Research Brief Library

Users value apps like Instagram and YouTube more when TikTok is collectively banned than when TikTok is individually deactivated, suggesting the importance of accounting for network effects when defining markets.

A recent Medicare reform that aimed to reduce administrative fragmentation by consolidating billing processes successfully reduced fragmentation, but had only modest effects on administrative efficiency and no discernible impact on patient outcomes or hospital administrative costs.

Randomly implementing an intervention that helps white collar employees at a multinational consumer goods firm find meaning at work leads low-performing employees to exit the firm, and remaining employees to improve their performance. As a result, compensation increases.

Non-wage job amenities vary significantly across firms and play a major role in shaping workers’ overall job utility. High-paying firms often offer worse amenities, and over half of the wage advantage is offset by these tradeoffs, driven largely by worker-firm...

Authoritarian propaganda is most effective in either highly atomized or fully connected ones, and least effective at intermediate levels of connectivity.

Verifiable lies told by politicians change citizens’ perceptions of politicians generally and reduce citizen’s willingness to replace their leaders.

Stablecoins are vulnerable to panic runs due to their reliance on imperfectly liquid reserve assets. They also face price instability due to a market structure that often concentrates arbitrage among a few participants. Issuers face a fundamental tradeoff: increasing arbitrage...

Recent Medicaid expansions increased enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced mortality by 2.5% among low-income adults, saving roughly 27,400 lives for only $5.4 million and $179,000 per life and life-year saved, respectively.

Regions and ethnic groups in Africa with a higher historical prevalence of traditional female political leadership tend to have a higher proportion of elected female representatives in today’s political institutions. Institutional, rather than economic, factors significantly shape the traditional political...

Personalizing policies can substantially improve program performance; in a case involving exercise incentives for individuals with lifestyle-related health conditions, such policies increased the treatment effect of incentives by 80% without increasing program costs.