Research Brief Library

Physician incomes in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands are concentrated in the top percentiles of the income distribution, though incomes are highest in the United States, mainly reflecting differences in overall income distributions, which suggests that broader...

Healthcare is the largest industry by employment in the United States; earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries since 1980 to 2022, including relatively large increases in the middle and upper-middle parts...

Married couples in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh jointly prefer that husbands work over wives, consistent with the fact that men’s employment raises both partners’ wellbeing, while women’s employment raises only the woman’s. Yet, six weeks of women’s employment substantially...

Though voters primarily care about economic issues, this paper offers a theoretical explanation for why cultural issues (immigration, nationalism, etc.) have become so central to modern politics, and how cultural issues signal a politician’s economic policies.

This paper presents a novel national analysis of segregation and access to public services in India’s urban and rural neighborhoods, revealing that the country’s growing cities (considered engines of upward mobility) largely replicate the caste and religious disparities of its...

An Illinois reform that shortened the duration of supervision for parolees from 12 to 6 months reduced prison re-entry rates by around 45%, with no evidence of increased crime.

In the 15 years post-NAFTA, an area with average NAFTA exposure experienced increased mortality overall; these mortality increases were particularly pronounced among working-age men, who also experienced disproportionate NAFTA-induced employment declines.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of plagiarism among Chinese graduate students and the implications for public service, revealing that plagiarists are more likely to enter and advance in the public sector, where they perform worse when holding power, and generate...

An examination of the performance of WWII fighter pilots demonstrates the power of incentives: A tiered, expanding system of status-based incentives can repeatedly leverage workers’ status concerns to extract effort.

Unconditional cash transfers may help attenuate the mother-child transmission of low executive function during early childhood. Providing unconditional cash support to low-income families could help close intergenerational skill gaps, particularly benefiting children at risk of inheriting cognitive and noncognitive disadvantages.