research
Investors Should Engage With Firms They Want To Go Green, Not Divest
How can investors use capital markets to encourage emissions reductions? In new research, Matthew E. Kahn, John G. Matsusaka, and Chong Shu examine whether public pension funds are more effective in mitigating pollution when they divest from fossil fuel companies or actively engage their management.
Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation
Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.
Is Social Science Research Politically Biased?
In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.
Closing the Revolving Door Comes With Trade-offs
How prolific is the revolving door issue at the federal level? In a new paper, Joseph Kalmenovitz, Siddharth Vij, and Kairong Xiao analyze the prevalence of revolving door behavior in the United States government and discuss the impacts of limiting private sector job prospects for regulators.
Panic-driven Bank Runs and Public Communication
Using a household survey with information treatments conducted in the aftermath of the SVB’s collapse, we examine the potential for a large bank’s failure to trigger bank runs and the effectiveness of public communication in containing such a risk. We find that news about SVB’s collapse increases households’ propensity to withdraw bank deposits as people become more worried that their bank may fail and expect larger losses on deposits in case of bank failure. Communication by the Federal Reserve in support of the banking sector and information about FDIC deposit insurance can contain the risk of bank runs, while communication from politicians influences only their electoral base.
We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry
Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.
Low Wages are Less Common Today and No More Persistent
Researchers find that a smaller fraction of workers today earn low wages than at any point since the early 1980s.
Many Americans believe that wages...
Data is Abundant But is it Accessible to Researchers?
Despite the wide availability of data, ensuring independent access to data sources has never been more crucial. How can researchers engage in data sharing...
The Uber Files Reveal The Risk of Private Interests Controlling Our Data
Researchers discovered that the introduction of Uber had negative impacts on transportation, findings that required cooperation with public authorities when Uber refused to share...
Characteristics and Behavior of the Rising Class of Small Campaign Donors
New research on US political donations under $200 reveals characteristics of these donors as well as their motivations. A Q&A with the authors of...
