Earnings growth and the wealth distribution.

As measured by Gini coefficients, fractile inequalities, and tail power laws, wealth is distributed less equally across people than are labor earnings. We study how luck, attitudes that shape saving decisions, and growth rates of labor earnings balance each other in ways that simultaneously shape joint distributions across people of labor earnings, age, and wealth together with an equilibrium rate of return on savings that plays a pivotal role in balancing contending forces. Strong motives for people to save and for firms to demand capital raise an equilibrium interest rate enough to make wealth grow faster than labor earnings.

Using satellite imagery to understand and promote sustainable development.

Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with a focus on approaches that combine imagery with machine learning. We quantify the paucity of ground data on key human-related outcomes and the growing abundance and improving resolution (spatial, temporal, and spectral) of satellite imagery.

The joint dynamics of investor beliefs and trading during the COVID-19 crash.

We analyze how investor expectations about economic growth and stock returns changed during the February-March 2020 stock market crash induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during the subsequent partial stock market recovery. We surveyed retail investors who are clients of Vanguard at three points in time: 1) on February 11-12, around the all-time stock market high, 2) on March 11-12, after the stock market had collapsed by over 20%, and 3) on April 16-17, after the market had rallied 25% from its lowest point. Following the crash, the average investor turned more pessimistic about the short-run performance of both the stock market and the real economy.

Contribution of historical precipitation change to US flood damages.

Precipitation extremes have increased across many regions of the United States, with further increases anticipated in response to additional global warming. Quantifying the impact of these precipitation changes on flood damages is necessary to estimate the costs of climate change. However, there is little empirical evidence linking changes in precipitation to the historically observed increase in flood losses.

The changing risk and burden of wildfire in the United States.

Recent dramatic and deadly increases in global wildfire activity have increased attention on the causes of wildfires, their consequences, and how risk from wildfire might be mitigated. Here we bring together data on the changing risk and societal burden of wildfire in the United States. We estimate that nearly 50 million homes are currently in the wildland-urban interface in the United States, a number increasing by 1 million houses every 3 y.

Does medicine run in the family-evidence from three generations of physicians in Sweden: retrospective observational study.

Objective: To examine occupational heritability in medicine and changes in heritability over time, with Swedish population wide administrative data that allowed mapping family trees of physicians spanning up to three generations.

Design: Retrospective observational study.

Setting: Individual level administrative registry data from Sweden.

Understanding the correlation between Alzheimer's Disease polygenic risk, wealth, and the composition of wealth holdings.

We investigate how the genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's Disease (AD) relates to saving behavior. Using nationally representative data from the 1996-2014 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find that genetic predisposition for AD correlates with, but is not causally related to how older individuals' hold wealth in different asset types. People with a higher AD polygenic risk score (PGS) hold roughly 20 per cent less wealth in IRAs and contribute about 24 percent less to IRAs between survey periods.

Local exposure to school shootings and youth antidepressant use.

While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use. Our empirical strategy compares the number of antidepressant prescriptions written by providers practicing 0 to 5 miles from a school that experienced a shooting (treatment areas) to the number of prescriptions written by providers practicing 10 to 15 miles away (reference areas), both before and after the shooting.

The Short-run and Long-run Effects of Covid-19 on Energy and the Environment.

Kenneth Gillingham is an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University, with a primary appointment in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. In 2015 to 2016, he served as the Senior Economist for Energy and the Environment at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. His research interests cover energy and environmental economics, industrial organization, technological change, and energy modeling.

Randomized trial shows healthcare payment reform has equal-sized spillover effects on patients not targeted by reform.

Changes in the way health insurers pay healthcare providers may not only directly affect the insurer's patients but may also affect patients covered by other insurers. We provide evidence of such spillovers in the context of a nationwide Medicare bundled payment reform that was implemented in some areas of the country but not in others, via random assignment. We estimate that the payment reform-which targeted traditional Medicare patients-had effects of similar magnitude on the healthcare experience of nontargeted, privately insured Medicare Advantage patients.

Directions for Research on Climate and Conflict.

The potential links between climate and conflict are well studied, yet disagreement about the specific mechanisms and their significance for societies persists. Here, we build on assessment of the relationship between climate and organized armed conflict to define crosscutting priorities for future directions of research. They include (1) deepening insight into climate-conflict linkages and conditions under which they manifest, (2) ambitiously integrating research designs, (3) systematically exploring future risks and response options, responsive to ongoing decision-making, and (4) evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to manage climate-conflict links.

Effects of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health, Health Beliefs, and Medical Use: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Many employers use workplace wellness programs to improve employee health and reduce medical costs, but randomized evaluations of their efficacy are rare.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of a comprehensive workplace wellness program on employee health, health beliefs, and medical use after 12 and 24 months.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This randomized clinical trial of 4834 employees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was conducted from August 9, 2016, to April 26, 2018.

Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa.

Accurate and comprehensive measurements of economic well-being are fundamental inputs into both research and policy, but such measures are unavailable at a local level in many parts of the world. Here we train deep learning models to predict survey-based estimates of asset wealth across ~ 20,000 African villages from publicly-available multispectral satellite imagery. Models can explain 70% of the variation in ground-measured village wealth in countries where the model was not trained, outperforming previous benchmarks from high-resolution imagery, and comparison with independent wealth measurements from censuses suggests that errors in satellite estimates are comparable to errors in existing ground data.

Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values.

Data from the General Social Survey indicate that higher-fertility individuals and their children are more conservative on "family values" issues, especially regarding abortion and same-sex marriage. This pattern implies that differential fertility has increased and will continue to increase public support for conservative policies on these issues. The association of family size with conservatism is specific to traditional-family issues and can be attributed in large part to the greater religiosity and lower educational attainment of individuals from larger families.

Impact of Feed the Future initiative on nutrition in children aged less than 5 years in sub-Saharan Africa: difference-in-differences analysis.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of the US government's Feed the Future initiative on nutrition outcomes in children younger than 5 years in sub-Saharan Africa.

Design: Difference-in-differences quasi-experimental approach.

Setting: Households in 33 low and lower middle income countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fine particulate matter damages and value added in the US economy.

Emissions of most pollutants that result in fine particulate matter (PM) formation have been decreasing in the United States. However, this trend has not been uniform across all sectors or regions of the economy. We use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to compute marginal damages for PM-related emissions for each county in the contiguous United States and match location-specific emissions with these marginal damages to compute economy-wide gross external damage (GED) due to premature mortality.

Local Area Variation in Morbidity Among Low-Income, Older Adults in the United States: A Cross-sectional Study.

Background: Recent studies have reported that low-income adults living in more affluent areas of the United States have longer life expectancies. Less is known about the relationship between the affluence of a geographic area and morbidity of the low-income population.

Objective: To evaluate the association between the prevalence of chronic conditions among low-income, older adults and the economic affluence of a local area.

Association of residency work hour reform with long term quality and costs of care of US physicians: observational study.

Objective: To determine whether 30 day mortality, 30 day readmissions, and inpatient spending vary according to whether physicians were exposed to work hour reforms during their residency.

Design: Retrospective observational study.

Setting: US Medicare.

USA aid policy and induced abortion in sub-Saharan Africa: an analysis of the Mexico City Policy.

Background: The Mexico City Policy, first announced by US President Ronald Reagan and since lifted and reinstated by presidents along partisan lines, prohibits US foreign assistance to any organisation that performs or provides counselling on abortion. Many organisations affected by this policy are also providers of modern contraception. If the policy reduces these organisations' ability to supply modern contraceptives, it could have the unintended consequence of increasing abortion rates.

Enhancing financial protection under China's social health insurance to achieve universal health coverage.

highlight the need for better financial protection for poor people

Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict.

Research findings on the relationship between climate and conflict are diverse and contested. Here we assess the current understanding of the relationship between climate and conflict, based on the structured judgments of experts from diverse disciplines. These experts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries.

Prediction Accuracy With Electronic Medical Records Versus Administrative Claims.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the incremental predictive power of electronic medical record (EMR) data, relative to the information available in more easily accessible and standardized insurance claims data.

Data And Methods: Using both EMR and Claims data, we predicted outcomes for 118,510 patients with 144,966 hospitalizations in 8 hospitals, using widely used prediction models. We use cross-validation to prevent overfitting and tested predictive performance on separate data that were not used for model training.

Regional Anesthesia and Readmission Rates After Total Knee Arthroplasty.

Background: Total knee arthroplasty is a commonly performed procedure and an important contributor to national health care spending. Reducing the incidence of readmission could have important consequences for patient well-being and relevant financial implications. Whether regional anesthesia techniques are associated with decreased readmission rates and costs among privately insured patients remains unknown.