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Stansbury, Anna, and Lawrence H. Summers. 2019. “Productivity and Pay: Is the Link Broken?” Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth. Peterson Institute for International Economics. Abstract

Median compensation in the U.S. has diverged starkly from labor productivity since 1973, and average compensation from productivity since 2000. In this paper, we ask: holding all else equal, to what extent does productivity growth translate into compensation growth for typical American workers?  We regress median, average, and production/nonsupervisory compensation growth on productivity growth in various specifications, finding substantial evidence of linkage between productivity and compensation. Over 1973–2016, one percentage point higher productivity growth was associated with 0.7-1 percentage points higher median and average compensation growth and with 0.4-0.7 percentage points higher production/nonsupervisory compensation growth. Further, we do not find strong evidence of co-movement between productivity growth and either the labor share or the mean/median compensation ratio. Our results tend to militate against pure technology-based theories of the productivity-compensation divergence, which would suggest that periods of higher productivity growth should also be periods of higher productivity-pay divergence. They suggest that factors orthogonal to productivity have been acting to suppress typical compensation even as productivity growth has been acting to raise it, and that faster future productivity growth is likely to boost median and average compensation growth close to one-for-one



Gonzales, Roberto G., Kristina Brant, and Benjamin Roth. 2020. “DACAmented in the age of deportation: navigating spaces of belonging and vulnerability in social and personal lives.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43 (1): 60-79.



Linos, Elizabeth, and Nefara Riesch. 2020. “Thick Red Tape and the Thin Blue Line: A Field Study on Reducing Administrative Burden in Police Recruitment.” Public Administration Review 80: 92-103. Abstract

Police departments struggle to recruit officers, and voluntary drop‐off of candidates exacerbates this challenge. Using four years of administrative data and a field experiment conducted in the Los Angeles Police Department, the authors analyze the impact of administrative burden on the likelihood that a candidate will remain in the recruitment process. Findings show that reducing friction costs to participation and simplifying processes improve compliance, as behavioral public administration would predict. Applicants who were offered simpler, standardized processes completed more tests and were more likely to be hired. Later reductions to perceived burden led to an 8 percent increase in compliance, with a 60 percent increase in compliance within two weeks. However, removing steps that would have allowed for better understanding of eligibility kept unqualified candidates in the process for longer, reducing organizational efficiency. These results extend the field's understanding of how administrative burden can impact the selection of talent into government.



Running out of excuses for high inequality

October 27, 2019

The Hill | By Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh (PhD 2004). Andrew Leigh is a member of the Australian Parliament and co-author with Joshua Gans of Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than Terminator (MIT Press, 2019).



The End of the Australian Miracle?

October 9, 2018

The New York Times | By Andrew Leigh (PhD 2004). The country needs to find ways to share prosperity with workers, writes Andrew Leigh, a Labor Party member of the Australian Parliament.



2019 in Research Highlights

December 27, 2019

American Economics Association | Among the top 10 research highlights of 2019, "Tech: Economists Wanted." An interview with Susan Athey and Michael Luca about the mutual influence between economics and the tech sector. Michael Luca is the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.



Proposals for improving the U.S. Pretrial System

March 15, 2019

The Hamilton Project | By Will Dobbie (PhD 2013) and Crystal S. Yang (PhD 2013). Will Dobbie is now Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Crystal S. Yang is Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.



Ideas42: A Talk with Jack Cao

November 20, 2017

Ideas42 | With the ideas42 Seminar Series, we invite leading scholars to share their insights and what inspires their exploration into human behavior. Our New York office was pleased to host Jack Cao, a 5th year PhD candidate in social psychology at Harvard University. Jack’s research examines the divide between the conscious values we try to uphold and the implicit biases that reside within the mind...After giving a talk to the ideas42 team, Jack was kind enough to share some of his thoughts on behavioral science.



What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes.

September 24, 2018

Washington Post | By Rebecca Goldstein, Michael Sances, and Hye Young You PhD 2014. Based on the authors' research, "Exploitative Revenues, Law Enforcement, and the Quality of Government Service," forthcoming in Urban Affairs Review.

Rebecca Goldstein is a PhD candidate in Government and a Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholar in Poverty and Justice. Hye Young You received her PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard and is now Assistant Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University.

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Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is helping fight West Virginia’s opioid epidemic

April 3, 2019

Vox | A new study by Brendan Saloner PhD 2012 (with Rachel Landis, Bradley Stein, and Colleen Barry) suggests that expanding Medicaid helped get more West Virginians into addiction treatment. Saloner is now Associate Professor Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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