For policymakers investigating the effective transition of an economy from agriculture to manufacturing and services, there are complex economic, institutional, and practical considerations. 'Are certain regions trapped in an under-industrialization state'' asks Tishara Garg, an economics doctoral student at MIT. 'If so, can government policy help them escape this trap and transition to an economy characterized by higher levels of industrialization and better-paying jobs'' Garg's research focuses on trade, economic geography, and development. Her studies yielded the paper 'Can Industrial Policy Overcome Coordination Failures: Theory and Evidence from Industrial Zones,' which investigates whether economic policy can shift an economy from an undesirable state to a desirable state. Garg's work combines tools from industrial organization and numerical algebraic geometry. Her paper finds that regions in India with state-developed industrial zones are 38 percent more likely to shift from a low to high industrialization state over a 15-year period than those without such zones....

A young man with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency's rules and regulations. Christopher Sweet was introduced to HUD employees as being originally from San Francisco and most recently a third-year at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science, in an email sent to staffers earlier this month. 'I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be 'Al computer programming quant analyst,'' Scott Langmack, a DOGE staffer and chief operating officer of an AI real estate company, wrote in an email widely shared within the agency and reviewed by WIRED. 'With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!'...

Dating and marriage markets have transformed as more women have gone to college and the share of college graduates has skewed more female. Some observers have concluded that this imbalance has left highly educated women unable to find men to marry. Not so. In a new paper cleverly titled 'Bachelors without Bachelor's,' the economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann find that 'the share of marriages where the wife has a four-year degree but the husband does not has quadrupled.' Contrary to popular narratives, marriage rates for educated women have remained remarkably stable. So who isn't getting married' Well, a growing share of non-college-educated women. On today's episode of Good on Paper, Goldman, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University, joins me to discuss what his findings reveal about the state of American marriage. One clue as to why marriage rates for non-college-educated women declined so steeply over the 20th century is revealed when you look at a map of marriage rates. In areas where men have the lowest rate of bad outcomes such as incarceration or unemployment, the marriage gap between college-educated and non-college-educated women is 50 percent smaller....

To the extent that Donald Trump's trade war with China is based on a coherent story about the world, it is this: Free trade with China has been a disaster for the American worker, and we need tariffs to reverse the damage. No one knows more about that story than the MIT economist David Autor. In 2016, he co-wrote a paper with David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson that challenged the economics profession's rapturous view of free trade. Drawing on their previous research, Autor and his co-authors concluded that from 1999 to 2011, the rise in Chinese imports had cost roughly 2 million American workers their jobs, with the bulk of those losses coming in the years immediately following China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. In the subset of factory towns where the damage was most concentrated, entire communities fell into ruin. The authors called the phenomenon 'the China shock.' The same year that the paper came out, Trump ascended to the White House'in part by railing against free-trade agreements and promising to bring back jobs from overseas. Later research found that he had overperformed in counties that had been hardest hit by trade with China, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The phrase China shock was suddenly being spoken all over Washington. And in the coming years, a new bipartisan consensus emerged that restricting trade with China was necessary to protect American workers....