1. The educational benefits of public libraries

Economists Gregory Gilpin, Ezra Karger, and Peter Nencka found that public library capital investments increased children's engagement with their local library, which in turn improved test score measures in local school districts. Read more.

Panel A of Figure 3 from Gilpin et. al (2024)

2. Remote learning

Researchers Michael S. Kofoed, Lucas Gebhart, Dallas Gilmore, and Ryan Moschitto present the results of an experimental setting for an introductory college course and find that online learning reduced final scores by half a letter grade. Read more.

Figure 2 from Kofoed et al. (2024)

3. Age limits for judges

Mandatory retirement ages for judges increases the output and legal influence of US state supreme courts, according to Elliott Ash and W. Bentley MacLeod. They drew their conclusions from analyzing mandatory retirement reforms across several states. Read more.

Figure 2 from Ash and MacLeod (2024)

4. Job search and unemployment insurance

Researchers Peter Ganong, Fiona Greig, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan, and Joseph Vavra show that temporary unemployment insurance (UI) supplements provided during the largest increase to UI benefits in US history had little impact on job finding. Read more.

Figure 4 from Ganong et al. (2024)

5. Carbon pricing

Economists Moritz A. Drupp, Frikk Nesje, and Robert C. Schmidt conducted the largest-to-date global survey of experts who have published on carbon pricing. They found that there is a strong consensus that a uniform global carbon price should be higher than the existing global average. Read more.

Figure 1 from Drupp et al. (2024)

6. Recovering from economic depressions

Researchers Martin Ellison, Sang Seok Lee, and Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke estimated the true drivers of economic recovery from the Great Depression, using the most comprehensive dataset to date. Their work suggests that big shocks to economic systems can boost inflationary expectations and stimulate demand—the end of the gold standard being a paradigmatic example. Read more.

Figure 11 from Ellison et al. (2024)

7. The optimal size of local governments

Economists Veda Narasimhan and Jeffrey Weaver show that Indian villages in smaller government units provided significantly better public services, including education, sanitation, and welfare programs. Read more.

Figure 2 from Narasimhan and Weaver (2024)

8. Policy interventions in conflict areas

Cash transfer programs in war-torn Niger did not reduce violence in the short run, according to Patrick Premand and Dominic Rohner. If anything, conflict appeared to increase in villages receiving cash benefits. Read more.

Figure 1 from Premand and Rohner (2024)

9. The costs of species extinction

Researchers Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan studied the sudden collapse of vulture populations across the Indian subcontinent as a result of farmers’ unintentionally poisoning the birds by using the painkiller diclofenac on their cattle. They found that when vultures in India died out, human mortality increased significantly. Read more.

Figure 4 from Frank and Sudarshan (2024)

10. Curtailing Mafia influence

Researchers Alessandra Fenizia and Raffaele Saggio found that an aggressive policy initiated in the 1990s by the Italian central government—city council dismissals (CCDs)—reestablished the legitimacy of local governments and spurred economies in areas dominated by organized crime. Read more.

Figure 5 from Fenizia and Saggio (2024)

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