The global economy is in the early stages of a second China shock as the Chinese economy moves up the manufacturing value chain to produce advanced technology for export. China’s advantage lies in government subsidies and an artificially suppressed exchange rate. If advanced economies in the West are to avoid the repetition of job loss and continued trade deficits witnessed over the last two decades, or the pyrrhic policies like tariffs implemented to address these harms, they must pursue institutional change, writes Joshua Banerjee.

In new research, evidence from a land titling campaign in the Democratic Republic of Congo shows that formal property rights can do more than secure land: they can give citizens an exit from costly informal obligations, writes Pablo Balán.

Responding to Mark Lemley and Jacob Noti-Victor, Shishene Jing argues that licensing deals struck by incumbent artificial intelligence firms with content owners will not disadvantage smaller AI rivals. Even if such deals establish a legal precedent requiring licenses, content owners have little incentive to actually sue small, cash-poor AI startups, making the precedent toothless in practice.

In new research, Cailtin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper find that birth rates in the United States have declined as a result of the introduction of the iPhone. They theorize that the smartphone is crowding out the market for attention, offering a device to fill users’ time that replaces forming in-person relationships that typically create children. 

In a new paper, Joseph Emmens, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, Stefano Manfredonia, Felix Noth, and Tommaso Santini find that when competitors for the same pool of workers share investors, they increase their innovation to automate tasks and slow down hiring.    

In new research for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, David M. Primo uses campaign contribution data to show that professors at leading universities are more politically active than the average American and skew heavily to the left politically, raising concerns about the diversity of perspectives on college campuses.