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Journal Article
Interview: Daron Acemoglu
Daron Acemoglu is one of MIT's nine university- wide Institute Professors, the university's highest faculty rank. One of his predecessors, Robert Solow, developed a pathbreaking mathematical model of economic growth in the 1950s. Today, Acemoglu says hurray for economic growth — but is also concerned that choices made by policymakers and companies are channeling the gains from that growth away from workers. And as he sees things, the powerful AI technologies that have come to the fore in the past several years, embedded in products such as ChatGPT, should be regulated with the economic ...
Journal Article
Interview: Ulrike Malmendier
Over the course of her career, much of the research of University of California, Berkeley economist Ulrike Malmendier has been in the areas of behavioral economics and behavioral corporate finance — looking at the effects of various psychological biases, such as overconfidence, on the decisions of consumers, investors, and executives.
Journal Article
Interview: Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen: On credentialism, the new math of causation, and the lasting economic influence of youthful experiences
Journal Article
A promising way forward for homeownership: assessing the benefits of shared equity programs
In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, what programs can help low-income families become homeowners in a sustainable way? Shared equity programs offer one model, successfully balancing both affordability and asset building goals. In this article, researchers from the Urban Institute evaluate the effectiveness of 7 shared equity homeownership programs from across the country. They find that without exception, the programs provide long-term affordable homeownership, opportunities for low-income families to build equity, and sustainable tenure. This study suggests that shared equity programs ...
Journal Article
Interview: Laura Alfaro
Laura Alfaro wanted to be an economist since she was a young girl in Costa Rica. That she went from studying economics in college in her native country to a professorship at Harvard Business School is a reflection, she says, that she's a bit necia — foolishly stubborn. Even more important: "I had the bliss of ignorance. To both of my parents, I could be anything, and I believed it. I didn't know women didn't get Ph.D.s in economics in Costa Rica; I thought it was normal."
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Interview: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé
Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé is probably one of the few top-level economics researchers without a college degree. A native of Germany, she enrolled to study economics at the University of Münster. After completing two years of her studies, she was offered a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States. She left temporarily — or so she thought.
Journal Article
Interview: Angus Deaton
When Angus Deaton was an undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, he found that the other students were better and more serious mathematicians than he was. He found his attention wandering from his math studies. He later recalled that his advisor, concerned by his lack of focus, finally told him to "take up what they clearly thought of as a last resort for ne'er-do-wells, a previously unconsidered option called economics."Roughly a half century later, in 2015, Deaton was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — recognized, in the words of the committee, ...
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Journal Article
Interview: Pinelopi Goldberg
Pinelopi Goldberg: On developing countries, measuring economies by satellite, and the learning crisis.
Journal Article
Interview: Annamaria Lusardi
Annamaria Lusardi "fell in love" with economics, she says, thanks to a macroeconomics course she took as an undergraduate at Bocconi University in her native Italy. But her career has been focused on a quite different topic — she's a leading researcher in personal finance. How good are the skills and information that individuals bring to their financial decisions? And how can institutions provide them with the skills to make better decisions? These are the questions that have been preoccupying her for the past several decades, most recently as University Professor at George Washington ...