economics research study 2023

Economic Studies

The Brookings Economic Studies program provides analysis of current and emerging economic issues to promote innovative and practical policy solutions.

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The Brookings Economic Studies program provides analysis of current and emerging economic issues to promote innovative and practical policy solutions. Economic Studies scholars conduct rigorous research and policy analysis and communicate their findings to inform policymakers and the public in the areas of broad-based economic growth, economic opportunity and mobility, inclusive social policy, sound monetary and fiscal policy, and climate-resilient growth.

Latest research and commentary

Janice C. Eberly, Donald Kohn, Jón Steinsson, Pierre Yared

May 23, 2024

Daniel K. Tarullo

May 22, 2024

David Wessel

Michael Wara, Michael Mastrandrea, Eric Macomber

Sanctions on Russia: What’s working? What’s not?

The Brookings Institution, Washington D.C.

10:30 am - 12:00 pm EDT

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Featured experts

Media coverage.

On NPR’s Marketplace, Loren Adler spoke about how private equity firms are changing the health care landscape.

Loren Adler

If you’re going to TikTok or Facebook to get information about the macroeconomy, the chances are very good that it’s going to be wrong.”

Donald Kohn appeared on American Banker’s “Buy the People” podcast to discuss the public pressures the Federal Reserve faces.

Donald Kohn

It would substantially strengthen the ability of the U.S. if it chose to seize [Russian] reserves.”

Research by Tara Watson and Wendy Edelberg was featured in an article on how immigration has been the crucial factor in supporting job and consumer spending growth.

Tara Watson, Director - Center for Economic Security and Opportunity ,

Wendy edelberg, director - the hamilton project ,.

James Stock’s research on climate tax policy reform was cited in an article on the 2025 Energy Tax Debate.

James Stock

Sanjay Patnaik’s research on clean energy infrastructure permitting was citied in an article discussing congressional action on energy permitting.

Sanjay Patnaik

Ben Harris’s research on why Americans are so displeased with the economy was cited by The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma.

“In my view, the BRICS so far has been more of a talking forum for some of the largest emerging economies rather than a structured entity with a complete commonality of views on the..."

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti

Alice Rivlin was part of a symposium on sustainable U.S. health spending

Alice M. Rivlin

Brookings papers on economic activity.

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) is a semi-annual academic conference and journal that pairs rigorous research with real-time policy analysis to address the most urgent economic challenges of the day.

1:00 pm - 12:45 pm EDT

Samuel G. Hanson, Victoria Ivashina, Laura Nicolae, Jeremy C. Stein, Adi Sunderam, Daniel K. Tarullo

March 27, 2024

Stefanie Stantcheva

Andrew Atkeson, Stephen Kissler

Economic Studies Bulletin Weekly

An update with the latest research on taxes, business, health, and social policy from the Economic Studies program at Brookings.

Hutchins Roundup and Newsletter Weekly

New research on fiscal and monetary policy, along with periodic updates from the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

Brookings Center on Health Policy Update Monthly

An update from the Center on Health Policy at Brookings.

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A newsletter that explores the most challenging U.S. social policy questions.

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An update on important regulatory actions taken by the U.S. federal government.

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Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity New Episodes 19 Episodes 4 Seasons

The Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity connects you to cutting edge economic policy research and the renowned economists who create it. Each episode features an…

Recession Remedies Podcast 11 Episodes Limited Series

Recession Remedies focused on the economic policy response to COVID-19 and lessons for future recessions. Expert guests joined host David Wessel, director of the Hutchins…

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Economics Nobel Prize goes to Claudia Goldin, an expert on women at work

Scott Horsley

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin. The committee cited her research on generations of women in the labor market. George Freston/Getty Images hide caption

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin. The committee cited her research on generations of women in the labor market.

Harvard University's Claudia Goldin has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her research on women in the labor market. She studies the changing role of working women through the centuries, and the causes of the persistent pay gap between men and women.

The award — formally known as The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — comes with a prize of 11 million kronor, or about $1 million. Goldin is the third woman to receive the prize.

"Claudia Goldin's discoveries have vast society implications," said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the Nobel committee. "She has shown us that the nature of this problem or the source of these underlying gender gaps changes throughout history and with the course of development."

Goldin's research showed that women's role in the job market has not moved in a straight line, but has waxed and waned in line with social norms and women's own ideas about their prospects in the workplace and the home. Some of these ideas are shaped early in life and are slow to change.

"She can explain why the gender gap suddenly started to close in the 1980s and the surprising role of the birth control pill and changing expectation," Hjalmarsson said. "And she can explain why the earnings gap has stopped closing today and the role of parenthood."

Tracing the history of women in the workplace was easier said than done. The Nobel committee said Goldin often had to contend with spotty records.

Gender pay gap remains

Women currently fill nearly half the jobs in the U.S. but typically earn less. They briefly outnumbered men on payrolls in late 2019 and early 2020, but women dropped out of the workforce in large numbers early in the pandemic, and their ranks have only recently recovered .

In a 2021 interview with NPR , Goldin offered a recipe for narrowing the pay gap between men and women: more government funding of child care and more jobs in which people could share duties rather than what she termed "greedy jobs".

Enough Already: How The Pandemic Is Breaking Women

The american government once offered widely affordable child care ... 77 years ago.

"The solution isn't a simple one, but part of it is reducing the value of these 'greedy jobs,' getting jobs in which individuals are very good substitutes for each other and can trade off," she said. "And I know there are people who will tell me this is impossible. But in fact, it's done in obstetrics. It's done in anesthesiology. It's done in pediatrics. It's done in veterinary medicine. It's done in various banking decisions. And if it can be done in all of that with all the amazing IT that we have, we could probably do it elsewhere as well. "

Nobel Peace Prize winner's husband speaks of her dedication to human rights

Some forecasters think women's role in the workplace will continue to grow as they surpass men on college campuses and as service-oriented fields such as health care expand.

"Understanding women's role in labor is important for society," said Jakob Svensson, chair of the prize committee. "Thanks to Claudia Goldin's groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future."

• Nobel Prize in Economics

Take a look at the latest research from MIT Economics faculty, including published work and newly-released working papers.

Working Papers

Learning, diversity and adaptation in changing environments: the role of weak links, the simple macroeconomics of ai.

Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It

Cooking to Save Your Life

Published papers, learning from ricardo and thompson: machinery and labor in the early industrial revolution - and in the age of ai.

Equilibrium Analysis in Behavioral One-Sector Growth Models

Labs and Centers

Research news.

Study finds workers misjudge wage markets

Simon Jäger receives 2024 In_equality Research Award

Department of Economics

• Research Groups

Our faculty has structured the department to have strong coverage in applied microeconomics, econometrics, economic theory, finance, and macroeconomics. Within these areas, our faculty work on a wide range of topics in economics important to the country and the world. Some of our most impactful work focuses on:

• The US and global financing system
• How unemployment affects workers and the economy
• Causes and consequences of economic inequality and poverty
• Household economic choices and economic behavior
• The importance of game theory and political economy to understanding economic outcomes

By focusing on these five core areas, particularly at the graduate level, the department offers a unique, specific educational experience. Aside from traditional coursework, research, and special lectures (including the Distinguished Lectures in Economics and the Newcomb Lectures), the department holds three weekly seminars to encourage collaboration and communication within these five disciplines. The seminars attract top scholars from throughout the world to discuss their work and also provide a forum for faculty and students to present their recent research.

The department also has a set of weekly brown bag seminars where graduate students present their research to their fellow students and the faculty.

Research Highlights

Unemployment and the economy.

The Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure: A New Method for Measuring Poverty

Robert Moffitt and John Fitzgerald

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

economic behavior

Hybrid decision model and the ranking of experiments.

Edi Karni and Zvi Safra

Journal of Mathematical Economics

Comparative Incompleteness: Measurement, Behavioral Manifestations and Elicitation

Edi Karni and Marie-Louise Vierø

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

U.S. and global financing system

Due Diligence

Brendan Daley, Thomas Geelen, and Brett Green

The Journal of Finance

Market Power in Neoclassical Growth Models

Laurence Ball and Gregory Mankiw

The Review of Economic Studies

Threats to Central Bank Independence: High-Frequency Identification with Twitter

Francesco Bianchi, Roberto Gomez-Cram, Thilo Kind, and Howard Kung

Journal of Monetary Economics

Forthcoming

Understanding U.S. Inflation During the COVID Era

Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prachi Mishra

Diagnostic Business Cycles

Francesco Bianchi, Cosmin Ilut, and Hikaru Saijo

Designing Securities for Scrutiny

Brendan Daley, Brett Green, and Victoria Vanasco

The Review of Financial Studies

Belief Distortions and Macroeconomic Fluctuations

Francesco Bianchi, Sydney Ludvigson, and Sai Ma

American Economic Review

game theory and political economy

Centralized matching with incomplete information.

Marcelo Ariel Fernandez, Kirill Rudov, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review: Insights

Misclassification Errors In Labor Force Statuses and the Early Identification of Economic Recessions

Jiandong Sun, Shuaizhang Feng, and Yingyao Hu

Journal of Asian Economics

Missing Events in Event Studies: Identifying the Effects of Partially Measured News Surprises

Refet S. Gürkaynak, Burçin Kisacikoğlu, and Jonathan H. Wright

Revealed Preferences over Risk and Uncertainty

Matthew Polisson, John K.-H. Quah, and Ludovic Renou

economic inequality and poverty

Genetic endowments and wealth inequality.

Daniel Barth, Nicholas W. Papageorge, and Kevin Thom

Journal of Political Economy

Bargaining and News

Brendan Daley and Brett Green

Macroprudential Regulation Versus Mopping Up After the Crash

Olivier Jeanne and Anton Korinek

A Mechanisms for Eliciting Second-Order Beliefs and the Inclination to Choose

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster (book)

Laurence Ball

Expected Inflation and Other Determinants of Treasury Yields

Gregory R. Duffee

The Distribution of Wealth and the Marginal Propensity to Consume

Christopher Carroll, Jiri Slacalek, Kiichi Tokuoka, and Matthew N. White

Quantitative Economics

The Economics of Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, Vol. 1 (book)

Robert Moffitt

Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability, and Corruption:  Evidence from U.S. States

Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do

Mandatory vs. Discretionary Spending:  The Status Quo Effect

T. Renee Bowen, Ying Chen, and Hülya Eraslan

What’s the Latest Research in Development Economics? A Roundup from NEUDC 2023

Almedina music, david evans.

There are so many studies regarding so many aspects of development economics that it can be difficult to keep up. Last week was the North East Universities Development Consortium annual conference , often called NEUDC. Researchers presented more than 130 papers across a wide range of topics, from agriculture to education and from labor to climate; almost all of the studies are available for download . This is a great snapshot of the latest research in development economics.

Where the studies are from and what methods they use

The studies take place all over the world (Figure 1). India has more than twice as many studies (23) than the next highest country, Brazil (with 10 studies). Kenya has eight, Indonesia has six, and Bangladesh, Malawi, and Pakistan each have five. A total of 43 countries are represented (not even including regional or cross-country studies that include dozens of countries). If you examine the studies per country population, the top countries are Guinea-Bissau, Uruguay, Malawi, Chile, and Jordan. (Guinea-Bissau and Uruguay just have one study each but have smaller populations.)

Figure 1. Where are recent development economics studies focused?

Source: This map draws on a sample of more than 135 studies from the NEUDC 2023 conference. We categorized studies and excluded those that covered more than three countries (often broad global or regional analyses).

The research continues to draw on a wide range of empirical strategies—i.e., not just randomized controlled trials, or RCTs (Figure 2). RCTs are the single largest group, but there are still lots of studies using difference-in-differences, fixed effects, and regression discontinuity. 

Figure 2. What empirical methods do recent development economics papers use? 

Source: This figure draws on 124 studies for which we found it easy to ascertain and categorize the empirical strategy. Some studies used multiple methods, in which case we categorized the two main methods we found.

What we learned from 130+ NEUDC studies

We went through each study, and we provide a micro-summary below. Obviously these are just our quick takes. Many studies have more than one thing to teach us, so if our microsummary piques your interest, click the link to the study! Also, take these micro-summaries with a grain of salt: some of these studies are still preliminary (that’s indicated on the front page of the studies themselves), and we also largely take the studies’ claims at face value (we aren’t peer reviewers). Still, there’s a lot of exciting research here, teaching us more about both problems and solutions in low- and middle-income countries (and beyond). We hope you learn as much reading them as we did writing them!

Guide to the methodological hashtags: 

Households and human capital

Education and early childhood development.

• Schools in Chile with more poor students tend to have lower test scores. A program that provides extra funding to those schools benefits disadvantaged students at both low and high levels of support. The results for advantaged students in the same schools are less consistent. (Cerda) #RD
• A school voucher program in India benefits recipients, but because voucher amounts are linked to schools' tuition fees, schools have an incentive to raise their fees, which hurts non-beneficiary students. The net effect is still positive, but failing to account for the effect on non-beneficiaries would dramatically overstate the benefits. (Sahai) #DID
• A ten-hour virtual training to help teachers in India better manage emotions, set goals, and solve problems led to a greater belief that they could boost students' learning and put more effort in their teaching. (Kaur) #RCT
• Lots of families in western Kenya don't have books to read to their kids. When those storybooks were offered, the vast majority of families took them. The more expensive they were, the less likely people were to buy them; but even with a low subsidy, more than 90 percent of families bought them. But three months later, kids still didn't have stronger vocabularies. (Bonds, Hamory, and Ochieng) #RCT
• In Tanzania, 10 percent more stagnant water increases diarrhea incidence among children by 30 percent and reduces test scores by 7 percent of a standard deviation. Access to improved sanitation and water sources mitigates the effect of stagnant water on these health and learning outcomes, but this effect increases with high temperatures and population density. (Berggreen and Mattisson) #DID
• A “learning how to learn” approach in Uganda raised the pass rate in the national exam (progression from primary to secondary school) from 51 percent to 71 percent. The approach “trained teachers to teach students to learn like scientists: posing sharp questions, framing specific hypotheses, using evidence and data gathered from everyday life whenever possible.” (Ashraf, Banerjee, and Nourani) #RCT
• In Chile, “classroom peers and older high school peers significantly shape students’ choices of college majors in male-dominated fields.” (Valdebenito) #RD
• In Peru, a 20-minute interaction between engineering students and high school students increased students’ preferences towards engineering, especially among female students with high math aptitude. (Agurto et al.) #RCT
• In India, primary students taught by college students scored 0.34 SD higher in math, 0.22 SD in science, and 0.15 SD in language higher than those taught by regular teachers. (Ganimian, Mbiti, and Mishra) #RCT
• A country-wide effort to improve toilet access and other aspects of sanitation in India (the "Clean India Mission") boosted children's math—but not literacy—scores. Results are similar for boys and girls. (Karmakar and Villa) #DID #ES
• Eleven months after introducing a program in India to encourage teachers to blend their teaching with high-quality videos, student math scores got worse, teachers taught less effectively (e.g., they gave worse feedback to students and monitored student learning less), and students had worse attitudes towards science and math. (de Barros) #RCT
• In the Dominican Republic, all Major League Baseball teams run training academies for adolescent boys. Despite public perceptions that this leads youth to undervalue formal education, exposure to these academies has no measurable impact on school attendance. (Marein and Palsson) #DID
• A common policy to get more underrepresented groups into college is to rank students within high schools (so that kids from poorer high schools have a shot). But in Chile, high school students switch schools to game the system, such that the current policy had a tiny impact, which would have been more than five times as large if students weren't switching schools. (Concha-Arriagada) #FE
• With the introduction of a new bus line and a new train line in Lima (Peru), "a 17 percent reduction in commuting time to college increases enrollment rates by 6 percent," with that mostly driven by enrollment in private colleges. Boys are willing to travel 50 percent longer than girls to attend a better college. (Alba-Vivar) #DID
• Study groups in Chinese primary schools boost student achievement. The effects are biggest for kids who were previously not doing so well in school but who are in high-achieving study groups. It also boosts those kids' level of motivation. (Gao et al.) #IV
• An additional year of education for women in India led to "a 27% decrease in less severe physical domestic violence, a 9% decrease in sexual violence, and a 10% decrease in injuries due to domestic violence." This was likely due to women finding better partners, improved attitudes, and potentially a higher likelihood of reporting violence. (Bergonzoli, Bahure, and Agarwal) #RD
• Higher export prices for crops grown by women in Peru reduce "domestic violence, including severe physical violence and female homicide... The effects are stronger in districts with more unequal gender norms." (Frankenthal) #FE
• In India, short-term exposure to domestic violence doesn't seem to affect women's attitudes about violence, but over time, women who experience violence are more likely to tolerate violence—potentially as a coping mechanism. (Frezza) #RD
• Girls' clubs for adolescents in Côte d'Ivoire alone boosted some girls' mental health but not employment outcomes. Adding separate clubs for husbands and future husbands boosted employment and sexual and reproductive health outcomes. (Boulhane et al.) #RCT
• Women living in neighborhoods with low risk of harassment or assault on the streets are 8.5 percentage points more likely to participate in the labor market relative to women in higher risk neighborhoods—in Indonesia and India. (Cahill) #PSM
• A successful school-expansion program in India “increased voter prioritization of leader competence over gender, boosting the share of women among candidates and state parliamentarians and the overall capability of elected officials.” (Anukriti, Calvo, and Charavarty) #RD
• In Pakistan, providing correct information about support for women voting in society to men does not change the turnout of women, while providing the same information to women or both lowers female turnout. “This blow-back effect is caused by men discouraging women from political participation because they believe women will act according to their own (and different from men’s) preferences.” (Gulzar, Khan, and Sonnet) #FE
• An anti-poverty program in Malawi improved households’ consumption, food security, and dietary diversity outcomes, regardless of whether men or women were targeted and whether a gender transformative training was incorporated in the program. (Bedi, King, and Vaillant) #RCT
• A conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Peru reinforced traditional gender-role attitudes among children, especially girls. Beneficiary mothers spent more time on home production, and this priority could be a channel for perpetuating traditional gender role attitudes. (Luong) #RD
• Families historically exposed to higher levels of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique tend to be more matrifocal, with weaker fathers after emancipation. These families also face higher child mortality, stemming from poorer family environments rather than local conditions. (Beigelman) #FE
• “On an online marriage market platform in India, ... working women are 14.5% less likely to receive interest from male suitors... Women employed in ‘masculine’ occupations are 3.2% less likely to elicit interest from suitors relative to those in ‘feminine’ occupations.” (Afridi et al.) #RCT
• Providing "mentored girls' clubs, life skills, and vocational training" to adolescent girls in northern Nigeria reduced marriage two years after the intervention by 65 percentage points! A major reason is that it boosted girls' likelihood of staying in school. (Cohen, Abubakar, and Perlman) #RCT
• A radio campaign against female genital cutting in Egypt reduced cutting by 13 percent. But those girls also saw their bride prices fall by nearly a quarter and child marriages rose. Across Africa, cutting is more common in settings with bride price. (Khalifa) #DID
• Several years after the start of a cash transfer program in Malawi, those who benefited as adolescent girls were more likely to move longer distances for marriage, and those moves happened over a longer period of time, into young women's mid-twenties. (Ibrahim) #RCT
• Parents in Pakistan prefer grooms who are relatives; they also prefer marriages where their daughters will have more freedom (e.g., to leave the house unaccompanied or to make health decisions independently). (Calvi, Farooqi, and Kandpal) #SurveyExperiment
• In Lahore (Pakistan), women are more likely to sign up for a job search platform than they are to take a job. For less-educated job seekers, jobs with explicit gender requirements are more likely to exclude women. Women with more education are more selective about jobs, but the jobs themselves are less likely to be gender-restrictive. (Gentile et al.) #RCT
• Offering women in West Bengal (India) the ability to multitask work with childcare and to work from home boosts labor market participation, especially for those from more traditional households. Flexible work also increases women's likelihood of accepting out-of-home work later. (Ho, Jalota, and Karandikar) #RCT
• Increasing the minimum wage by nearly a quarter in Morocco narrowed the gender pay gap in the formal sector by about a quarter. But it also led a small fraction of women (but not men) to leave the formal labor market. (Paul-Delvaux) #DID
• In India, horizontal communication between cisgender participants reduces discrimination against transgender people: when involved in a group discussion with two neighbors, there is no longer discrimination at all on average, even when making private choices. This effect is 1.7x larger than top-down communication that informs participants about the legal rights of transgender persons. (Webb) #RCT
• In a lab in the field experiment in Bangladesh, the “less capable women are perceived compared to men, the less they are involved in decision-making. After the information treatment (on women’s abilities), individuals with the lowest perceptions about the wife’s skills are 20 percent more likely to make allocations in her favor.” (Nani) #RCT
• Employers in Bangladesh discriminate paternalistically, i.e., they restrict women’s employment choices to protect them from what employers perceive as unsafe. Informing about safe worker transport at the end of the shift increases demand for female labor by 22 percent and female labor supply by 15 percent. (Buchmann, Meyer, and Sullivan) #RCT
• Offering female entrepreneurs in Jordan access to virtual storefronts by (1) creating and managing Facebook pages for their businesses and (2) offering them digital marketing training created in collaboration with local influencers, increased business survival and revenues. Effects are driven by women with low physical mobility due to social norms at baseline. (Alhorr) #RCT

Health (including mental health)

• Sharing information about either "the prevalence of mental health issues and the efficacy of treatment" or "the mental health struggles of a Nepali celebrity and how he benefited from treatment" boosted people's stated willingness to seek mental health treatment and to pay for counseling. The effects were biggest for those with "less severe symptoms of depression and anxiety." (Lacey et al.) #RCT
• Sometimes people are uncertain about how risky a behavior is. In Malawi, people with greater uncertainty about how risky regular unprotected sex with an HIV-infected partner update their beliefs more drastically in response to new information. (Kerwin and Pandey) #RCT
• Groups of friends among Syrian refugees in Jordan are good at identifying who needs mental health support. Sometimes friends don't want to share info about mental health services because of stigma, but if you nudge the sharers to disclose that they're being financially compensated for sharing the info, they're more likely to share it. (Smith) #RCT
• Home visits inviting adults in Kenya to get vaccinated against COVID increased vaccine doses by ten percent, especially among women and people with less education or income. Announcing the home visit ahead of time (so people could either making a point of being home for the appointment or being out to avoid it) further boosted vaccinations. (Carney et al.) #RCT
• Providing frontline health workers in Guinea-Bissau "with evidence of their program’s effectiveness in improving local health indicators" significantly boosted the effort of health workers, even six months later. (Fracchia) #RCT
• A "mother and child health and family planning program in Bangladesh" boosted height in adulthood for those who participated as children (as well as education among the men). In the next generation, daughters of beneficiaries tend to be taller and have better cognitive development. (Barham et al.) #DID
• Introducing “a competitive selection system for recruiting CEOs in public hospitals in Chile reduced hospital mortality by 8%”, driven by hospitals in which the new CEOs had managerial qualifications. “These CEOs improved operating room efficiency and reduced staff turnover.” (Otero and Muñoz) #DID
• In Rajasthan (India), posting of a mid-level health care provider increased the monthly patient load by 68 percent. The number of patients diagnosed with hypertension and diabetes at treatment facilities increased as well. After one year, elderly deaths declined by 12 percent. (Agte and Soni) #DID

Migration and refugees

• Mexican regions experiencing larger inflows of Mexican low-skilled deportees have higher rates of firm creation, firm survival, and revenue. (Osuna-Gomez and Medina-Cortina) #FE
• In Vietnam, the Ho Khau reform, which reduced migration barriers, had more impact on reducing spatial inequality than place-based incentives. (Huynh) #DID
• In Uganda, “landslides increase long-term displacement and migration, and affected households have substantially worse economic and mental health outcomes years afterward.” (Baseler and Hennig) #FE #DID
• In the Philippines, typhoons increase international migration from affected municipalities, and incentivize migrants to leave for lower paying overseas jobs. (Murathanoglu) #FE
• Municipalities from which more Moroccan soldiers were deployed to France before independence were more likely to send emigrants to France after independence. But this wasn’t true with those sent to Algeria. (Salem and Seck) #FE

Safety nets (including cash transfers and peer support)

• How do you  target disaster aid to households? In post-2015 earthquake Nepal, the “property damage criterion excludes many liquidity-constrained households that have high demand for aid, and it includes wealthy, well-insured households that have low demand.” Dividing aid equally among all affected households has larger welfare gains. (Gordon, Hashida, and Fenichel) #RD
• In Mumbai (India), residents who received a subsidy that could only be used for rice or wheat spent less on packaged snacks. The effect was bigger in households with children. (Aouad, Ramdas, and Sungu) #RCT
• With access to safety nets, middle-income households in Colombia are more likely to borrow from formal lenders, and in the long run, they substitute away from predatory loans toward formal loans when experiencing severe shocks. (Álvarez et al.) #RD
• An unconditional grant to poor kids in South Africa reduced the likelihood that girls would be underweight or obese, but it boosted the likelihood that they'd be overweight. There were no substantive effects for boys on average. (Chakraborty and Villa) #RD
• Peer groups in Nepal where most people know each other don't necessarily choose a peer monitor in lab games. But groups where few people are immediately connected do. (Iacobelli and Singh) #RCT #DID
• Using data from six low- and middle-income countries, a proxy means test (PMT)—i.e., using a short list of household characteristics to decide if a household is poor—fails to accurately predict eligibility for social protection programs: “the accuracy of the PMT prediction algorithm decreases steadily over time, by roughly 1.7 percentage points per year,” even though the PMT model is updated only every 5-8 years. (Aiken, Ohlenburg, and Blumenstock)

Working and saving

Banking and credit.

• Encouraging commercial banks in India to increase lending to minority borrowers in “minority concentration” districts in India increased minorities’ access to bank credit. (Khan and Ritadhi) #RD
• In Kenya and Pakistan, equity-like contracts stimulate more profitable investments. Risk preferences play an important but nuanced role: loss-averse individuals prefer equity; however, individuals exhibiting non-linear probability weighting prefer debt. (Meki) #RCT
• In Ghana, individual incentives increased adoption of a new technology; adding endorsement by a trusted peer doubles the impact of the individual subsidy. (Riley, Shonchoy, and Darko Osei) #RCT
• Lots of people in urban India don't have access to credit for when there's a financial crunch or to professionals for mental health problems. Many would like to talk to the people they know, but—from a survey—68 percent underestimate others' willingness to engage on these topics. Helping people realize that boosts sign-ups for potential savings groups or for a potential program to get trained to be a volunteer to listen to other people's anxieties. (Jain and Khandelwal) #RCT

Firms and microenterprises

• Fifteen years after the Indian Ocean tsunami, Indonesian business owners exposed to the tsunami had lower levels of capital and profits than those not exposed. These effects were biggest in rural areas. (Lombardo, Frankenberg, and Thomas) #FE
• Providing firms in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) with more information about candidates with college degrees led firms to hire faster, but they often hired candidates without college degrees and downgraded their expectations about college graduate productivity. (Wu and Wang) #RCT
• For US firms, entering the whaling industry entails lots of sunk costs such that firms are slow to enter but also slow to leave the market. (Yun)
• In Kenya, “informality is particularly prevalent in downstream economic activities and smaller regional markets.” (Wiedemann et al.) #DID #SC
• Vendors in the Kolkata (India) vegetable market subsidized to sell additional produce earned over 60 percent higher profits, after excluding the value of the subsidy. And yet, “after the subsidy ended vendors largely stopped selling the additional produce” which may reflect “social or private preferences”. (Banerjee et al.) #RCT
• In Tanzania, rural firms smooth both negative and positive input price shocks more than urban firms. Urban firms pass nearly 95 percent of input price increases to customers, while rural firms pass only 55 percent of input price increases. (Rudder) #FE
• Some firms in Sri Lanka have much higher returns to inputs than others, and new econometric tools to test how much putting inputs into the wrong firms affects growth suggest that output could quadruple with better allocation of resources. (Hughes and Majerotvitz) #RCT
• When steam power started replacing water power in the United States, water-powered mills shut down rather than transforming to steam mills, suggesting that shifting technologies is costly. (Hornbeck et al.) #FE
• In Malawi, a survey of shopkeepers shows that they have widely varying strengths across different dimensions of productivity (like attracting customers, managing a storefront, and maintaining inventory across many products). So a one-size-fits-all management training intervention may have disappointing results. (Huntington, de la Parra, and Shenoy)  

Labor (including child labor)

• In Uganda, an experiment with job referrals reveals that gender discrimination exists in both directions (favoring the majority gender in a given sector) but that it's worse in male-dominated sectors. But when men can make referrals anonymously, they discriminate less. (Alfonsi and Ferreira) #RCT
• A subsidy to help people find jobs in Ethiopia seems to have smaller effects when more people participate (i.e., general equilibrium effects). The net impact on people's wellbeing still seems to be positive. (Van Vuren) #RCT
• If the unemployment rate is 1 percent higher at the time a person first starts looking for a job in Indonesia, that person is likely to have worse long-term economic prospects: 21 percent lower income and 7 percent lower likelihood of being employed. These effects are smaller than those in high-income settings. (Marshan) #FE
• When farmers in Burundi train their workers, they don't capture all the benefits, since the workers often take those skills and work for others. A contract that keeps workers with the same employer boosts employers' willingness to train massively (by 50 percentage points). (Cefala et al.) #RCT
• A comprehensive training and mentoring program targeted to youth at risk in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) boosts employment among men but it also—surprisingly—boosts fertility and subsequently welfare receipts among women. (Barros et al.) #RCT
• How much a person is willing to work may in part just be driven by getting used to working. In Chennai (India), providing casual workers with incentives to work over a couple of months boosted how much they worked during that time (by 23 percent), and those same workers worked 16 percent in the following two months, after incentives were removed. (Cefala et al.) #RCT

Governments, institutions, and conflict

Conflict and crime.

• Which connections do people value most in times of crisis? During social unrest in Haiti, daily contacts decrease but total talk time remains constant. Checking in on close friends, family, and others remains a priority. (Putman and Lybbert) #DID
• Historical genocide violence of the Cambodian population impacts today’s household wealth and village-level poverty rates, driven by lower human capital, limited structural transformation, and restricted public goods provision. (Mehrotra) #IV
• In Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), installing peacemaker units of police officers reduced crime rates, which boosted available credit, which in turn further reduced crime. (Tomkowski, Monteiro, and Caluz) #DID
• Sanctioning public acts of repression, such as beating or arrests of protesters, can encourage a regime to prevent protest through less-public means, such as obstruction or harassment of organizers (based on data from 150 countries). (Andirin et al.) #FE
• The political leaning of Brazilian players during the 2022 World Cup affected fans’ reactions depending on their political alignment. Celebrations after goals scored by a player were more intense among politically congruent fans. (Ajzenman, Ferman and Sant'Anna) #RCT
• In southern Ethiopia, areas with more droughts also have more violent conflict. But when herders get and use insurance to protect against drought, it reduces conflict significantly (between 17 and 50 percent). (Sakketa, Maggio, and McPeak) #RCT
• A law in Brazil requiring firms with more than a hundred workers to reserve at least two percent of their job openings for people with disabilities increased employment of people with disabilities. When firms got fined for not meeting the quota, nearby firms—even those not covered by the law—also boosted their disability employment. (Berlinski and Gagete-Miranda) #DID
• In Uruguay, introducing individual retirement accounts as a complement to the traditional defined benefit pension led more people to work into their fifties. It also may have reduced tax evasion. In early old age, people had similar income levels across the two systems, but when people had the chance to go back to the defined benefit system, many did. (Lauletta and Bérgolo) #RD
• If the government doesn't enforce people sticking to contracts, how do they work? Gamblers on horse races in Pakistan provide a window, since such betting is illegal and so the government doesn't enforce the contracts. "Even in the absence of legal enforcement authority, personal relationships, and violence, more than 70% of gamblers fulfill their contractual obligations." (Mehmood and Chen) #RCT
• South African municipalities with higher historical exposure to post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commissions on media have lower levels of violence today. (Gautier, Horta-Saenz, and Russo) #FE
• Losing a sibling during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide leads to more schooling and more siblings born after the genocide. (Gautier) #IV

Regulation, tax, and government

• In Indonesia, “electoral defeats of the incumbent village head increase turnover in the village bureaucracy and reduce nepotism.” (Bazzi et al.) #RD
• In India, after a bureaucrat is transferred to an important ministry with the power to make influential policies, the annual growth rate of the value of the bureaucrat’s assets is 10 percent higher, and it’s 4.4 percent higher for the number of their assets. (Chaudhury and Yuan) #DID
• In China, “over 65% scoring auctions in public procurement show evidence of scoring rule manipulation.” (Chen) #FE
• In Brazil, “high-ability students in (anti-corruption) audited municipalities are less likely to choose majors tailored toward public sector careers, such as business administration and law.” (Xun) #DID
• In rural Bangladesh, the introduction of Village Courts more than doubled the share of disputes resolved in state-sanctioned courts, but the informal dispute resolution mechanism “shalish” remains most used. (Mattsson and Mobarak) #RCT
• A comparative welfare analysis of 40 policies implemented in low- and middle-income countries since 1997 shows that the marginal value is low. (Morris)  
• Successful democratizations lead to substantial redistribution: the size of the public sector grows, income inequality falls, and the labor share of income rises, according to data from 90 countries. (Miller) #DID
• In India, “local democracy aligns spending more closely with citizen preferences, but these gains accrue more to men, upper castes, and other advantaged social groups.” (Arora et al.) #FE #DID
• In Brazil, “when a young politician is in office, there is a reduction in deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions without significant effects on local GDP.” (Dahis, de las Heras, Saavedra)   #RD #DID
• Appointing “a new city party secretary (PS), who serves as the leader of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organization, is associated with a significant increase in the revealed comparative advantage in industries where the PS’s previous work location exhibited better performance.” (Lin et al.) #FE
• Electoral turnovers improve country performance. “Electing new leaders leads to more policy change, it improves governance, and it reduces perceived corruption,” based on data from over 4,000 national elections since 1945. (Marx, Pons, and Rollet) #RD
• In Senegal, bureaucrats with full discretion for building the lists of potential property tax payers tend to undervalue properties, and they do so even more for higher-value properties, resulting in a regressive tax profile. “In contrast, a rule-based system where bureaucrats record property characteristics (not values) that an algorithm then uses to compute values, significantly reduces this tax gap.” (Knebelmann, Pouliquen, and Sarr) #RCT
• In Uzbekistan, mandating the use of online electronic fiscal devices, which provide regulators with real-time information on business transactions, increases company revenue reports to tax authorities by 13 percent. Adding a direct communication channel with citizens and financial rewards to act as enforcement agents increases firms’ reported revenues by an additional 34 percent. (Kobilov) #DID 
• Research projects developed in partnership with policymakers are 17 to 20 percentage points more likely to result in observed policy change. (Bonargent)
• Do religions codify ecological principles? In Benin, a 1 SD increase in African Traditional Religions adherence has a 0.4 SD positive impact on forest cover change. (Deopa and Rinaldo) #IV
• When Israel reduced child allowances to large families in 2003, Jewish families substituted by enrolling their young boys in ultra-Orthodox religious schools. In the long-term, fewer boys enrolled in high schools, without affecting families’ fertility or labor supply decisions. The reform led to a 13 percent decline in completed fertility among Arab families. (Gershoni et al.) #RD
• In Brazil, exposure to a church-affiliated TV channel increases fertility rates, lowers female labor force participation, lowers schooling for young women in the next generation, and leads to more votes for Pentecostal candidates. (Mello and Buccione) #DID
• In Brazil, the removal of progressive Catholic leaders halted the land invasion movement, a conflict in which poor and landless peasants invaded large landholdings to force land redistribution. (Martinez-Bravo, Solá, and Tuñón) #FE
• Hate or fear? In the ongoing conflict between Christians and Muslims in Jos (Nigeria), fear explains 76 percent, and hate 24 percent of the non-cooperative behavior. (Ortiz) #RCT 
• Climate change leads to welfare losses of 4.8 percent of GDP across 271 regions in sub-Saharan Africa, with country-level losses as high as 43.8 percent of GDP. “Lowering trade costs can offset these losses by connecting deficit regions to surplus regions and the world market.” (Porteous)
• In South Korea, under a better bureaucrat, exports increased by 40 percent. "In subsequent appointments, exports increase in products with greater bureaucrat experience." (Barteska and Lee) #FE
• Giving information on tariff costs and local prices to traders (via a cell phone platform) at the Kenya-Uganda border increases switching across markets and routes, leading to large increases in traders’ profits and significant formalization of trade. (Wiseman) #RCT

Agriculture, infrastructure, and the environment

Agriculture and land.

• In India, redistribution of land ownership led to an overall increase in durable asset ownership, nonfarm employment and years of schooling, including among lower-caste descendants of households that did not receive land. (Batra) #RD
• Households’ agricultural production in Côte d’Ivoire improves during the agricultural season overlapping with oxen delivery, and increases in land holdings and input use in the subsequent season. (Brudevold-Newman, Donald, and Rouanet) #RCT
• In Kenya, an information campaign (training farmers to identify hybrid maize seeds that are quality-verified) improved farmers' purchasing decisions and led to gains in maize yields. While improved information caused sellers to exit the market, there are no effects on prices or quality among stayers. (Hsu and Wambugu) #RCT
• Increasing agricultural technologies cannot rely on market prices as a mechanism for targeting high-return farmers. In Bangladesh, when farmers receive a new wheat seed variety for free, they adopt it as much as farmers that chose to buy it at a subsidized price. (Mahmoud) #RCT
• Improving the allocation of inputs (like land, labor, and credit) across farms in Thailand could boost productivity by more than a third. But improving allocation of multiple inputs is more productive than focusing entirely on improving allocation of just one input. (Silver)  
• A government program to subsidize the price of fertilizer encouraged farmers to specialize based on their comparative advantage: some boosted their agricultural yields; others left agriculture. (Diop) #DID
• Social networks are key to people adopting new agricultural technology. But in Malawi (and a theoretical model predicts similar results elsewhere), using people with lots of connections to get farmers to adopt new seeds works best when lots of farmers in the network have similar farms (so that the seeds are similarly likely to work). (Chakraborty) #FE

Climate and pollution

• Increasing water prices led to a decline in water use of richer households in Cape Town (South Africa). However, richer households substituted municipal water with privately drilled groundwater. (Cole et al.)
• In Mozambique, “providing information on flood risk [such as physical damage and disease outbreaks] increased the implementation of suggested mitigation strategies.” (Leefers) #RCT
• In the Philippines, large-scale tree planting reduced regional poverty and increased economic activity. (Pagel and Sileci) #DID
• In Vietnam, rising temperatures lead more workers to move from agriculture into other industries, both in the short run and the long run. (Pham) #FE
• Reducing localized emissions from vehicles within India’s 10 largest cities leads to a 3 times larger GDP gain than a policy controlling agricultural fires. “Further accounting for labor reallocation leads to a 6 times larger GDP gain.” (Tiwari)
• In Colombia, “extreme temperature events increase the frequency of land sales and decrease the average farm size within municipalities.” (Arteaha et al.) #FE
• In India, industrial water pollution does not seem to affect crop yields. Farmers respond to industrial water pollution by switching irrigation sources from surface water to (costly) groundwater and expanding irrigation. (Hagerty and Tiwari) #RD
• To address sea level rise, the Indonesian government proposed a sea wall. Moral hazard generates severe lock-in and limits migration inland, even over the long run. (Hsiao) #RD
• The 2009 tightening of environmental standards in the US shifted used lead-acid battery recycling, an industry that emits large amounts of lead pollution, to Mexico. Lead pollution exposure reduced students’ text scores by 0.05-0.09 standard deviations. (Litzow et al.) #DID
• The Green Municipalities Program in the Brazilian Amazon (PMV) increased secondary forest cover (in places that have been previously deforested) by 9 percent. (Shinde et al.) #DID
• In Nairobi (Kenya), improved stove ownership reduced high-frequency particulate matter (PM) exposure from 122 µg/m3 to 49 µg/m3, with a 0.24 SD reduction in self-reported respiratory health symptoms. (Berkouwer and Dean) #RCT
• The beef cattle sector drives deforestation worldwide. In the Brazilian Amazon, large intermediaries drive down prices for farmer and cattle supply, but the deforestation frontier is largely competitive and thus emissions remain unaffected. (Barrozo) #IV

Infrastructure and transport

• Chinese infrastructure projects significantly increased nighttime light in the African recipient regions, and the effects persist over time. World Bank projects, however, did not exhibit significant impacts on nighttime light. World Bank and Chinese infrastructure projects both positively influence women’s education attainment and health. (Chai and Tang)  
• Motortaxi drivers in Uganda admire other drivers who speed. Drivers are more likely to want financial incentives to limit speeding if those incentives are visible, so they can use them to justify their reduced speed to other drivers. (Raisaro) #RCT
• In Mexico, urban localities that spent an additional month downwind from a 0.1 degree × 0.1 degree grid cell that has adopted conservation agriculture experience a 1.3 percent reduction in the number of infant deaths. (Ferguson and Govaerts) #ES #DID
• Discontinuous incentives around the range thresholds of Chinese driving-range-based subsidies made low-end electric vehicle manufacturers’ invest in reducing the production costs of driving ranges by 30 percentage points. (Zhang) #FE
• “Commuters in Jakarta (Indonesia) are 2-4 times more sensitive to wait time compared to time on the bus, and inattentive to long routes.” (Kreindler et al.) #DID
• “Winning random lotteries for the ownership of condominium houses in Ethiopia leads to significant gains in educational attainment: educational enrollment increases by 4.5-11%, secondary school completion rates by 10.5% and post-secondary attendance rates by 16%.” (Agness and Getahun) #IV

The order of authors on this blog was determined by a virtual coin flip. This blog post benefited from research assistance by Amina Mendez Acosta and editing by Jeremy Gaines . A version of this post will also appear on the CGD Blog.

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Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development

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IP, Inflation, and Liquidity Premia

Find research from economists Ana Maria Santacreu  on intellectual property rights in Review of Economics and Statistics and Fernando Martin on inflation and liquidity premia in Review of Economic Dynamics .

Hannah Rubinton

St. Louis Fed Economists Support Wider Efforts

Oksana Leukhina serves on the  Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute  and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria is secretary of the Society for Economic Dynamics to support impactful economic research.

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Throughout the year, there are always many opportunities available to undergraduates to enhance your knowledge and experience in the field of Economics.  Below are different types of opportunities currently available.

The Ec Department runs a  Semester Undergraduate Program for Economics Research  (SUPER), which pairs students with faculty for semester-long RA positions. The application and hiring cycle for Fall 2023 is now closed. The Spring 2024 cycle will accept applications starting in Dec/Jan. Please stay tuned  on our website  (and make sure you are signed up on our listserv to hear when SUPER is accepting applications).

Types of Opportunities:

Jobs, Research Analysts or Assistantships, Internships   For Seniors   Funding Opportunities   Other Interesting Opportunities

Jobs, Research Analysts or Assistantships, Internships

Research Assistant : Lydia Assouad (London School of Economics), Giulia Buccione (Brown University), and Emma Smith (Harvard University) seek a GIS Research Assistant to join their team for 1-2 months part-time, with the possibility of extension. Deadline: none given (posted 5/13/2024)

Laboratory Assistants : The Behavioral Lab (BeLab) at the Harvard Business School is hiring 1 – 2 laboratory assistants to assist in lab operations, data collection, and subject pool recruitment for summer 2024. Deadline: none given (posted 5/13/2024)

Research Assistant : Ana Antolin, PhD Candidate in Strategy at Harvard Business School, seeks one to two undergraduate research assistants to assist with various aspects of the research process, including working on background research on state-level gaming laws and legal precedent. Deadline: none given (posted 4/10/2024)

Student Trainee (summer intern) : The Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission seek interns for Summer 2024. They are looking for advanced undergraduate economics students who are interested in exploring graduate school (such as those considering a pre-doc for the fall of 2025) or economic policy jobs after graduation. They are especially interested in students with substantive experience analyzing data in Stata, R, or Python, and excellent written and oral communication skills. Deadline: rolling basis (posted 3/28/2024)

Research Assistant: Jared Ellias, professor at Harvard Law School, seeks full-time summer research assistants for empirical research on corporate bankruptcy and financial distress. Tasks will include reading and analyzing legal documents and business and financial data. To apply, please email Professor Ellias’ assistant Alina Kilcoyne ( [email protected] ) with a resume, transcript and a short cover email detailing your familiarity with statistical analysis and Python.  Prior familiarity with financial data, corporate law or bankruptcy is not necessary.  Programming experience is not necessary but is helpful. Deadline: none given (posted 3/11/2024)

Research Assistant: Econometrics tutoring help needed for 10-20 hours for Visiting Fellow. Undergraduate or graduate student who is proficient in using STATA, R, and EVIEWS is desired for part time assistance.  Knowledge of Python will be considered an added advantage. Pay scale negotiable. If interested, please send your resume to Prof. Richard Peiser at [email protected] . Deadline: none given (posted 2/5/2024)

Research Assistant : PhD students in the Harvard economics department (Matthew Lee Chen, Eu-Wayne Mok, and Yu-Jia Wang) seek research assistants to help with data collection for an early-stage project that explores how the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia conditioned political change in China over the course of the 20th century. Applicants considered on a rolling basis and should apply as soon as possible. Deadline: none given (posted 2/2/2024)

Research Assistant : PhD student in the Harvard economics department (Matthew Lee Chen) seeks part-time research assistants for a project that seeks to understand how European exploration around the world conditioned a “culture of science” and imperialism at home. Deadline: none given (posted 2/2/2024)

Summer 2024 Internship : Abdiel Capital seeks summer interns to read financial reports, interview sources, and collect and analyze data. Deadline: none given (posted 2/2/2024)

Summer 24 Internship : The D. E. Shaw group seeks students with an expected grad term of Spring 2025 to apply to their summer 2024 internship program. Deadline: none given (posted 12/27/2023)

Research Assistant : PhD student seeks a research assistant to work on an ongoing project focusing on the intersection between the peace processes and on-the-ground conflict. The role will mainly require scraping data, training a language model, and labelling data. If interested, email Emily Silcock at [email protected] . Deadline: none given (posted 12/27/2023)

Research Assistant : PhD student seeks a research assistant to work on an ongoing project focusing on the intersection between the peace processes and on-the-ground conflict. The role will mainly require combing through news reports to find details of their peace processes. If interested, email Emily Silcock at [email protected] . Deadline: none given (posted 12/27/2023)

Research Assistant : Dr. Ashley Nunes (Harvard Law) is seeking an undergraduate research assistant to work on a project on the economics of decarbonization. Deadline: none given (posted 11/21/2023)

Research Assistant : Professor Leo Bursztyn (UChicago Economics) and Aakaash Rao (Harvard Economics) seek an undergraduate research assistant to work on a project on American political campaigns. Deadline: none given (posted 10/10/2023)

Research Assistant : Professor Alisha Holland (Government, Harvard) seeks a part-time RA with a strong command of Stata to help build and analyze a dataset of international infrastructure contracts for a study of electoral cycles in infrastructure contracting in the developing world. Deadline: none given (posted 9/1/2023)

Research Assistant : Jared Ellias, a professor at Harvard Law School, seeks a Fall Semester research assistant through the Institute for Quantitative Social Science for empirical research on corporate bankruptcy and financial distress. To apply, contact Alina Kilcoyne ( [email protected] ) with necessary materials. Deadline: none given (posted 8/30/2023)

Research Assistant : The Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution lab at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology seeks an RA for the Fall semester to work on a variety of computational and programming tasks. If interested, contact Mona Xue at [email protected] . Deadline: none given (posted 8/14/2023)

Various Summer Research Assistantships at the National Bureau of Economic Research

• Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers (PREDOC) : A one-stop place where undergraduate students from any backgrounds can find all the information they need, including available RA job positions around the country, educational material to prepare for e.g. data tests, guidance on courses to take, testimonials, and more.  
• NBER RA page . Aggregates RA searches by NBER fellows. 

For Seniors

Research Analyst : The energy team in Goldman Sachs Macro Research seeks an analyst with strong programming skillsets and a keen interest in economics to join Energy Research team within Commodities Research. The Energy group focuses on developing forecasting models across energy markets - including demand, supply and prices - as well as framing the ongoing energy transition. Deadline: none given (posted 5/7/2024)

Research Assistant : The Mongan Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital seeks a full-time Research Assistant II to support the research activities of investigators within the Health Policy Research Center. Deadline: none given (posted 4/29/2024)

Faculty Research Analyst :  Business Economics and Public Policy (BEPP) at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania seeks a faculty research analyst to analyze data, develop statistical models, conduct literature reviews, create presentations, and edit research papers. Deadline: none given (posted 4/26/2024)

Analyst/Associate : Charles River Associates seeks an associate for their Antitrust and Competition Economics practice, providing economic analysis, advice, and testimony for antitrust and merger cases worldwide. Deadline: none given (posted 4/25/2024)

Post-doctoral Fellow : The Golub Capital Social Impact Lab in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford seeks fellows for a two year post-doctoral fellowship in field experiments for impact driven social science research working with The Economics of Technology professor Susan Athey and other affiliates of the GC Lab. Deadline: none given (posted 2/29/2024)

Post-doctoral Fellow : The Golub Capital Social Impact Lab in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford seeks fellows for a two year post-doctoral fellowship in applied causal inference with machine learning methods working with The Economics of Technology professor Susan Athey and other affiliates of the GC Lab. Deadline: none given (posted 2/29/2024)

Research Assistant : The Aspen Economic Strategy Group (AESG) seeks a Research Assistant to support its work promoting evidence-based economic policy and support AESG’s Director and Policy Director, both PhD Economists, by producing original economic research and editing commissioned papers. Deadline: none given (posted 2/26/2024)

Economist : Decision Economics, Inc. (DE) seeks a full-time economist to join their economic analysis and quantitative econometric model-based information system forecasting firm serving Corporations, Financial Institutions (Banks, Asset Managers and Traders), and Individuals. Part-time hours are possible for the right candidate. Deadline: none given (posted 1/22/2024)

Research Staff Associate : Columbia Business School seeks a Research Staff Associate for the Economics Division to work on empirical and theoretical research on sovereign debt, the emergence, propagation, and resolution of sovereign debt crises. Deadline: none given (posted 1/3/2024)

Pre-doctoral Researcher : Professors Tong Liu, Lira Mota, Christopher Palmer, and Kerry Siani seek full-time pre-doctoral research fellows for up to two years starting summer 2024 to collaborate on empirical projects in the fields of corporate finance, capital markets, macro-finance, entrepreneurial finance, household finance, and micro-econometrics. Deadline: none given (posted 12/13/2023)

Pre-doctoral Researcher : Professors Joseph Doyle, Alexey Makarin, and Benjamin Vatter seek full-time pre-doctoral researchers to collaborate at all stages of the research process on new and ongoing empirical projects in applied economics. Deadline: none given (posted 12/13/2023)

Pre-doctoral Researcher : Professor Mert Demirer, MIT Sloan, and Michael Rubens, UCLA, seek full-time research assistants for summer 2024 to collaborate on projects in industrial organization. Deadline: none given (posted 12/13/2023)

Pre-doctoral Researcher : David Thesmar & Emil Verner, MIT Sloan, seek fulltime Technical Associates for at least one year, ideally two, beginning in July, 2024 to collaborate in all stages of the research process on a number of new and ongoing empirical projects in the fields of financial economics and macroeconomics. Deadline: none given (posted 12/13/2023)

Pre-doctoral Researcher : Professors Charles Angelucci and Alexey Makarin at MIT Sloan School of Management seek a full-time Predoctoral Technical Associate to help conduct research for several projects in the areas of Political Economy, Economics of Media, Applied Microeconomics in Summer 2024. Deadline: none given (posted 11/22/2023)

Research Assistant : The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) seeks full-time, in-person research assistants to work with senior economists on a wide variety of economic policy issues related to the US economy, tax policy, international finance, political economy, financial services, and health care. Deadline: none given (posted 10/30/2023)

Research Fellow : Prof Marcella Alsan, Director of the Health Inequality Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, seeks full-time predoctoral research fellows to start in Summer 2024 to support and collaborate on a series of projects related to the economics of health inequality within the U.S. and around the globe. Deadline: none given (posted 10/26/2023)

Strategy Associate : The Fidelity Foundations’ Strategy & Impact team seeks an associate for a strategy consulting role in social impact, with opportunity for learning and growth. Deadline: none given (posted 10/4/2023)

Research Professional :  The Booth School of Business at University of Chicago seeks full-time research assistants for a period of at least one year starting in Summer 2024. Deadline: none given (posted 10/3/2023)

Predoctoral Research Assistants : The Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance at Princeton University seeks predoctoral research assistants interested in macroeconomics and finance, to start in summer 2024. Deadline: none given (posted 9/29/2023)

Associate : Secretariat, an international consulting firm, seeks Associates for Summer 2024 starts in its Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA offices. The Associate position is an entry-level position with opportunities for advancement. Deadline: none given (posted 9/21/2023)

Economics Consulting Analyst/Associate : Charles River Associates seeks analysts at a variety of practices and locations. Deadline: none given (9/12/2023)

Research Assistant : Economics professors Dan Benjamin (UCLA), David Cesarini (NYU), Patrick Turley (USC), statistical geneticist Alex Young (UCLA), and their co-authors seek full‐time research assistants at UCLA with start dates during the summer of 2024. Deadline: none given (posted 9/12/2023)

Director’s Financial Analyst Program : The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are recruiting for the Director’s Financial Analyst (DFA) position to start in June 2024. The DFA offers two-year full-time rotational fellowships designed to engage new entry professionals in public service work. Deadline: none given (posted 9/12/2023)

Pre-Doctoral Fellowship : Economics professors David Laibson (Harvard University), James Choi (Yale University), and John Beshears (Harvard Business School) seek a full‐time predoctoral fellow for mid-June 2024, lasting until mid-July 2025, with a potential second-year renewal. This will involve work on theoretical and empirical research related to behavioral economics, decision making, household finance, and health behaviors. Deadline: none given (posted 8/31/2023)

Research Assistant : The Federal Reserve system seeks research assistants for Spring and Summer of 2024 to work closely with economists on a variety of research questions and real-world policy issues. Deadline: none given (posted 8/30/2023)

Research Assistant Program : The International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeks recent grads for their Research Assistant Program (RAP). Deadline: none given (posted 8/30/2023)

Compilation of job opportunities for graduating seniors interested in research-based careers ​.

Funding Opportunities

Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund:  Funding opportunities for advancing diversity, inclusion, and belonging through technology driven solutions. All Harvard students, staff, faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and academic personnel are eligible to apply. 

• All  Harvard Fellowships  from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowship
• Harvard College Funding Sources Database  
• Harvard University CARAT  ( Common Application for Funding and Travel)
• Making the Most of Funding Sources at Harvard ( Powerpoint )
• Various links for funding opportunities in economics
• Echoing Green Fellowships  for funding opportunities social entrepreneurship
• Frank N. Newman Undergraduate Research Fund in Economics , rolling acceptance
• The Davis Center  for research related to Russia and Eurasia.
• Ec Dept Undergraduate Research and Travel Fund , rolling acceptance (thesis writers only)
• IQSS-OTD Entrepreneurship Program

Other Interesting Opportunities

Participedia Summer School : Participedia seeks participants for their summer school program on Transnational Democratic Innovations taking place in person at three locations from June 10-15, 2024, held in partnership with Memorial University, the University of the Western Cape, McMaster University, the Coady Institute, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Innovation for Policy Foundation, Missions Publiques, and Democracy International. Deadline: none given (posted 2/27/2024)

Zotero Workshops :  Attend a Zotero class to learn how to easily save references, organize PDFs, create in-text citations & footnotes, and create bibliographies automatically. 

MATLAB Boot Camp : The primary objective is to familiarize students with the MATLAB computational environment.  This boot camp does not suppose any prior experience with MATLAB or computation.

• Python Boot Camp : The Python Boot Camp is designed to provide an introduction to coding in Python. It assumes zero prior knowledge of Python or programming in general.

Qualitative Research Workshops : Harvard Library workshops for students interested in using qualitative data and doing interview-based research.

The Harvard Undergraduate Economics Association : HUEA is a forum for all students concentrating or interested in economics providing academic, professional, and social support through student mixers and intercollegiate networking events, career and internship panels, and topical discussions with faculty and professional economists. 

• Harvard Undergrads for Inclusion in Economics (HUIE) works directly with the Harvard Economics Department to create a more diverse and inclusive community within the field.  Join the club to help foster a supportive Economics community, learn more about research in Economics, and/or sign-up for their peer mentorship program. You can also follow HUIE on Twitter.  
• Interested in Study Abroad ? Meet with Office of International Education (OIE) staff and student advisers during drop-ins Monday-Thursdays, 2-4pm to chat about the vast range of academic opportunities.
• Sophomores interested in spending junior spring at Oxford or Cambridge, applications are due in January and February. View an Oxford Visiting Student panel recording to learn more!
• Enjoy coffee on the OIE with one of your fellow Economics concentrators, Kate Downey and Dan Contreras , or any of the OIE Student Adviser team members! Reach out to schedule a time to connect.
• It’s never too early to start planning. Summer and fall term applications are due in early spring and spring term applications are due in early fall.
• Hear from fellow Economics Concentrators who are willing to share their study abroad experiences with you.
• Follow the Instagram stories of students abroad this term at HarvardOIE !
• Feel free to reach out to the OIE team ( [email protected] ) and Nicole Garcia ( [email protected] ) with any questions or concerns.  

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The Future of Jobs Report 2023

The Future of Jobs Report 2023 explores how jobs and skills will evolve over the next five years. This fourth edition of the series continues the analysis of employer expectations to provide new insights on how socio-economic and technology trends will shape the workplace of the future.

Economic, health and geopolitical trends have created divergent outcomes for labour markets globally in 2023. While tight labour markets are prevalent in high-income countries, low- and lower-middle-income countries continue to see higher unemployment than before the COVID-19 pandemic. On an individual level, labour-market outcomes are also diverging, as workers with only basic education and women face lower employment levels. At the same time, real wages are declining as a result of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and changing worker expectations and concerns about the quality of work are becoming more prominent issues globally.

The fourth edition of the Survey has the widest coverage thus far by topic, geography and sector. The Future of Jobs Survey brings together the perspective of 803 companies – collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers – across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions. The Survey covers questions of macrotrends and technology trends, their impact on jobs, their impact on skills, and the workforce transformation strategies businesses plan to use, across the 2023-2027 timeframe.

Technology adoption will remain a key driver of business transformation in the next five years. Over 85% of organizations surveyed identify increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organization. Broader application of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards within their organizations will also have a significant impact. The next most-impactful trends are macroeconomic: the rising cost of living and slow economic growth. The impact of investments to drive the green transition was judged to be the sixth-most impactful macrotrend, followed by supply shortages and consumer expectations around social and environmental issues. Though still expected to drive the transformation of almost half of companies in the next five years, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased geopolitical divisions and demographic dividends in developing and emerging economies were ranked lower as drivers of business evolution by respondents.

The largest job creation and destruction effects come from environmental, technology and economic trends. Among the macrotrends listed, businesses predict the strongest net job-creation effect to be driven by investments that facilitate the green transition of businesses, the broader application of ESG standards and supply chains becoming more localized, albeit with job growth offset by partial job displacement in each case. Climate change adaptation and the demographic dividend in developing and emerging economies also rate high as net job creators. Technological advancement through increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and increased digital access are expected to drive job growth in more than half of surveyed companies, offset by expected job displacement in one-fifth of companies. The net job creation effect places these two trends in 6th and 8th place respectively. The three key drivers of expected net job destruction are slower economic growth, supply shortages and the rising cost of inputs, and the rising cost of living for consumers. Employers also recognize that increased geopolitical divisions and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will drive labour-market disruption – with an even split between employers who expect these trends to have a positive impact and employers who expect them to have a negative impact on jobs.

Within technology adoption, big data, cloud computing and AI feature highly on likelihood of adoption. More than 75% of companies are looking to adopt these technologies in the next five years. The data also shows the impact of the digitalization of commerce and trade. Digital platforms and apps are the technologies most likely to be adopted by the organizations surveyed, with 86% of companies expecting to incorporate them into their operations in the next five years. E-commerce and digital trade are expected to be adopted by 75% of businesses. The second-ranked technology encompasses education and workforce technologies, with 81% of companies looking to adopt these technologies by 2027. The adoption of robots, power storage technology and distributed ledger technologies rank lower on the list.

The impact of most technologies on jobs is expected to be a net positive over the next five years. Big data analytics, climate change and environmental management technologies, and encryption and cybersecurity are expected to be the biggest drivers of job growth. Agriculture technologies, digital platforms and apps, e-commerce and digital trade, and AI are all expected to result in significant labour-market disruption, with substantial proportions of companies forecasting job displacement in their organizations, offset by job growth elsewhere to result in a net positive. All but two technologies are expected to be net job creators in the next five years: humanoid robots and non-humanoid robots.

Employers anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23% of jobs in the next five years. This can be interpreted as an aggregate measure of disruption, constituting a mixture of emerging jobs added and declining jobs eliminated. Respondents to this year’s Future of Jobs Survey expect a higher-than-average churn in the Supply Chain and Transportation and Media, Entertainment and Sports industries, and lower-than-average churn in Manufacturing as well as Retail and Wholesale of Consumer Goods. Of the 673 million jobs reflected in the dataset in this report, respondents expect structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million jobs. This corresponds to a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment.

The human-machine frontier has shifted, with businesses introducing automation into their operations at a slower pace than previously anticipated. Organizations today estimate that 34% of all business-related tasks are performed by machines, with the remaining 66% performed by humans. This represents a negligible 1% increase in the level of automation that was estimated by respondents to the 2020 edition of the Future of Jobs Survey. This pace of automation contradicts expectations from 2020 survey respondents that almost half (47%) of business tasks would be automated in the following five years. Today, respondents have revised down their expectations for future automation to predict that 42% of business tasks will be automated by 2027. Task automation in 2027 is expected to vary from 35% of reasoning and decision-making to 65% of information and data processing.

But while expectations of the displacement of physical and manual work by machines has decreased, reasoning, communicating and coordinating – all traits with a comparative advantage for humans – are expected to be more automatable in the future. Artificial intelligence, a key driver of potential algorithmic displacement, is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies and is expected to lead to high churn – with 50% of organizations expecting it to create job growth and 25% expecting it to create job losses.

The combination of macrotrends and technology adoption will drive specific areas of job growth and decline:

- The fastest-growing roles relative to their size today are driven by technology, digitalization and sustainability. The majority of the fastest growing roles are technology-related roles. AI and Machine Learning Specialists top the list of fast-growing jobs, followed by Sustainability Specialists, Business Intelligence Analysts and Information Security Analysts. Renewable Energy Engineers, and Solar Energy Installation and System Engineers are relatively fast-growing roles, as economies shift towards renewable energy.

- The fastest-declining roles relative to their size today are driven by technology and digitalization. The majority of fastest declining roles are clerical or secretarial roles, with Bank Tellers and Related Clerks, Postal Service Clerks, Cashiers and Ticket Clerks, and Data Entry Clerks expected to decline fastest.

- Large-scale job growth is expected in education, agriculture and digital commerce and trade. Jobs in the Education industry are expected to grow by about 10%, leading to 3 million additional jobs for Vocational Education Teachers and University and Higher education Teachers. Jobs for agricultural professionals, especially Agricultural Equipment Operators, are expected to see an increase of around 30%, leading to an additional 3 million jobs. Growth is forecast in approximately 4 million digitally-enabled roles, such as E-Commerce Specialists, Digital Transformation Specialists, and Digital Marketing and Strategy Specialists.

- The largest losses are expected in administrative roles and in traditional security, factory and commerce roles. Surveyed organizations predict 26 million fewer jobs by 2027 in Record-Keeping and Administrative roles, including Cashiers and Ticket Clerks; Data Entry, Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll Clerks; and Administrative and Executive Secretaries, driven mainly by digitalization and automation.

Analytical thinking and creative thinking remain the most important skills for workers in 2023. Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by companies. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, ahead of three self-efficacy skills – resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; and curiosity and lifelong learning – in recognition of the importance of workers ability to adapt to disrupted workplaces. Dependability and attention to detail, ranks seventh, behind technological literacy. The core skills top 10 is completed by two attitudes relating to working with others – empathy and active listening and leadership and social influence – as well as quality control.

Employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Cognitive skills are reported to be growing in importance most quickly, reflecting the increasing importance of complex problem-solving in the workplace. Surveyed businesses report creative thinking to be growing in importance slightly more rapidly than analytical thinking. Technology literacy is the third-fastest growing core skill. Self-efficacy skills rank above working with others, in the rate of increase in importance of skills reported by businesses. The socio-emotional attitudes which businesses consider to be growing in importance most quickly are curiosity and lifelong learning; resilience, flexibility and agility; and motivation and self-awareness. Systems thinking, AI and big data, talent management, and service orientation and customer service complete the top 10 growing skills. While respondents judged no skills to be in net decline, sizable minorities of companies judge reading, writing and mathematics; global citizenship; sensory-processing abilities; and manual dexterity, endurance and precision to be of declining importance for their workers.

Six in 10 workers will require training before 2027, but only half of workers are seen to have access to adequate training opportunities today. The highest priority for skills training from 2023-2027 is analytical thinking, which is set to account for 10% of training initiatives, on average. The second priority for workforce development is to promote creative thinking, which will be the subject of 8% of upskilling initiatives. Training workers to utilize AI and big data ranks third among company skills-training priorities in the next five years and will be prioritized by 42% of surveyed companies. Employers also plan to focus on developing worker’s skills in leadership and social influence (40% of companies); resilience, flexibility and agility (32%); and curiosity and lifelong learning (30%). Two-thirds of companies expect to see a return on investment on skills training within a year of the investment, whether in the form of enhanced cross-role mobility, increased worker satisfaction or enhanced worker productivity.

The skills that companies report to be increasing in importance the fastest are not always reflected in corporate upskilling strategies. Beyond the top-ranked cognitive skills are two skills which companies prioritize much more highly than would appear according to their current importance to their workforce: AI and big data as well as leadership and social influence. Companies rank AI and big data 12 places higher in their skills strategies than in their evaluation of core skills, and report that they will invest an estimated 9% of their reskilling efforts in it – a greater proportion than the more highly-ranked creative thinking, indicating that though AI and big data is part of fewer strategies, it tends to be a more important element when it is included. Leadership and social influence ranks five places higher than suggested by its current importance and is the highest ranked attitude. Other skills which are strategically emphasized by business are design and user experience (nine places higher), environmental stewardship (10 places higher), marketing and media (six places higher) and networks and cybersecurity (five places higher).

Respondents express confidence in developing their existing workforce, however, they are less optimistic regarding the outlook for talent availability in the next five years. Accordingly, organizations identify skills gaps and an inability to attract talent as the key barriers preventing industry transformation. In response 48% of companies identify improving talent progression and promotion processes as a key business practice that can increase the availability of talent to their organization, ahead of offering higher wages (36%) and offering effective reskilling and upskilling (34%).

Surveyed companies report that investing in learning and on-the-job training and automating processes are the most common workforce strategies which will be adopted to deliver their organizations’ business goals. Four in five respondents expect to implement these strategies in the next five years. Workforce development is most commonly considered to be the responsibility of workers and managers, with 27% of training expected to be furnished by on-the-job training and coaching, ahead of the 23% by internal training departments and the 16% by employer-sponsored apprenticeships. To close skills gaps, respondents expect to reject external training solutions in favour of company-led initiatives.

A majority of companies will prioritize women (79%), youth under 25 (68%) and those with disabilities (51%) as part of their DEI programmes. A minority will prioritize those from a disadvantaged religious, ethnic or racial background (39%), workers over age 55 (36%), those who identify as LGBTQI+ (35%) and those from a low-income background (33%).

Forty-five percent of businesses see funding for skills training as an effective intervention available to governments seeking to connect talent to employment. Funding for skills training ranks ahead of flexibility on hiring and firing practices (33%), tax and other incentives for companies to improve wages (33%), improvements to school systems (31%) and changes to immigration laws on foreign talent (28%).

LC 2023 - Economics Important Information

Important information in relation to the assessment arrangements for Leaving Cert 2023 for ECONOMICS.

The Research Study has now been published on the SEC Website and is available  here  and also attached below.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets in a slower era

At a glance, macroeconomic challenges continued.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets: A slower era

If 2022 was a tale of two halves, with robust fundraising and deal activity in the first six months followed by a slowdown in the second half, then 2023 might be considered a tale of one whole. Macroeconomic headwinds persisted throughout the year, with rising financing costs, and an uncertain growth outlook taking a toll on private markets. Full-year fundraising continued to decline from 2021’s lofty peak, weighed down by the “denominator effect” that persisted in part due to a less active deal market. Managers largely held onto assets to avoid selling in a lower-multiple environment, fueling an activity-dampening cycle in which distribution-starved limited partners (LPs) reined in new commitments.

About the authors

This article is a summary of a larger report, available as a PDF, that is a collaborative effort by Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alastair Green , Paul Maia, Alexandra Nee , David Quigley , Aditya Sanghvi , Connor Mangan, John Spivey, Rahel Schneider, and Brian Vickery , representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice.

Performance in most private asset classes remained below historical averages for a second consecutive year. Decade-long tailwinds from low and falling interest rates and consistently expanding multiples seem to be things of the past. As private market managers look to boost performance in this new era of investing, a deeper focus on revenue growth and margin expansion will be needed now more than ever.

Perspectives on a slower era in private markets

Global fundraising contracted.

Fundraising fell 22 percent across private market asset classes globally to just over $1 trillion, as of year-end reported data—the lowest total since 2017. Fundraising in North America, a rare bright spot in 2022, declined in line with global totals, while in Europe, fundraising proved most resilient, falling just 3 percent. In Asia, fundraising fell precipitously and now sits 72 percent below the region’s 2018 peak.

Despite difficult fundraising conditions, headwinds did not affect all strategies or managers equally. Private equity (PE) buyout strategies posted their best fundraising year ever, and larger managers and vehicles also fared well, continuing the prior year’s trend toward greater fundraising concentration.

The numerator effect persisted

Despite a marked recovery in the denominator—the 1,000 largest US retirement funds grew 7 percent in the year ending September 2023, after falling 14 percent the prior year, for example 1 “U.S. retirement plans recover half of 2022 losses amid no-show recession,” Pensions and Investments , February 12, 2024. —many LPs remain overexposed to private markets relative to their target allocations. LPs started 2023 overweight: according to analysis from CEM Benchmarking, average allocations across PE, infrastructure, and real estate were at or above target allocations as of the beginning of the year. And the numerator grew throughout the year, as a lack of exits and rebounding valuations drove net asset values (NAVs) higher. While not all LPs strictly follow asset allocation targets, our analysis in partnership with global private markets firm StepStone Group suggests that an overallocation of just one percentage point can reduce planned commitments by as much as 10 to 12 percent per year for five years or more.

Despite these headwinds, recent surveys indicate that LPs remain broadly committed to private markets. In fact, the majority plan to maintain or increase allocations over the medium to long term.

Investors fled to known names and larger funds

Fundraising concentration reached its highest level in over a decade, as investors continued to shift new commitments in favor of the largest fund managers. The 25 most successful fundraisers collected 41 percent of aggregate commitments to closed-end funds (with the top five managers accounting for nearly half that total). Closed-end fundraising totals may understate the extent of concentration in the industry overall, as the largest managers also tend to be more successful in raising non-institutional capital.

While the largest funds grew even larger—the largest vehicles on record were raised in buyout, real estate, infrastructure, and private debt in 2023—smaller and newer funds struggled. Fewer than 1,700 funds of less than $1 billion were closed during the year, half as many as closed in 2022 and the fewest of any year since 2012. New manager formation also fell to the lowest level since 2012, with just 651 new firms launched in 2023.

Whether recent fundraising concentration and a spate of M&A activity signals the beginning of oft-rumored consolidation in the private markets remains uncertain, as a similar pattern developed in each of the last two fundraising downturns before giving way to renewed entrepreneurialism among general partners (GPs) and commitment diversification among LPs. Compared with how things played out in the last two downturns, perhaps this movie really is different, or perhaps we’re watching a trilogy reusing a familiar plotline.

Dry powder inventory spiked (again)

Private markets assets under management totaled $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023, and have grown nearly 20 percent per annum since 2018. Dry powder reserves—the amount of capital committed but not yet deployed—increased to $3.7 trillion, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Dry powder inventory—the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment—increased for the second consecutive year in PE, as new commitments continued to outpace deal activity. Inventory sat at 1.6 years in 2023, up markedly from the 0.9 years recorded at the end of 2021 but still within the historical range. NAV grew as well, largely driven by the reluctance of managers to exit positions and crystallize returns in a depressed multiple environment.

Private equity strategies diverged

Buyout and venture capital, the two largest PE sub-asset classes, charted wildly different courses over the past 18 months. Buyout notched its highest fundraising year ever in 2023, and its performance improved, with funds posting a (still paltry) 5 percent net internal rate of return through September 30. And although buyout deal volumes declined by 19 percent, 2023 was still the third-most-active year on record. In contrast, venture capital (VC) fundraising declined by nearly 60 percent, equaling its lowest total since 2015, and deal volume fell by 36 percent to the lowest level since 2019. VC funds returned –3 percent through September, posting negative returns for seven consecutive quarters. VC was the fastest-growing—as well as the highest-performing—PE strategy by a significant margin from 2010 to 2022, but investors appear to be reevaluating their approach in the current environment.

Private equity entry multiples contracted

PE buyout entry multiples declined by roughly one turn from 11.9 to 11.0 times EBITDA, slightly outpacing the decline in public market multiples (down from 12.1 to 11.3 times EBITDA), through the first nine months of 2023. For nearly a decade leading up to 2022, managers consistently sold assets into a higher-multiple environment than that in which they had bought those assets, providing a substantial performance tailwind for the industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in technology. After experiencing more than eight turns of multiple expansion from 2009 to 2021 (the most of any sector), technology multiples have declined by nearly three turns in the past two years, 50 percent more than in any other sector. Overall, roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals that were entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to market multiple expansion and leverage. Now, with falling multiples and higher financing costs, revenue growth and margin expansion are taking center stage for GPs.

Real estate receded

Demand uncertainty, slowing rent growth, and elevated financing costs drove cap rates higher and made price discovery challenging, all of which weighed on deal volume, fundraising, and investment performance. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent year over year, and funds returned −4 percent in the first nine months of the year, losing money for the first time since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity via redemptions in open-end vehicles, from which net outflows reached their highest level in at least two decades. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, with investors focusing on capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive. Rising interest rates widened bid–ask spreads and impaired deal volume across food groups, including in what were formerly hot sectors: multifamily and industrial.

Private debt pays dividends

Debt again proved to be the most resilient private asset class against a turbulent market backdrop. Fundraising declined just 13 percent, largely driven by lower commitments to direct lending strategies, for which a slower PE deal environment has made capital deployment challenging. The asset class also posted the highest returns among all private asset classes through September 30. Many private debt securities are tied to floating rates, which enhance returns in a rising-rate environment. Thus far, managers appear to have successfully navigated the rising incidence of default and distress exhibited across the broader leveraged-lending market. Although direct lending deal volume declined from 2022, private lenders financed an all-time high 59 percent of leveraged buyout transactions last year and are now expanding into additional strategies to drive the next era of growth.

Infrastructure took a detour

After several years of robust growth and strong performance, infrastructure and natural resources fundraising declined by 53 percent to the lowest total since 2013. Supply-side timing is partially to blame: five of the seven largest infrastructure managers closed a flagship vehicle in 2021 or 2022, and none of those five held a final close last year. As in real estate, investors shied away from core and core-plus investments in a higher-yield environment. Yet there are reasons to believe infrastructure’s growth will bounce back. Limited partners (LPs) surveyed by McKinsey remain bullish on their deployment to the asset class, and at least a dozen vehicles targeting more than $10 billion were actively fundraising as of the end of 2023. Multiple recent acquisitions of large infrastructure GPs by global multi-asset-class managers also indicate marketwide conviction in the asset class’s potential.

Private markets still have work to do on diversity

Private markets firms are slowly improving their representation of females (up two percentage points over the prior year) and ethnic and racial minorities (up one percentage point). On some diversity metrics, including entry-level representation of women, private markets now compare favorably with corporate America. Yet broad-based parity remains elusive and too slow in the making. Ethnic, racial, and gender imbalances are particularly stark across more influential investing roles and senior positions. In fact, McKinsey’s research  reveals that at the current pace, it would take several decades for private markets firms to reach gender parity at senior levels. Increasing representation across all levels will require managers to take fresh approaches to hiring, retention, and promotion.

Artificial intelligence generating excitement

The transformative potential of generative AI was perhaps 2023’s hottest topic (beyond Taylor Swift). Private markets players are excited about the potential for the technology to optimize their approach to thesis generation, deal sourcing, investment due diligence, and portfolio performance, among other areas. While the technology is still nascent and few GPs can boast scaled implementations, pilot programs are already in flight across the industry, particularly within portfolio companies. Adoption seems nearly certain to accelerate throughout 2024.

Private markets in a slower era

If private markets investors entered 2023 hoping for a return to the heady days of 2021, they likely left the year disappointed. Many of the headwinds that emerged in the latter half of 2022 persisted throughout the year, pressuring fundraising, dealmaking, and performance. Inflation moderated somewhat over the course of the year but remained stubbornly elevated by recent historical standards. Interest rates started high and rose higher, increasing the cost of financing. A reinvigorated public equity market recovered most of 2022’s losses but did little to resolve the valuation uncertainty private market investors have faced for the past 18 months.

Within private markets, the denominator effect remained in play, despite the public market recovery, as the numerator continued to expand. An activity-dampening cycle emerged: higher cost of capital and lower multiples limited the ability or willingness of general partners (GPs) to exit positions; fewer exits, coupled with continuing capital calls, pushed LP allocations higher, thereby limiting their ability or willingness to make new commitments. These conditions weighed on managers’ ability to fundraise. Based on data reported as of year-end 2023, private markets fundraising fell 22 percent from the prior year to just over $1 trillion, the largest such drop since 2009 (Exhibit 1).

The impact of the fundraising environment was not felt equally among GPs. Continuing a trend that emerged in 2022, and consistent with prior downturns in fundraising, LPs favored larger vehicles and the scaled GPs that typically manage them. Smaller and newer managers struggled, and the number of sub–$1 billion vehicles and new firm launches each declined to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Despite the decline in fundraising, private markets assets under management (AUM) continued to grow, increasing 12 percent to $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023. 2023 fundraising was still the sixth-highest annual haul on record, pushing dry powder higher, while the slowdown in deal making limited distributions.

Investment performance across private market asset classes fell short of historical averages. Private equity (PE) got back in the black but generated the lowest annual performance in the past 15 years, excluding 2022. Closed-end real estate produced negative returns for the first time since 2009, as capitalization (cap) rates expanded across sectors and rent growth dissipated in formerly hot sectors, including multifamily and industrial. The performance of infrastructure funds was less than half of its long-term average and even further below the double-digit returns generated in 2021 and 2022. Private debt was the standout performer (if there was one), outperforming all other private asset classes and illustrating the asset class’s countercyclical appeal.

Private equity down but not out

Higher financing costs, lower multiples, and an uncertain macroeconomic environment created a challenging backdrop for private equity managers in 2023. Fundraising declined for the second year in a row, falling 15 percent to $649 billion, as LPs grappled with the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions. Managers were on the fundraising trail longer to raise this capital: funds that closed in 2023 were open for a record-high average of 20.1 months, notably longer than 18.7 months in 2022 and 14.1 months in 2018. VC and growth equity strategies led the decline, dropping to their lowest level of cumulative capital raised since 2015. Fundraising in Asia fell for the fourth year of the last five, with the greatest decline in China.

Despite the difficult fundraising context, a subset of strategies and managers prevailed. Buyout managers collectively had their best fundraising year on record, raising more than $400 billion. Fundraising in Europe surged by more than 50 percent, resulting in the region’s biggest haul ever. The largest managers raised an outsized share of the total for a second consecutive year, making 2023 the most concentrated fundraising year of the last decade (Exhibit 2).

Despite the drop in aggregate fundraising, PE assets under management increased 8 percent to $8.2 trillion. Only a small part of this growth was performance driven: PE funds produced a net IRR of just 2.5 percent through September 30, 2023. Buyouts and growth equity generated positive returns, while VC lost money. PE performance, dating back to the beginning of 2022, remains negative, highlighting the difficulty of generating attractive investment returns in a higher interest rate and lower multiple environment. As PE managers devise value creation strategies to improve performance, their focus includes ensuring operating efficiency and profitability of their portfolio companies.

Deal activity volume and count fell sharply, by 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, which continued the slower pace set in the second half of 2022. Sponsors largely opted to hold assets longer rather than lock in underwhelming returns. While higher financing costs and valuation mismatches weighed on overall deal activity, certain types of M&A gained share. Add-on deals, for example, accounted for a record 46 percent of total buyout deal volume last year.

Real estate recedes

For real estate, 2023 was a year of transition, characterized by a litany of new and familiar challenges. Pandemic-driven demand issues continued, while elevated financing costs, expanding cap rates, and valuation uncertainty weighed on commercial real estate deal volumes, fundraising, and investment performance.

Managers faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in many years. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent to $125 billion. While fundraising challenges were widespread, they were not ubiquitous across strategies. Dollars continued to shift to large, multi-asset class platforms, with the top five managers accounting for 37 percent of aggregate closed-end real estate fundraising. In April, the largest real estate fund ever raised closed on a record $30 billion.

Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity through redemptions in open-end vehicles and reduced gross contributions to the lowest level since 2009. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, as investors turned their attention toward capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive.

In the United States, for instance, open-end funds, as represented by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Fund Index—Open-End Equity (NFI-OE), recorded $13 billion in net outflows in 2023, reversing the trend of positive net inflows throughout the 2010s. The negative flows mainly reflected $9 billion in core outflows, with core-plus funds accounting for the remaining outflows, which reversed a 20-year run of net inflows.

As a result, the NAV in US open-end funds fell roughly 16 percent year over year. Meanwhile, global assets under management in closed-end funds reached a new peak of $1.7 trillion as of June 2023, growing 14 percent between June 2022 and June 2023.

Real estate underperformed historical averages in 2023, as previously high-performing multifamily and industrial sectors joined office in producing negative returns caused by slowing demand growth and cap rate expansion. Closed-end funds generated a pooled net IRR of −3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2023, losing money for the first time since the global financial crisis. The lone bright spot among major sectors was hospitality, which—thanks to a rush of postpandemic travel—returned 10.3 percent in 2023. 2 Based on NCREIFs NPI index. Hotels represent 1 percent of total properties in the index. As a whole, the average pooled lifetime net IRRs for closed-end real estate funds from 2011–20 vintages remained around historical levels (9.8 percent).

Global deal volume declined 47 percent in 2023 to reach a ten-year low of $650 billion, driven by widening bid–ask spreads amid valuation uncertainty and higher costs of financing (Exhibit 3). 3 CBRE, Real Capital Analytics Deal flow in the office sector remained depressed, partly as a result of continued uncertainty in the demand for space in a hybrid working world.

During a turbulent year for private markets, private debt was a relative bright spot, topping private markets asset classes in terms of fundraising growth, AUM growth, and performance.

Fundraising for private debt declined just 13 percent year over year, nearly ten percentage points less than the private markets overall. Despite the decline in fundraising, AUM surged 27 percent to $1.7 trillion. And private debt posted the highest investment returns of any private asset class through the first three quarters of 2023.

Private debt’s risk/return characteristics are well suited to the current environment. With interest rates at their highest in more than a decade, current yields in the asset class have grown more attractive on both an absolute and relative basis, particularly if higher rates sustain and put downward pressure on equity returns (Exhibit 4). The built-in security derived from debt’s privileged position in the capital structure, moreover, appeals to investors that are wary of market volatility and valuation uncertainty.

Direct lending continued to be the largest strategy in 2023, with fundraising for the mostly-senior-debt strategy accounting for almost half of the asset class’s total haul (despite declining from the previous year). Separately, mezzanine debt fundraising hit a new high, thanks to the closings of three of the largest funds ever raised in the strategy.

Over the longer term, growth in private debt has largely been driven by institutional investors rotating out of traditional fixed income in favor of private alternatives. Despite this growth in commitments, LPs remain underweight in this asset class relative to their targets. In fact, the allocation gap has only grown wider in recent years, a sharp contrast to other private asset classes, for which LPs’ current allocations exceed their targets on average. According to data from CEM Benchmarking, the private debt allocation gap now stands at 1.4 percent, which means that, in aggregate, investors must commit hundreds of billions in net new capital to the asset class just to reach current targets.

Private debt was not completely immune to the macroeconomic conditions last year, however. Fundraising declined for the second consecutive year and now sits 23 percent below 2021’s peak. Furthermore, though private lenders took share in 2023 from other capital sources, overall deal volumes also declined for the second year in a row. The drop was largely driven by a less active PE deal environment: private debt is predominantly used to finance PE-backed companies, though managers are increasingly diversifying their origination capabilities to include a broad new range of companies and asset types.

Infrastructure and natural resources take a detour

For infrastructure and natural resources fundraising, 2023 was an exceptionally challenging year. Aggregate capital raised declined 53 percent year over year to $82 billion, the lowest annual total since 2013. The size of the drop is particularly surprising in light of infrastructure’s recent momentum. The asset class had set fundraising records in four of the previous five years, and infrastructure is often considered an attractive investment in uncertain markets.

While there is little doubt that the broader fundraising headwinds discussed elsewhere in this report affected infrastructure and natural resources fundraising last year, dynamics specific to the asset class were at play as well. One issue was supply-side timing: nine of the ten largest infrastructure GPs did not close a flagship fund in 2023. Second was the migration of investor dollars away from core and core-plus investments, which have historically accounted for the bulk of infrastructure fundraising, in a higher rate environment.

The asset class had some notable bright spots last year. Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year’s total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes. And as was the case in other asset classes, investors concentrated commitments in larger funds and managers in 2023, including in the largest infrastructure fund ever raised.

The outlook for the asset class, moreover, remains positive. Funds targeting a record amount of capital were in the market at year-end, providing a robust foundation for fundraising in 2024 and 2025. A recent spate of infrastructure GP acquisitions signal multi-asset managers’ long-term conviction in the asset class, despite short-term headwinds. Global megatrends like decarbonization and digitization, as well as revolutions in energy and mobility, have spurred new infrastructure investment opportunities around the world, particularly for value-oriented investors that are willing to take on more risk.

Private markets make measured progress in DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an important part of the fundraising, talent, and investing landscape for private market participants. Encouragingly, incremental progress has been made in recent years, including more diverse talent being brought to entry-level positions, investing roles, and investment committees. The scope of DEI metrics provided to institutional investors during fundraising has also increased in recent years: more than half of PE firms now provide data across investing teams, portfolio company boards, and portfolio company management (versus investment team data only). 4 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023.

In 2023, McKinsey surveyed 66 global private markets firms that collectively employ more than 60,000 people for the second annual State of diversity in global private markets report. 5 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023. The research offers insight into the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in private investing as of year-end 2022. In this chapter, we discuss where the numbers stand and how firms can bring a more diverse set of perspectives to the table.

The statistics indicate signs of modest advancement. Overall representation of women in private markets increased two percentage points to 35 percent, and ethnic and racial minorities increased one percentage point to 30 percent (Exhibit 6). Entry-level positions have nearly reached gender parity, with female representation at 48 percent. The share of women holding C-suite roles globally increased 3 percentage points, while the share of people from ethnic and racial minorities in investment committees increased 9 percentage points. There is growing evidence that external hiring is gradually helping close the diversity gap, especially at senior levels. For example, 33 percent of external hires at the managing director level were ethnic or racial minorities, higher than their existing representation level (19 percent).

Yet, the scope of the challenge remains substantial. Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in senior positions and investing roles. They also experience uneven rates of progress due to lower promotion and higher attrition rates, particularly at smaller firms. Firms are also navigating an increasingly polarized workplace today, with additional scrutiny and a growing number of lawsuits against corporate diversity and inclusion programs, particularly in the US, which threatens to impact the industry’s pace of progress.

Fredrik Dahlqvist is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Stockholm office; Alastair Green  is a senior partner in the Washington, DC, office, where Paul Maia and Alexandra Nee  are partners; David Quigley  is a senior partner in the New York office, where Connor Mangan is an associate partner and Aditya Sanghvi  is a senior partner; Rahel Schneider is an associate partner in the Bay Area office; John Spivey is a partner in the Charlotte office; and Brian Vickery  is a partner in the Boston office.

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Christy, Louis Dufau, Vaibhav Gujral, Graham Healy-Day, Laura Johnson, Ryan Luby, Tripp Norton, Alastair Rami, Henri Torbey, and Alex Wolkomir for their contributions

The authors would also like to thank CEM Benchmarking and the StepStone Group for their partnership in this year's report.

This article was edited by Arshiya Khullar, an editor in the Gurugram office.

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• Published: 14 May 2024

2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years

• Jan Esper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3919-014X 1 , 2 ,
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Including an exceptionally warm Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer 1 ,2 , 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record 3-5 . Contextualizing recent anthropogenic warming against past natural variability is nontrivial, however, because the sparse 19 th century meteorological records tend to be too warm 6 . Here, we combine observed and reconstructed June-August (JJA) surface air temperatures to show that 2023 was the warmest NH extra-tropical summer over the past 2000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than half a degree Celsius. Comparison of the 2023 JJA warming against the coldest reconstructed summer in 536 CE reveals a maximum range of pre-Anthropocene-to-2023 temperatures of 3.93°C. Although 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend 7 that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event 8 , this extreme emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction.

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Increasing heat and rainfall extremes now far outside the historical climate

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Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic

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Esper, J., Torbenson, M. & Büntgen, U. 2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07512-y

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A chemical linked to a higher risk of leukemia and other blood cell cancers creeps into millions of homes whenever residents light their gas stoves. A new Stanford-led analysis finds that a single gas cooktop burner on high or a gas oven set to 350 degrees Fahrenheit can raise indoor levels of the carcinogen benzene above those in secondhand tobacco smoke. Benzene also drifts throughout a home and lingers for hours in home air, according to the paper published June 15 in Environmental Science & Technology .

Go to the web site to view the video.

A Stanford-led analysis finds that a single gas cooktop burner on high or a gas oven set to 350 F can raise indoor levels of the carcinogen benzene above those in secondhand tobacco smoke.

“Benzene forms in flames and other high-temperature environments, such as the flares found in oil fields and refineries. We now know that benzene also forms in the flames of gas stoves in our homes,” said study senior author Rob Jackson , the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor and professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability . “Good ventilation helps reduce pollutant concentrations, but we found that exhaust fans were often ineffective at eliminating benzene exposure.”

Worse than secondhand smoke

Overall, the researchers found that indoor concentrations of benzene formed in the flames of gas stoves can be worse than average concentrations from secondhand smoke, that benzene can migrate into other rooms far from the kitchen, and that concentrations measured in bedrooms can exceed national and international health benchmarks. They also found residential range hoods are not always effective at reducing concentrations of benzene and other pollutants, even when the hoods vent outdoors.

The new paper is the first to analyze benzene emissions when a stove or oven is in use. Previous studies focused on leaks from stoves when they are off, and did not directly measure resulting benzene concentrations. The researchers found gas and propane burners and ovens emitted 10 to 50 times more benzene than electric stoves. Induction cooktops emitted no detectable benzene whatsoever. The rates of benzene emitted during combustion were hundreds of times higher than benzene emission rates identified in other recent studies from unburned gas leaking into homes.

The researchers also tested whether foods being cooked emit benzene and found zero benzene emissions from pan-frying salmon or bacon. All benzene emissions the investigators measured came from the fuel used rather than any food cooked.

A previous Stanford-led study showed that gas-burning stoves inside U.S. homes leak methane with a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from about 500,000 gasoline-powered cars. They also expose users to pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, which can trigger respiratory diseases. A 2013 meta-analysis concluded that children who live in homes with gas stoves had a 42% greater risk of asthma than children living in homes without gas stoves, and a 2022 analysis calculated that 12.7% of childhood asthma in the U.S. is attributable to gas stoves .

“I’m renting an apartment that happens to have an electric stove,” said study lead Yannai Kashtan , a graduate student in Earth system science. “Before starting this research, I never thought about it twice, but the more we learn about pollution from gas stoves, the more relieved I am to be living without a gas stove.”

Jackson is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy . Study co-authors also include Metta Nicholson and Colin Finnegan , environmental science research professionals in Stanford’s Earth System Science Department; Zutao Ouyang , a physical science research associate in Stanford’s Earth System Science Department; and researchers at PSE Healthy Energy, the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The study was funded by the High Tide Foundation.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly   Stanford Science Digest .

Media Contacts

Rob Jackson, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability: (650) 497-5841, [email protected]

Yannai Kashtan, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability: (510) 866-3232, [email protected]

Rob Jordan, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 721-1881, [email protected]

The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. We exploit natural variability in global temperature and rely on time-series variation. A 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world GDP. Global temperature shocks correlate much more strongly with extreme climatic events than the country-level temperature shocks commonly used in the panel literature, explaining why our estimate is substantially larger. We use our reduced-form evidence to estimate structural damage functions in a standard neoclassical growth model. Our results imply a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide. A business-as-usual warming scenario leads to a present value welfare loss of 31%. Both are multiple orders of magnitude above previous estimates and imply that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

Adrien Bilal gratefully acknowledges support from the Chae Family Economics Research Fund at Harvard University. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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When Online Content Disappears

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later, table of contents.

• Webpages from the last decade
• Links on government websites
• Links on news websites
• Reference links on Wikipedia
• Posts on Twitter
• Acknowledgments
• Collection and analysis of Twitter data
• Data collection for World Wide Web websites, government websites and news websites
• Data collection for Wikipedia source links
• Evaluating the status of pages and links
• Definition of links

Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part of the study looks at a representative sample of webpages that existed over the past decade to see how many are still accessible today. For this analysis, we collected a sample of pages from the Common Crawl web repository for each year from 2013 to 2023. We then tried to access those pages to see how many still exist.

A second part of the study looks at the links on existing webpages to see how many of those links are still functional. We did this by collecting a large sample of pages from government websites, news websites and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia .

We identified relevant news domains using data from the audience metrics company comScore and relevant government domains (at multiple levels of government) using data from get.gov , the official administrator for the .gov domain. We collected the news and government pages via Common Crawl and the Wikipedia pages from an archive maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation . For each collection, we identified the links on those pages and followed them to their destination to see what share of those links point to sites that are no longer accessible.

A third part of the study looks at how often individual posts on social media sites are deleted or otherwise removed from public view. We did this by collecting a large sample of public tweets on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) in real time using the Twitter Streaming API. We then tracked the status of those tweets for a period of three months using the Twitter Search API to monitor how many were still publicly available. Refer to the report methodology for more details.

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

• A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

• For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.

How this report defines inaccessible links and webpages

There are many ways of defining whether something on the internet that used to exist is now inaccessible to people trying to reach it today. For instance, “inaccessible” could mean that:

• The page no longer exists on its host server, or the host server itself no longer exists. Someone visiting this type of page would typically receive a variation on the “404 Not Found” server error instead of the content they were looking for.
• The page address exists but its content has been changed – sometimes dramatically – from what it was originally.
• The page exists but certain users – such as those with blindness or other visual impairments – might find it difficult or impossible to read.

For this report, we focused on the first of these: pages that no longer exist. The other definitions of accessibility are beyond the scope of this research.

Our approach is a straightforward way of measuring whether something online is accessible or not. But even so, there is some ambiguity.

First, there are dozens of status codes indicating a problem that a user might encounter when they try to access a page. Not all of them definitively indicate whether the page is permanently defunct or just temporarily unavailable. Second, for security reasons, many sites actively try to prevent the sort of automated data collection that we used to test our full list of links.

For these reasons, we used the most conservative estimate possible for deciding whether a site was actually accessible or not. We counted pages as inaccessible only if they returned one of nine error codes that definitively indicate that the page and/or its host server no longer exist or have become nonfunctional – regardless of how they are being accessed, and by whom. The full list of error codes that we included in our definition are in the methodology .

Here are some of the findings from our analysis of digital decay in various online spaces.

To conduct this part of our analysis, we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl , an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.

Not surprisingly, the older snapshots in our collection had the largest share of inaccessible links. Of the pages collected from the 2013 snapshot, 38% were no longer accessible in 2023. But even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about one-in-five were no longer accessible just two years later.

We sampled around 500,000 pages from government websites using the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet, including a mix of different levels of government (federal, state, local and others). We found every link on each page and followed a random selection of those links to their destination to see if the pages they refer to still exist.

Across the government websites we sampled, there were 42 million links. The vast majority of those links (86%) were internal, meaning they link to a different page on the same website. An explainer resource on the IRS website that links to other documents or forms on the IRS site would be an example of an internal link.

Around three-quarters of government webpages we sampled contained at least one on-page link. The typical (median) page contains 50 links, but many pages contain far more. A page in the 90th percentile contains 190 links, and a page in the 99th percentile (that is, the top 1% of pages by number of links) has 740 links.

Other facts about government webpage links:

• The vast majority go to secure HTTP pages (and have a URL starting with “https://”).
• 6% go to a static file, like a PDF document.
• 16% now redirect to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to.

When we followed these links, we found that 6% point to pages that are no longer accessible. Similar shares of internal and external links are no longer functional.

Overall, 21% of all the government webpages we examined contained at least one broken link. Across every level of government we looked at, there were broken links on at least 14% of pages; city government pages had the highest rates of broken links.

For this analysis, we sampled 500,000 pages from 2,063 websites classified as “News/Information” by the audience metrics firm comScore. The pages were collected from the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet.

Across the news sites sampled, this collection contained more than 14 million links pointing to an outside website. 1 Some 94% of these pages contain at least one external-facing link. The median page contains 20 links, and pages in the top 10% by link count have 56 links.

Like government websites, the vast majority of these links go to secure HTTP pages (those with a URL beginning with “https://”). Around 12% of links on these news sites point to a static file, like a PDF document. And 32% of links on news sites redirected to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to – slightly less than the 39% of external links on government sites that redirect.

When we tracked these links to their destination, we found that 5% of all links on news site pages are no longer accessible. And 23% of all the pages we sampled contained at least one broken link.

Broken links are about as prevalent on the most-trafficked news websites as they are on the least-trafficked sites. Some 25% of pages on news websites in the top 20% by site traffic have at least one broken link. That is nearly identical to the 26% of sites in the bottom 20% by site traffic.

For this analysis, we collected a random sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages and examined the links in their “References” section. The vast majority of these pages (82%) contain at least one reference link – that is, one that directs the reader to a webpage other than Wikipedia itself.

In total, there are just over 1 million reference links across all the pages we collected. The typical page has four reference links.

The analysis indicates that 11% of all references linked on Wikipedia are no longer accessible. On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.

For this analysis, we collected nearly 5 million tweets posted from March 8 to April 27, 2023, on the social media platform X, which at the time was known as Twitter. We did this using Twitter’s Streaming API, collecting 3,000 public tweets every 30 minutes in real time. This provided us with a representative sample of all tweets posted on the platform during that period. We monitored those tweets until June 15, 2023, and checked each day to see if they were still available on the site or not.

At the end of the observation period, we found that 18% of the tweets from our initial collection window were no longer publicly visible on the site . In a majority of cases, this was because the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. For the remaining tweets, the account that posted the tweet was still visible on the site, but the individual tweet had been deleted.

Which tweets tend to disappear?

Tweets were especially likely to be deleted or removed over the course of our collection period if they were:

• Written in certain languages. Nearly half of all the Turkish-language tweets we collected – and a slightly smaller share of those written in Arabic – were no longer available at the end of the tracking period.
• Posted by accounts using the site’s default profile settings. More than half of tweets from accounts using the default profile image were no longer available at the end of the tracking period, as were more than a third from accounts with a default bio field. Tweets from these accounts tend to disappear because the entire account has been deleted or made private, as opposed to the individual tweet being deleted.
• Posted by unverified accounts.

We also found that removed or deleted tweets tended to come from newer accounts with relatively few followers and modest activityon the site. On average, tweets that were no longer visible on the site were posted by accounts around eight months younger than those whose tweets stayed on the site.

And when we analyzed the types of tweets that were no longer available, we found that retweets, quote tweets and original tweets did not differ much from the overall average. But replies were relatively unlikely to be removed – just 12% of replies were inaccessible at the end of our monitoring period.

Most tweets that are removed from the site tend to disappear soon after being posted. In addition to looking at how many tweets from our collection were still available at the end of our tracking period, we conducted a survival analysis to see how long these tweets tended to remain available. We found that:

• 1% of tweets are removed within one hour
• 3% within a day
• 10% within a week
• 15% within a month

Put another way: Half of tweets that are eventually removed from the platform are unavailable within the first six days of being posted. And 90% of these tweets are unavailable within 46 days.

Tweets don’t always disappear forever, though. Some 6% of the tweets we collected disappeared and then became available again at a later point. This could be due to an account going private and then returning to public status, or to the account being suspended and later reinstated. Of those “reappeared” tweets, the vast majority (90%) were still accessible on Twitter at the end of the monitoring period.

• For our analysis of news sites, we did not collect or check the functionality of internal-facing on-page links – those that point to another page on the same root domain. ↩

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