Analysis

UBI & the City

Skeptics of guaranteed income tend to worry about the policy’s inflationary effects; absent rent regulation, for instance, one might expect housing costs to rise in proportion to the increase in disposable income generated by the policy.

Macro Modeling in the Age of Inequality

Recent years have seen the revival of academic conversation around rising wealth inequality and its distributional consequences. But while applied, microeconomics-oriented fields like public and labor economics have long engaged with questions around inequality, macroeconomics has historically paid less attention to these questions, particularly as they relate to business cycles. Instead, it has focused more on the relationships between aggregate macroeconomic outcomes—such as unemployment, income, and consumption—and how they fluctuate during booms and recessions. As a result, research on rising income and wealth inequality in the United States tends to overlook the macroeconomic consequences of these developments, as well as the long-term macroeconomic trends which have contributed to their rise.

In order to assess what rising inequality means for our society, and what policies we should enact to mitigate its effects, we must understand its relationship to the economy as a whole. What macroeconomic forces have contributed to rising inequality, and how might elevated levels of inequality be shaping our economy? We need macroeconomic research to fully understand how income and wealth inequality have evolved in the United States. Particularly, we need a range of macroeconomic models, each of which can capture meaningful differences in household income or wealth but emphasizes different, potentially relevant features of the economy.

Unequal and Uneven: The Geography of Higher Education Access

Mapping market concentration in the higher education industry

In much of the existing higher education literature, “college access” is understood in terms of pre-college educational attainment, social and informational networks, and financial capacity, both for tuition and living expenses. The US ranks highly on initial college access by comparison with other countries, but this access—along with all major metrics of college success, including completion rates, default rates, and debt-to-income ratios—exhibits drastic inequality along familiar lines of race, gender, class, and geography.

Along with other pernicious myths, the media stereotype of the college student often figures undergraduates traveling far from home to live in a dorm on a leafy campus. The reality is far from the case: over 50% of students enrolled in four-year public college do so close to their home. This means that the geography of higher ed institutions strongly determines the options available to a given student. While much higher education policy discourse justly attempts to improve students’ access to information on school costs, financial aid information, completion rates, or post-graduation employment statistics to inform their school choices, political attention to geographic access remains overlooked.

Previous research on the geography of higher ed has simply reported the number of institutions in a given area. But the raw number of schools is ambiguous, as it fails to account for enrollment. We wanted to complicate the picture: given the uneven distribution of higher ed institutions and institution types—public and private non-profits, as well as for-profits of all kinds—around the country, we wanted to examine what role market concentration might play in a higher education industry increasingly characterized by a wide divide between elite institutions and the landscape of what Tressie McMillan Cottom has termed "Lower Ed." Starting from the perspective that many students are not going to travel long distances to be in residence full time at a leafy campus, how many options are they realistically looking at? And what’s the relationship between concentration, disparities on the basis of race, class, and geography, institutions’ resulting market power, and college cost, debt loads, and post-graduate earnings?

Development and Displacement

Infrastructure lies at the heart of development. From transportation and telecommunication networks to electrical grids and water pipelines, large-scale infrastructure projects play a pivotal role in the global development landscape.

Collective Ownership in the Green New Deal

This year, we once again shattered the record for atmospheric carbon concentration, and witnessed a series of devastating setbacks in US climate policy—from attempts to waive state protections against pipelines to wholesale attacks on climate science.

Disparate Causes, pt. II

An accurate understanding of the nature of race in our society is a prerequisite for an adequate normative theory of discrimination.

Disparate Causes, pt. I

Legal claims of disparate impact discrimination go something like this: A company uses some system (e.g., hiring test, performance review, risk assessment tool) in a way that impacts people. Somebody sues, arguing that it has a disproportionate adverse effect on racial minorities, showing initial evidence of disparate impact.

Money Parables

In the past year, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shifted the policy debate in a way that few heterodox schools of economic thought have in recent memory.

Is it impossible to be fair?

Statistical prediction is increasingly pervasive in our lives. Can it be fair?

The Allegheny Family Screening Tool is a computer program that predicts whether a child will later have to be placed into foster care. It's been used in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, since August 2016. When a child is referred to the county as at risk of abuse or neglect, the program analyzes administrative records and then outputs a score from 1 to 20, where a higher score represents a higher risk that the child will later have to be placed into foster care. Child welfare workers use the score to help them decide whether to investigate a case further.

Travel search engines like Kayak or Google Flights predict whether a flight will go up or down in price. Farecast, which launched in 2004 and was acquired by Microsoft a few years later, was the first to offer such a service. When you look up a flight, these search engines analyze price records and then predict whether the flight's price will go up or down over some time interval, perhaps along with a measure of confidence in the prediction. People use the predictions to help them decide when to buy a ticket.

Decentralize What?

The internet's early proliferation was steeped in cyber-utopian ideals. The circumvention of censorship and gatekeeping, digital public squares, direct democracy, revitalized civic engagement, the “global village”—these were all anticipated characteristics of the internet age, premised on the notion that digital communication would provide the necessary conditions for the world to change.

Student Debt & Racial Wealth Inequality

The effect of cancelling student debt on various measures of individual and group-level inequality has been a matter of controversy, especially given presidential candidates’ recent and high-profile proposals to eliminate outstanding student debt.

The Politics of Machine Learning, pt. II

Across all these applications of machine learning methods, there is a common thread: Data on individuals is used to treat different individuals differently. In the past, broadly speaking, such commercial and government activities used to target everyone in a given population more or less similarly—the same advertisements, the same prices, the same political slogans.

The Politics of Machine Learning, pt. I

Terminology like "machine learning," "artificial intelligence," "deep learning," and "neural nets" is pervasive: business, universities, intelligence agencies, and political parties are all anxious to maintain an edge over the use of these technologies.

The Emerging Monopsony Consensus

Early on in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith asked who had the edge in negotiations between bosses and wage laborers. His answer: the bosses. In the case of a stalemate, landlords and manufacturers “could generally live a year or two” on their accumulated wealth, while among workers, “few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment.”

Banking with Imprecision

​In 1596, Spanish troops under the leadership of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia set fire to their own ships in the waters near Cadiz. The sinking of these thirty-two vessels was a tactical necessity: a joint Anglo-Dutch navy had annihilated the slapdash defenses of the city, driving the Spanish ships off to nearby Puerto Real.