Social Science Space

A report from the Brookings Institution finds, at least in the case of economists, the U.S. government is roughly at the same place as academe when it comes to diversity.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to Canadian -born but US-based economist David Card for his work with Alan Krueger in reversing the perception that raising the minimum wage inevitably reduces the number of jobs.

The Nobel committee’s decision to award its economics prize for 2021 to David Card, Josh Angrist and Guido Imbens marks […]

There is no shortage of disciplines and industries rife with sexism. The STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – are particularly well […]

Janet Yellen, appointed as the 78th secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in January, has a long history of work in and alongside the social sciences above and beyond her role as an academic economist and policy maker

In the battle between the army of renegade Reddit retail traders and Wall Street’s hedge funds over unloved stocks like the Texan computer games retail chain GameStop, there has been a serious case of mistaken accusations on both sides. They are both being wrongly accused of manipulating the markets, but they are not.

Two economists whose work on how auctions work shone a much broader light on how people value and price goods and service have received the 2020 Nobel Prize in economics.

Remembering the Italian economist who once wrote, “Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.”

Economist Anne Case didn’t believe her eyes when she first identified the trend of what came to be called ‘deaths of despair’: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again.

William Nordhaus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was the first macroeconomist to seriously consider how climate can be influenced by human behavior and that human action and economic policy can influence climate, will receive the 2020 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize.

Over the last three decades randomized trials have become an increasingly popular way of testing interventions designed to address developmental challenges. But do RCTs generate reliable results – or even retard progress?

“Many people die without getting a transplant because there aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, living donor organs included. Sometimes, you might love someone enough to give him a kidney but you can’t give a kidney to the person you love, because kidneys have to be very well-matched. Kidney exchange is a way of getting some transplants done, even when patients and their donors are not well matched.”