two. That’s not the stage of policy maturity where you publish lots of interviews with volunteers at NGOs; it’s the stage of policy maturity where you are expected to have (and where the mainstream climate policy literature does have) specific by-country emissions targets, breakdowns of possible routes for that country’s energy demand to be met while those emissions targets are met, and analyses of the trajectory so far.

You might expect that the field would have these struggles as it was new but would have higher-quality research as it matured. That does not appear to be the case with degrowthism, which has its origins as far back as the 1972 report “ The Limits to Growth ” by the Club of Rome. As the review authors concluded: “There is also no indication that things are improving with time.” Recent work is just as far from meeting scientific standards as older work.

None of this surprised me as someone who has tried in the past to wade through the degrowth literature for my reporting. But I am glad the review was comprehensively written up and published in a journal that people who believe in degrowth actually read.

If you think that our world needs degrowth, then the horrendously poor quality of the degrowth literature isn’t just annoying, it’s a serious emergency.

The more important a problem is, the more important it is to do high-quality, comprehensive, well-justified work on it. If degrowth ideas have something to offer the world, it’s all the more important that they adhere to normal standards about how to do research.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Most Popular

• Sign up for Vox’s daily newsletter
• The twisted political logic behind Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrant
• Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword
• Laura Loomer, Trump’s new favorite conspiracy theorist, explained
• The new followup to ChatGPT is scarily good at deception

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Future Perfect

Scientists are trapped in an endless loop of grant applications. How can we set them free?

Why the new luxury is flip phones and vinyl LPs

It’s not just the Princess of Wales. More and more young people are getting cancer.

We buy stuff. We throw it away. There’s a system to stop this toxic cycle.

Introducing Your Mileage May Vary, an unconventional new advice column.

ChatGPT didn’t write this and I can prove it.

This website uses cookies to ensure the best user experience. Privacy & Cookies Notice Accept Cookies

Manage My Cookies

Manage Cookie Preferences

Confirm My Selections

• Monetary Policy
• Health Care
• Climate Change
• Artificial Intelligence
• All Chicago Booth Review Topics

Line of Inquiry: Milena Almagro on Public Housing Demolition and Urban Inequality

• August 15, 2024
• CBR - Inequality
• Share This Page

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the United States’ HOPE VI program provided grants to tear down distressed public housing. The program aimed to provide better homes for public-housing residents and improve the neighborhoods surrounding these developments. But when Chicago Booth’s Milena Almagro  and her coauthors looked into the direct and indirect effects of these demolitions in Chicago, they found that the razing of public housing also led to gentrification and increased inequality.

Video Transcript

(calm music)

The HOPE VI program was a program that was funded by the federal government and it was run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the HUD. And the intention of the program was to redevelop disadvantaged areas, to invest in these areas, especially through the development of mixed-income housing after the demolition of public housing.

So in this project, we are trying to think about the effect of place-based policies. Place-based policies is when governments . . . either the local government or the federal government is putting money into some areas, such as the HOPE VI program, and trying to restimulate those distressed areas. And the cost of these programs are not negligible. It is estimated that on an annual basis, the federal government and local governments spend roughly $100 billion to stimulate redevelopment in these disadvantaged areas.

The first question that we need to ask is: Who are the winners and losers of these local investments, of these place-based policies? And we still don’t have a good answer for that.

So for this project, we have three sources of data. The first one is census data. And what we’re gonna do is we’re going to look at the census tracts for the city of Chicago—for Cook County actually, which is where the city of Chicago is. And we’re gonna follow how tracts are changing from 1990 until 2010. The second source of data is the location of public-housing demolitions, the date of these demolitions, and the number of units that were demolished.

And the last data set that we are going to use is a sample of 5,000 individuals who were living in public housing and faced this demolition. Some of them were forced to be displaced somewhere else because the unit in which they were living was demolished. Some of them decided to voluntarily move somewhere else. So we are tracking where these people are living one year after these demolitions happen.

So in particular for the city of Chicago, there were roughly 40,000 public-housing units. And with the money that the CHA got from this HOPE VI program, 23,000 units were demolished. That accounts for 1 percent of the housing stock in the city of Chicago. Overall, these demolitions displaced 15,000 families that were predominantly African American, typically single mom, and their annual income was roughly $6,000 per year. And this $6,000 was not actually labor income. This was social benefits, like government assistance, things such as SNAP or other forms of social assistance.

So the first step that we take in our paper to understand what the effects are of public-housing demolition is to start looking at what’s happening to the areas that are experiencing these demolitions. These areas are becoming less African American, more white. The level of the Hispanic population seems to be constant. We see that income in these areas, the average income of the residents is going up. And we also see that rents and house values are going up in response to these demolitions.

And for the people who were living in public housing, for the households that we observed living in public housing at the beginning of the ‘90s, what we saw is that these people look very different from the rest of the population. Even when we compare them to groups that are similar in principle, such as low-income African Americans, these people are going to drastically different tracts. And what we see from our data is that they are moving into places that are poorer, are cheaper, have a higher share of African American families, and also have more presence of public housing back in 1999.

For the HOPE VI program in the city of Chicago, the program was not only focused on demolishing public-housing units. What they also wanted to do is to have some form of redevelopment in the areas with public-housing projects. Why was that? Because there was a lot of opposition from the communities of people living in public housing against these demolitions, spurred or motivated by the fact that these demolitions were going to destroy their communities. So these redevelopments were so important for these people because this was a promise that was given to them to actually preserve those communities that they were attached to.

When we go into the data and we see what’s happening to the areas that experienced demolitions, we see that 40 percent of the lots that had public housing back in 1990 and were demolished, 40 percent of them remain completely vacant. And you can actually Google and search for the name of some of these projects back in the day and you would see that there is an empty lot with grass and everything. And this was kind of surprising to us because some of the promises that were made as part of the program were never fully materialized.

What our analysis reveals is that even though public-housing demolitions were meant to target very specific areas—and just to give you some context, only 5 percent of the tracts experienced some form of public-housing demolition—we do see effects at the city level. So locally, the literature found that public-housing demolitions led to a rent increase from 9 percent to 20 percent. In our analysis, we see a price increase of 13 percent, a house price increase of 13 percent, but this aggregates up to 2.4 percent at the city level. So the city of Chicago is becoming 2.4 percent more expensive when it comes to housing prices.

Our analysis also reveals that everybody dislikes living in places that have public housing. So when you put the two things together, first you have destruction of public housing. And in principle, people are gonna be better off by this because they dislike public housing. But second, as a response to that, we also face higher housing prices.

The next question that we wanted to answer is how you put the two things together in order to measure the final welfare or the changes in well-being of the residents of the city of Chicago. And what we found is that the average resident in the city of Chicago is better off by 1 percent. So the well-being, your well-being is better, is increasing by 1 percent, but there is a huge gap. This is very unevenly distributed across demographic groups.

We see that high-income, non-Hispanic white families are gaining roughly $120 per year in terms of rental prices. So they’re willing to pay like $120 more per year to live in a city, in the city of Chicago postdemolition. But this is not the case for low-income African Americans. African Americans are losing by $75 per year. So you see a welfare gap between high-income whites and low-income African Americans of $200 per year.

Now, when we go into public-housing residents, what we see is that these people are losing a lot. This cost we estimated to be of the order of $15,000. As part of the policy, what the CHA did was to give these people rental vouchers, which is just a discount on the rent. And what we find in our analysis is that even after these discounts, these people are losing by $1,200 per year.

What we wanted to do is to start thinking about policy that could help mitigate this increase in the inequality gap that we see after demolitions. And what we find is that if you only redevelop 20 percent of the units that were demolished, you can actually make everybody better off. There’s not gonna be any loser from public-housing demolitions if this is accompanied by a redevelopment of 20 percent of those demolished units. Why is that? Because remember that I told you that prices, housing prices were going up by 2.4 percent. So you can curve that increase in prices just by the construction of more housing.

Something that is even more interesting is that if you redevelop . . . if you’re willing to redevelop 50 percent of these units that were demolished, it’s not only that everybody is gonna be better off, but actually the inequality gap completely closes off. So there’s not gonna be any disparity between high-income whites and low-income African Americans.

When policymakers think about place-based policies, they should not only think about the local effects of these place-based policies, and not only the direct effects of these place-based policies, we should also think about what economists call equilibrium effects, how housing prices are responding to these interventions and how you should create a framework to evaluate everything that is happening together, at the same time.

More from Chicago Booth Review

Why inflation still looms large for us voters.

The standard measure of the CPI doesn’t recognize important aspects of how people experience the economy.

• CBR - Monetary Policy

Women and Minorities Are Charged More for Car Loans

Data suggest that women paid higher rates in many areas, with older women and minorities charged even more. These gaps appear to have shrunk over time.

Does Poverty Make You Behave Differently?

Research suggests the experience of poverty can shape decision-making.

• CBR Podcast

Related Topics

• Public Policy
• CBR - Public Policy
• CBR - Economics

More from Chicago Booth

Your Privacy We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice , which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.