Economics Research Paper

Consumers in developed countries who want to help lift producers in developing countries out of poverty have shown a willingness to pay significantly higher prices for Fair Trade-certified products – coffee in particular.In the current issue of the free, quarterly NBER Reporter, a researcher discusses what's been learned about who benefits most, and least.Edward Miguel of the University of California, Berkeley and the NBER presented the 2019 NBER Summer Institute Methodology Lecture on "Research Transparency and Reproducibility." He described the importance of ensuring that researchers can replicate, and build on, empirical research findings, and summarized a number of emerging practices that are designed to facilitate reproducibility. Cristea, and Donghyun Lee show that relatively low monitoring-related costs in manufacturing industries compared to those in other sectors is an important explanation of the higher level of cross-border merger and acquisition activity in manufacturing. Crump, Stefano Eusepi, Marc Giannoni, and Ayşegül Şahin estimate that the natural rate of unemployment in the United States was around 4 percent toward the end of 2018 and that the unemployment gap had roughly closed.

Nominating economist: Susan Athey, Stanford University Specialization: The economics of technology Why?

“Alice Wu wrote a very provocative paper about misogyny on an anonymous website for economists frequented by tens of thousands of people.

It led to policy intervention by the American Economics Association.”Main finding: Even with generous subsidies, low-income people are still unlikely to buy health insurance.

Nominating economist: David Autor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Specialization: Globalization and labor markets Why?

“Bob Allen’s breakthrough paper shows a way ahead in a long-standing intractable problem of how to construct poverty lines that account for needs as well as prices.

The World Bank’s global poverty count uses a single global poverty line that is adjusted for different price levels in different countries, but that takes no account of differences in needs across countries, for example between cold places and warm places.

“The recent work of Harvard’s Amanda Pallais is very interesting, as it addresses various issues underlying racial discrimination and gender gaps that are important from a social perspective but not well understood.

Pallais and her collaborators study the dynamics that underlie discrimination and show that there is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Certain managers have negative expectations about how minority employees will perform and in response those workers have worse performance when randomly paired with those managers.

Bulletin on Retirement and Disability Bulletin on Health including Archive of Lists of Affiliates' Work in Medical and Other Journals with Pre-Publication Restrictions Archives of Bulletin on Aging and Health Digest — Non-technical summaries of 4-8 working papers per month Reporter — News about the Bureau and its activities.

At the end of every year, culture critics get to compile best of the year lists. Just like films and albums, economics research deserves a little reflection.