Research Highlights Article
December 30, 2024
2024 in Research Highlights
Economists addressed issues related to economics publishing, congestion effects, bank runs, and more.
The top ten research highlights of 2024 cover a wide variety of topics.
Tyler Smith
The Research Highlights series features summaries of selected AEA journal articles based on interviews with the authors. The top ten highlights of 2024 include pieces about economics publishing, congestion effects, bank runs, and more. You can read the most popular research highlights from 2024 below. The rankings are based on overall page views. Check out more on our website.
1. The pace of economics publishing
Daniel Hamermesh discusses publishing in economics and how to speed it up.
"Compared to the hard sciences, from the time I submit a paper to the time it appears in print, it takes 6 to 8 months for the average paper to get published. A more relevant comparison is the other social sciences that are quite similar, such as psychology and sociology. And there the evidence says it takes us twice as long from the time the paper is submitted to the time it's accepted and appears in print." – Daniel Hamermesh
2. Expanding markets
What happens to incumbents when more sellers are added to online platforms?
Economist Oren Reshef provides the first empirical evidence of what happens when an online two-sided market expands. He shows that expansions tend to favor incumbents, but only for the highest-quality sellers.
3. Product variety and congestion effects online
The growth of mobile apps illustrates the importance of congestion externalities for online markets.
Economist Daniel Ershov presents the first empirical evidence on the existence and magnitude of congestion effects online. He says that more apps in online markets directly reduces per app usage and downloads.
4. Public works in the city
Do government employment programs boost the welfare of the urban poor in developing countries?
Researchers Simon Franklin, Clément Imbert, Girum Abebe, and Carolina Mejia-Mantilla show that urban public works can help lift the urban poor out of poverty. However, labor market dynamics in cities need to be considered when evaluating such programs.
5. Explaining differences in the college wage premium across countries
Do employment protection policies help buoy the wages of less educated workers relative to their more educated counterparts?
Scholars Matthias Doepke and Ruben Gaetani show that differences in employment protection are key to understanding the divergence in the college wage premium across developed countries. They built a quantitative model of the labor market, in which on-the-job skill accumulation is a major source of income disparity among workers, and calibrated it to the United States and Germany.
6. The roots of US innovation clusters
Daniel Gross and Bhaven Sampat discuss the impact of one of the largest shocks to federal R&D funding in US economic history.
"We particularly examine regional innovation capacity, looking at the development of technology clusters and evidence that the war triggered the growth of several technology clusters. But beyond that, the bigger thing that I think I'm drawn to understanding better is the capabilities that we see in the US innovation system as well as the direction that innovation took after the war—postwar era communications, electronics, and ultimately the development of electronic computing." - Daniel Gross
7. The distributional consequences of recessions
How do local labor markets recover after economic shocks?
Economists Brad Hershbein and Bryan A. Stuart studied the relative recovery of local labor markets after recessions in the United States. They find that local labor markets hit the hardest persistently lag behind their more fortunate counterparts and experience long-term decreases in the employment–population ratio.
8. Information inequality
Do US voters share a common baseline of political facts?
The biggest gaps in voters' knowledge may come from socioeconomic factors, according to Charles Angelucci and Andrea Prat. They investigated how well a cross-section of US voters were able to sift true and false news stories, as assessed by mainstream journalists.
9. The political power of historical narratives
Christian Ochsner discusses a campaign by Austria's far-right populists to link historic atrocities to Muslim minorities.
"States are formed based on a myth. We show that this can materialize from time to time. But from a broader perspective, our paper is probably one of the first convincing papers that shows that historical facts do not only persist over a couple of years or decades or even centuries. It is one of the first papers that shows that history can show up and go down and show up again, and this is why we call the paper activated history." - Christian Ochsner
10. A textbook bank run
Andrew Metrick discusses the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the government's response.
"What happened essentially to Silicon Valley Bank is that their assets, the things they bought with all of the deposits people gave them, fell a lot in value. They fell in value to the point that the depositors were not sure they could get paid back. Once that happened, they ran."- Andrew Metrick
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