AEA公布2017-19年度最受关注的十大研究话题, 给你的选题方向！！！
凡是搞计量经济的，都关注这个号了
邮箱：econometrics666@126.com
注：下方*后面皆为参考文献。
1. Flexible(ish) working hours
灵活的工作时间
When the economy enters a recession, pundits are quick to trot out unemployment numbers to argue about the health of the economy or the success of the government's response. Of course, job loss should be front and center when talking about the economy, but companies have more options than just hiring and firing employees.
2. The indirect effects of good teaching
良好教学的间接影响
Last year, American public school teachers had enough. Fed up with swelling class sizes and stagnant paychecks, they walked out of their classrooms in Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginia to demand adequate compensation for the value they brought to their school systems. Those educators may be even more undervalued than they realize.
*Opper, Isaac M. 2019. "Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education." American Economic Review, 109 (3): 1080-1115.
3. Tech: economists wanted
“If you're interested in understanding questions about the role of data or the role of personalization or the questions about large-scale behavior or even fundamental questions about how markets work, the tech industry provides a unique place to answer those questions.” – Susan Athey
*Athey, Susan, and Michael Luca. 2019. "Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33 (1): 209-30.
4. Boys' club
男孩俱乐部
It may not be enough to provide access for women and low-income students to well-regarded institutions. There are relationships formed during the college experience that disproportionately benefit wealthy male students in their careers.
*Zimmerman, Seth D. 2019. "Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes." American Economic Review, 109 (1): 1-47.
5. Entertainment and the rise of populism
娱乐与民粹主义的兴起
Cable news has taken a lot of blame for America’s political divide. Pundits featured on partisan outlets like Fox News and MSNBC speak in strident language that draws clear lines between right and left, right and wrong, and does not ask viewers to understand “the other side.” But beyond news programming, even pure entertainment content may be playing a role in driving political leanings.
*Durante, Ruben, Paolo Pinotti, and Andrea Tesei. 2019. "The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV." American Economic Review, 109 (7): 2497-2530.
6. Breaching the Great Firewall
突破防huo墙
In 2016, newspapers around the world marked the 50th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution. Inside the Middle Kingdom, authorities made sure coverage of the anniversary was almost zero, but there was a small group of undergraduates that read about it in the New York Times. A couple of months before they probably wouldn’t have. They had recently been given an uncensored version of the internet, along with a little encouragement, by a pair of researchers from Peking University and Harvard University.
*Chen, Yuyu, and David Y. Yang. 2019. "The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?" American Economic Review, 109 (6): 2294-2332.
7. Why did productivity drop after the Great Recession?
大萧条后生产力为何下降？
The engine of America’s economy may have restarted after the Great Recession, but it wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Even as unemployment dropped and more workers were earning paychecks, productivity remained anemic for years. The phenomenon puzzled economists, leading researchers to wonder whether it was caused by the recession or something else—a more fundamental shift in the economy that just happened to coincide with the worst downturn in 70 years.
*Anzoategui, Diego, Diego Comin, Mark Gertler, and Joseba Martinez. 2019. "Endogenous Technology Adoption and R&D as Sources of Business Cycle Persistence." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 11 (3): 67-110.
8. An efficient way to reduce emissions
减少碳排放的有效方法
Economists have long championed raising the price of carbon to combat climate change and nearly 40 nations around the globe have followed suit. There’s some disagreement about the extent to which cap-and-trade policies or nationwide carbon taxes have an impact. Some critics have even claimed they could do more harm than good, stifling growth without reducing harmful air pollution. But we may be underestimating the positive impacts of carbon taxes, which have a larger effect on transportation emissions than past research has shown.
*Andersson, Julius J. 2019. "Carbon Taxes and CO2 Emissions: Sweden as a Case Study." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 11 (4): 1-30.
9. Passing the buck
推卸责任
“The dismal truth from the dismal science is that when the price of something goes up, people buy less,” said David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation, echoing a long held theory. “The number of workers that a firm will hire at $15 is less than the number they will hire at $7.75.” There may be some truth in that, but such arguments exaggerate the losses and ignore the upside of giving low-wage workers a boost.
*Harasztosi, Peter, and Attila Lindner. 2019. "Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?" American Economic Review, 109 (8): 2693-2727.
10. Scientific progress one funeral at a time
科学进步一次一个葬礼
Ambitious scientists dream of leaving a lasting mark on their discipline. They spend a lifetime working to shape the direction of their field by building a community of like-minded researchers and convincing others that they are the ones asking the most important questions. But when they finally reach the top of their profession, they may overstay their welcome.
*Azoulay, Pierre, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin. 2019. "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" American Economic Review, 109 (8): 2889-2920.
1. Data visualization for economists
经济学家的数据可视化
“My belief is that we as economists — but really social scientists, scientists in general, people working with data and data-rich content — don't do a great job of thinking about the communication of that work to our audience, be it a reader in a report or a reader on a website or a user of a data tool or interactive. We tend not to think about the user or the reader often enough.” – Jonathan Schwabish
*“An Economist’s Guide to Data Visualization” appears in the Winter 2014 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives
2. Modern family
摩登家庭
The 1995 policy reform in Sweden earmarked one month of paid leave — the so-called “daddy month” — to each parent and restricted the ability to transfer those days to one spouse or the other. Facing the option to “use it or lose it,” fathers took up the paid leave at a much greater rate than before. And yet, it added tension in some families.
*“Modern Family? Paternity Leave and Marital Stability” appears in the October issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
3. Does a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment exist?
是否存在通货膨胀与失业之间的权衡？
Today, most economists agree that there is no long-run conflict between price stability and full employment, but the short-run relationship between the two policy goals hinges on how these concepts are defined.
*"Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the 'Cruel Dilemma'" appears in the winter issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
4. What's best for the baby
什么对宝宝最好?
“There's a lot of interest today among both researchers and policymakers in understanding the trends and growth in inequality and intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status both in the US and around the world. What we think we can contribute to that discussion is that we're pointing out one channel through which disparities in early life, and experiences during pregnancy even, can perpetuate disadvantages across generations.” – Maya Rossin-Slater
*“Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation” appears in the April issue of the American Economic Review.
5. Making economics transparent and reproducible
使经济学透明和可复制
“There's been increasing evidence really across the social sciences, and economics is no exception, that publication bias is a real concern. The kind of evidence that we see published in our journals may not always be representative of the underlying data and findings.” – Ted Miguel
*“Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research” appears in the September issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.
6. Designing theories for the real world
为现实世界设计理论
“What we've been working on in market design is a very practical engineering-oriented approach to economics. . . . We've gotten our hands dirty in the field. In many cases, things that we think are theoretically important turn out not to be. And we only learn that by interacting with things in the field and working alongside people who look at data, people who run experiments.” – Parag Pathak
*https://www.aeaweb.org/research/parag-pathak-school-choice-john-bates-clark-medal-interview-2018
7. Learning to cheat
学习作弊
If you give high school students cash incentives to perform well on exams, their scores will increase. Of course, these higher grades have two possible explanations: increased learning or increased cheating. The first was the goal of Aligning Learning Incentives (ALI), an experiment designed to encourage student learning throughout high schools in Mexico. It worked, but the second explanation played a role, too.
*"Cheating and Incentives: Learning from a Policy Experiment" appears in the February issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
8. Is a globalized world a less equal world?
全球化的世界是平等程度较低的世界吗？
A common narrative frames globalization as the cause of inequality: by shifting low-skilled jobs from wealthier countries to poorer countries, economic integration has increased inequality within countries while lowering inequality between them. However, the story is more complex.
*"Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay" appears in the June issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.
9. Scrapping a subsidy to homeowners
取消对房主的补贴
Critics say the mortgage interest deduction is a regressive tax policy that inflates prices and encourages buyers to choose more expensive houses and take on debt rather than sinking money into other investments. It also robs the Treasury of tax revenue that could be used to close the deficit. But real estate lobbyists say its repeal would depress homeownership and negatively impact social welfare.
*“Implications of US Tax Policy for House Prices, Rents, and Homeownership” appears in the February issue of theAmerican Economic Review.
10. Understanding the economic brain
了解经济头脑
Integrating psychology and economics has led to some of today’s most important insights into human behavior. Now, social neuroscience and economics have a similar chance to learn from one another. If they do, their shared field is sure to benefit both disciplines and help us to better understand our economic and neuroscientific worlds.
*"A Review Essay on Social Neuroscience: Can Research on the Social Brain and Economics Inform Each Other?" appears in the March issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.
1. The gender gap in economics
经济学中的性别差距
What does the gender gap in economics looks like, and what can we do about it?
It's not just a matter of fairness. There's efficiency, and so the diversity of individuals within a group affects the productivity of that group. The lack of diversity in our profession likely hampers our whole discipline, constraining the range of issues that we address and limiting our collective ability to understand familiar issues from new perspectives.
*"Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem" appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives
2. I don't want to know
我不想知道
We are surrounded by information, but we often choose to ignore it — even when it’s free and accurate.
And now the mood had become much much more grim because, as you said, it seems like instead of using the Internet to expose themselves to a variety of perspectives, people mainly use the Internet to kind of personalize the news to hear more about what they want to hear about and what they already believe. So, as you say, the Internet has become a kind of echo chamber and it's also become a conduit for fake news. And this has something to do with hedonics. People seem to care as much about how reading a news story will make them feel as they care about whether the news story is (true) or not.
*Information Avoidance appears in the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature
3. The Big Sort
大排序
Colleges accept students based on their skills, and employers choose employees based on their colleges’ reputations. Our video The Big Sort describes this process and how, as researchers Bentley MacLeod, Evan Riehl, Juan Saavedra, and Miguel Urquiola found, it affects people over the course of their careers.
[S]omeone who goes to an elite college is likely not just to have a better starting wage, but their earnings may also grow faster than their peers who graduated from a state school. It’s not certain whether reputation is the factor causing this wage growth. But the findings still should give policymakers pause as they work to expand college opportunities to more people.
*MacLeod, W. Bentley, Evan Riehl, Juan E. Saavedra, and Miguel Urquiola. 2017. "The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9 (3): 223-61.
4. The downsides of virtual learning
虚拟(网络)学习的缺点
Students who take courses online tend to fall behind, say researchers Eric Bettinger, Lindsay Fox, Susanna Loeb, and Eric Taylor. The downsides of virtual learning explains how online education affects students’ grades and progress toward graduation.
Students in online courses had lower grades, did not earn as many credits, and were more likely to drop out of college than similar students taking those courses in person. Even though the two versions — which used the same grading rubrics and delivered the same content — were nearly identical, students in the in-person class earned a B- on average, whereas students taking the course online earned a C.
*"Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success" appears in the September issue of the American Economic Review.
5. A long-term investment in education
长期的教育投资
Educational spending has real consequences for students, as reported in A long-term investment in education. Researcher Joshua Hyman explains that increases in spending lead to greater college enrollment and graduation, but this may not be true for everyone.
Policymakers shouldn’t assume, however, that they can throw money at schools and get the results they want. Some districts benefit more than others, Hyman said, and they may not be the ones that policymakers are most worried about. Students in wealthier urban and suburban districts had the biggest boost to college going. Meanwhile, spending increases had barely any impact on students in rural high-poverty districts.
*“Does Money Matter in the Long Run? Effects of School Spending on Educational Attainment” appears in the November issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
6. Is globalization good?
全球化好吗？
Is globalization good? describes researcher Luigi Pascali’s work on how the steamship spurred the first wave of globalization, ultimately contributing to global inequality.
As some countries reaped the benefits of globalization, others fell behind. "In the past, at least in the short run, a big wave of globalization ended up with some losers, who appear to be concentrated among the poor and among those with bad institutions," Pascali says. This gap between "winners" and "losers" spurred an economic divergence between rich and poor countries that persisted for decades. Although it may not explain today’s economic divides, this historical period can still shed light on how globalization may contribute to global inequality.
Is globalization good?
*"The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development" appears in the September issue of the American Economic Review.
7. A "dark side" to the commodity boom in Africa
非洲商品繁荣的“阴暗面”
Researchers Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Dominic Rohner, and Mathias Thoenig show how Africa’s commodity boom led to increased violence in mining areas, as explained in A “dark side” to the commodity boom in Africa.
The researchers trace the actions of hundreds of rebel groups active between 1997 and 2010, including some that won battles or captured territory in mineral-rich cells. They find that when a rebel group succeeds in capturing a lucrative mining area, violence is more likely to occur for several years afterward, with effects on cells as far as 1,000 km away. By one rough measure, a group’s capture of a mining area triples the number of violent events that can be expected from that group in the next year.
*This Mine Is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa appears in the June 2017 issue of the American Economic Review.
8. An interview with Dave Donaldson
克拉克奖获得者Dave Donaldson专访
Dave Donaldson was the 2017 John Bates Clark medalist. He talks about his reaction to winning, how he became interested in economics, and his advice for young economists in our interview(可打开下方的链接)
I got kind of hooked on the idea that economics was the physics of the social sciences, or physics for public policy questions is a better way of putting it. That is, using theory and data and scientific method to come up with clear answers to questions to those policy questions that were on the front pages and were in the hearts and minds of students around the world in the late 90s about globalization.
*https://www.aeaweb.org/research/dave-donaldson-interview-john-bates-clark-medal
9. Women's work?
女人的工作？
Women are more likely than men to take on work tasks with no reward, such as cleaning out the refrigerator or organizing an office party. In our audio interview Women’s work?, researchers Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, and Laurie Weingart talk about their experiences with thankless tasks and how this phenomenon affects women.
I think what we show in the paper is that we are expected to perform these tasks and often asked to do them. Unless we break this cycle, it's in our best interests to step up to the plate because otherwise we may fail to do the task entirely as an organization. So, all we need is almost good bosses or a way to allocate tasks in a fair manner, which may be very simple in an organization because you could just think about a random way to allocate or ask people to do these tasks.
*“Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability” appears in the March issue of the American Economic Review
10. What should we do about climate change?
我们应该如何应对气候变化？
Economists have been studying climate change for decades. What should we do about climate change? covers Geoffrey Heal’s overview of the economics research on climate change, its consequences, and its potential solutions.
Heal’s survey makes one thing clear: economists are essential players in the national conversation about climate change, and they will continue to have this role as long as climate change continues to threaten the global economy. Economists help to inform policymakers and the public about the costs and benefits of mitigation. They frame climate change as a risk — potentially a catastrophic one — and highlight how much we have to lose if we do not take action. And, they evaluate solutions so that we invest in the technologies that are best for our planet and for our budgets.
*"The Economics of the Climate" appears in the September issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.
2年，计量经济圈公众号近1000篇文章，
Econometrics Circle
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计量经济圈组织了一个计量社群，有如下特征：热情互助最多、前沿趋势最多、社科资料最多、社科数据最多、科研牛人最多、海外名校最多。因此，建议积极进取和有强烈研习激情的中青年学者到社群交流探讨，始终坚信优秀是通过感染优秀而互相成就彼此的。
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