One of the most influential ideas to arise out of recent economic research is the notion that people’s ability to move up the income ladder over generations is heavily influenced by where they live. If you reside in certain areas of the US Southeast, for example, you will experience less upward mobility than if, say, you live in certain areas of the Great Plains. Further, these variations occur at a neighborhood level, such that if you live in a city, for example, you will experience differences in intergenerational mobility depending on where you live within that city. In other words, location is destiny, at least on average.

From 2019 to early 2023, the share of job postings offering remote work for one or more days per week rose more than three-fold in the United States and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Work from home saved about two hours per week per worker in 2021 and 2022, and will likely save about one hour per week per worker after the pandemic ends; workers allocate 40 percent of time savings to work and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.

Of the many decisions facing high school students—and their parents—few loom larger than whether and where to attend college. Families with college-bound children often go to great lengths to ensure admission into a “good” school. But do colleges with successful graduates actually contribute to their students’ success, or simply enroll the types of students who would do well no matter where they attend?

One puzzle for researchers in recent decades surrounds two seemingly contradictory facts: The wage gap between Black and White men has remained stubbornly large in recent decades while, over the same period, racial discrimination has steadily declined. This divergence has occurred even as the racial gap in test scores, conditional on education, has also narrowed.

When most people think about international trade, they likely imagine large companies trading goods back and forth among many countries, and they likely picture rows and rows of colorful intermodal containers stacked on huge transport ships.