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Weekly Briefing

The Role of Risk and Ambiguity Preferences on Early-Childhood Investment: Evidence from Rural India

Michael Cuna, Lenka Fiala, Min Sok Lee, John List, and Sutanuka Roy

Mothers in villages in Rajasthan, India, who exhibit more risk and ambiguity aversion tend to invest more in their young children’s nutrition. These investments improve skill development and even attenuate the negative impacts of certain disadvantages in children’s outcomes.

BFI Student Lunch Series – The Economics of Biodiversity Losses

Featured Scholar: Eyal Frank

The Harris School of Public Policy's Eyal Frank reviewed how economics is relevant when thinking about biodiversity losses and ecosystem functioning, focusing on examples that use “natural experiments” to understand how biodiversity affects human wellbeing.

Administrative Fragmentation in Health Care

Riley League and Maggie Shi


Stablecoin Runs and the Centralization of Arbitrage

Yiming Ma, Yao Zeng, and Anthony Lee Zhang


Firm Premia and Match Effects in Pay vs. Amenities

Anders Humlum, Mette Rasmussen, and Evan K. Rose

THE NEW YORKER

What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime

Featured Scholar: Jens Ludwig

THE GUARDIAN

Loan Plan in Republican Bill Could Worsen Doctor Shortage, Experts Warn

Featured Scholar: Lesley Turner

SIRIUS XM

An Increasing Number of Ordinary Americans is Supporting Political Violence

Featured Scholar: Robert Pape

 

THE ATLANTIC

The GOP’s New Medicaid Denialism

Featured Scholar: Bruce Meyer

 

BLOOMBERG

Trump’s Tax Bill Has Nasty Surprise in SALT Fine Print for Some Rich Americans

Featured Scholar: Eric Zwick

RESEARCH BRIEF

Social Signaling and Childhood Immunization: A Field Experiment in Sierra Leone

Anne Karing

This study tests whether social signaling can positively influence parents’ vaccination decisions in Sierra Leone. Giving children color-coded bracelets that indicate their vaccination status increases parents’ belief in the visibility of their actions and their knowledge of other children’s vaccine status. The bracelets have no effect on vaccination decisions when their color corresponds to an easier-to-complete vaccine with low perceived benefits, and large, positive effects when their signal is linked to a costlier-to-achieve vaccine with high perceived benefits.

RESEARCH BRIEF

Debt Moratoria: Evidence from Student Loan Forbearance

Ching-Tse Chen, Michael Dinerstein, and Constantine Yannelis

Relative to borrowers who had to continue paying their loans, borrowers allowed to pause their payments sharply increased mortgage, auto, and credit card borrowing, with little effect on loan delinquencies.

VIDEO

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

Featured Scholar: Anjali Adukia

Children learn many things from the books they read, and some of the most important lessons books teach are the sociocultural norms of society and whose space it is. These lessons are conveyed, in part, through the representation of different characters. This work shows how novel computer-driven tools can help systematically measure the messages children encounter in books.

Employment Opportunities

BFI

Research Administrator – Federal Statistical Research Data Center, UChicago Branch

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The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago advances inquiry that illuminates our choices, our economy, our society, and our future. Learn more at bfi.uchicago.edu.
 



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