We study whether student-advisor gender and race composition matters for publication productivity of Ph.D. students in South Africa. We consider all Ph.D. students in STEM graduating between 2000 and 2014, after the recent systematic introduction of doctoral programs in this country. We...

We examine friendships and study partnerships among university students over several years. At the aggregate level, connections increase over time, but homophily on gender and ethnicity is relatively constant across time, university residences, and different network layers. At the individual...

The scholarly impact of academic research matters for academic promotions, influence, relevance to public policy, and others. Focusing on writing style in top-level professional journals, we examine how it changes with age, and how stylistic differences and age affect impact. As top-level...

Using data describing all "Top 5" economics journal publications from 1969-2018, we examine what determines which authors produce less as they age and which retire earlier. Sub-field has no impact on the rate of production, but interacts with it to alter retirement probabilities. A positive,...

We examine the dynamics of a country's growth, consumption, and sovereign debt, assuming that the government is myopic and wants to maximize short-term, self-interested spending. Surprisingly, government myopia can increase a country's access to external borrowing. In turn, access to borrowing...

We show that supply networks are inefficiently, and insufficiently, resilient. Upstream firms can expand their production capacity to hedge against supply and demand shocks. But the social benefits of such investments are not internalized due to market power and market incompleteness. Upstream...

To understand new information, we exchange models or interpretations with others. This paper provides a framework for thinking about such social exchanges of models. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their network that best explains the data, given their prior...

Adaptation to dynamic conditions requires a certain degree of diversity. If all agents take the best current action, learning that the underlying state has changed and behavior should adapt will be slower. Diversity is harder to maintain when there is fast communication between agents, because...

Good health is important for employment at older ages. However, little is known about how health-related functional abilities interact with occupational demands to shape work capacity. Using new data, we quantify individuals' functional abilities, combine that information with...