Martin S. Feldstein, NBER: Why is Growth better in the United States than in other Industrial Countries. Although the official statistics imply that the rate of growth of real GDP in the United States has declined in recent years, it has still been substantially higher than the real growth rates in Europe and the other industrial countries, leading to higher real per capita incomes. In 2015, real GDP per capita was $56,000 in the United States. On a purchasing power basis, the real GDP per capita in that same year was only $47,000 in Germany, $41,000 in France and the United Kingdom, and just $36,000 in Italy. I can think of ten different features that distinguish the United States from other industrial economies. Of course, not all of these features are present to a greater extent in the United States than in all other industrial countries. Moreover, I will only list and describe these features but cannot rank them in order of their importance. And I believe that these features interact in contributing to stronger growth and are not merely additive.

Esther Duflo, NBER: The Economist as Plumber. As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This essay argues that economists should seriously engage with plumbing, in the interest of both society and our discipline.

Branko Milanovic, Globalinequality: Why 20th century tools cannot be used to address 21st century income inequality? The remarkable period of reduced income and wealth inequality in the rich countries, roughly from the end of the Second World War to the early 1980s, relied on four pillars: strong trade unions, mass education, high taxes, large government transfers. Since the increase of inequality twenty or more years ago, the failed attempts to stem its further rise have relied on trying, or at least advocating, the expansion of all or some of the four pillars. But neither of them will do the job in the 21st century.

George J. Borjas, NBER: The Earnings of Undocumented Immigrants. Using newly developed methods that impute undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in microdata surveys, the study documents a number of findings. First, the age-earnings profile of undocumented workers lies far below that of legal immigrants and of native workers, and is almost perfectly flat during the prime working years. Second, the unadjusted gap in the log hourly wage between undocumented workers and natives is very large (around 40 percent), but half of this gap disappears once the calculation adjusts for differences in observable socioeconomic characteristics, particularly educational attainment. Finally, the adjusted wage of undocumented workers rose rapidly in the past decade. As a result, there was a large decline in the wage penalty associated with undocumented status. The relatively small magnitude of the current wage penalty suggests that a regularization program may only have a modest impact on the wage of undocumented workers.

Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru, NBER: When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct. We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline following missteps. There are substantial differences in the punishment of misconduct across genders. Although both female and male advisers are disciplined for misconduct, female advisers are punished more severely. Following an incidence of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs, and 30% less likely to find new jobs relative to male advisers. Females face harsher punishment despite engaging in less costly misconduct and despite a lower propensity towards repeat offenses. Evidence suggests that the observed behavior is not driven by productivity differences across advisers. Rather, we find supporting evidence for taste-based discrimination.

Zack Beauchamp, VOX: No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism. Democrats would only be able to defeat Trump and others like him if they adopted an anti-corporate, unabashedly left-wing policy agenda. The answer to Trump’s right-wing populism, Sanders argued, was for the left to develop a populism of its own. The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration — or, more precisely, it doesn’t do it powerfully enough. For some, it frees them to worry less about what it’s in their wallet and more about who may be moving into their neighborhoods or competing with them for jobs.

Elise Bohan, Big Think: Do Smarter People Look More Intelligent? It Depends on Their Gender. Yes, smarter people look more intelligent. But not all people - just men. Kleisner discovered that “both men and women were able to accurately evaluate the intelligence of men by viewing facial photographs.” But strangely, “no relationship between perceived intelligence and IQ was found for women.” Why would this be? The study suggests that it may be beneficial for men to signal intelligence honestly. Kleisner speculates that such signalling might play well with females' "mixed mating strategy."