1. The Gulags and the intelligentsia

How forced relocation of Soviet intellectuals shaped Russia's economic geography.

During Stalin’s reign, the Soviet Union forcibly sent millions of educated citizens, labeled “enemies of the people,” to labor camps across its vast territory. While studying this dark chapter of Russia’s history, two economists, Gerhard Toews and Pierre-Louis Vézina, discovered an unexpected pattern: areas around camps that held more of these educated prisoners are significantly more prosperous today. The pair provide compelling evidence for how human capital—people's education and skills—can create lasting economic advantages that persist across generations.

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2. The uneven labor market impact of industrial robots

How are the effects of automation spread across the population?

Economist Benjamin Lerch shows that automation simultaneously narrowed gender employment gaps while widening racial and ethnic disparities, revealing the uneven effects of technological change.

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3. Climate shocks and the economy

Is the US economy adapting to more severe weather patterns?

Researchers Hee Soo Kim, Christian Matthes, and Toàn Phan find evidence that the impact of extreme weather events on the US macroeconomy has grown stronger over time, suggesting limited adaptation to climate change at the macroeconomic level.

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4. Measuring US income inequality

Matthieu Gomez discusses income inequality and why it has increased in recent years.

"When you look at people at the very top, they tend to be people that own businesses. Today, they are able to accumulate much more wealth than the top entrepreneurs in the 1960s or 1970s. If you look at the numbers, one thing that really jumps out is that since 1980, the average income share of the top 0.01 percent has been multiplied by four. That's a huge shift in a pre-tax income basis." - Matthieu Gomez

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5. The returns to industrial policy

Panle Jia Barwick and Myrto Kalouptsidi discuss how China subsidized its rise to becoming the world’s leading shipbuilder.

"Industrial policies will distort market behavior and, as a result, induce rent seeking and promote the participation of more inefficient firms. The reason entry subsidy is so wasteful in our setting is it's just a blank policy. Anyone who wants to set up a shipyard can get free land. That's not a very effective policy because it attracts inefficient firms. So that's why I think investment and production subsidies are more useful." - Panle Jia Barwick

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6. The long-term impacts of Reconstruction-era education

How did educational opportunities after the American Civil War shape economic outcomes for Black families?

Economists Daniel B. Jones and Ethan Schmick found that Black children exposed to greater educational opportunity during Reconstruction had significantly better economic outcomes as adults, and that those benefits were passed on to their children. Their research suggests that if Reconstruction efforts had continued, the Black–White inequality gap could have been significantly reduced at this point in US history.

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7. Media salience and polarization

Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski discusses how increased media coverage can polarize the views of moderate individuals.

I think this really calls for journalists and editorial teams to carefully think not only about how, but also about if they should talk or not about a topic, and to be careful about potentially having extreme candidates or extreme parties trying to dictate the media agenda towards topics that could benefit them." - Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski

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8. Housing supply skepticism

Christopher Elmendorf discusses the views of the US public on the housing market.

Our takeaway is not that people are what you might call ideological supply skeptics, like people who have some well-formed or firm belief that if you build new housing, it's just going to cause the price of existing housing to go up. Instead, they're more naive, or in a Bayesian sense, they have incredibly weak priors about the effect of regional supply shocks on the price of existing housing in the region." - Christopher Elmendorf

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9. Understanding the US net foreign asset position

Andrew Atkeson discusses changes in how much the United States is indebted to the rest of the world.

"When we think of the US stock market booming, only like 60 percent of that is American wealth, and the other 40 percent is actually foreign wealth. So our net foreign asset position was deteriorating rapidly because the US stock market was booming. The thing that really struck us in the data is that our liabilities to foreigners, our net foreign asset position, was deteriorating rapidly because the US stock market was booming. And since foreigners owned a lot of US stocks, the value of their claims against us was booming, which for us means we owed them more money." - Andrew Atkeson

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10. Market segmentation and housing prices

Did relaxed credit standards drive the housing boom that led to the Great Recession?

Economists have struggled to reach a consensus on the role that credit availability played in driving the 2000s housing boom. Daniel L. Greenwald  and Adam Guren took a step toward resolving this puzzle by identifying a previously overlooked factor. They demonstrated that the degree of segmentation between rental and owner-occupied housing significantly determines how credit affects house prices.

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