Anup Malani ✓

Paper: https://t.co/VKQN0oTgot 380 views · 4 likes · 0 reposts · 0 replies Open on X →

cc @EricHanushek @dynarski — if frontier content pays off in earnings mainly for the better-prepared, is updating the curriculum a complement to preparation rather than a substitute for it, and who actually gains from curriculum reform? 443 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 2 replies Open on X →

Take the result at face value and the channels differ. The broad gains (completion, grades) run through engagement, while the earnings returns concentrate among the better-prepared and better-resourced, a skill-building payoff only for students able to absorb it. 318 views · 0 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

But that design handles student selection, not teacher selection. Content isn't randomized across instructors, and syllabus-updaters may just be better teachers. My read is that Chetty's value-added worry binds, and the lift may be the teacher, not the content. 366 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 3 replies Open on X →

The obvious worry is that strong students sort into frontier courses. To handle it, Biasi & Ma lean on syllabus updates a student could not have foreseen at enrollment, comparing cohorts that took the same course before and after it moved toward the frontier. 607 views · 0 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

The measure is textual. They compare each syllabus's readings against recent versus older work, so a course built on new papers scores closer to the frontier than one on long-settled material. Frontier courses also cut time-to-degree and raise grad-school entry. 666 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

Does teaching recent research help students more than settled material? @BarbaraBiasi & @ProfSongMa (NBER, 2026) match 459,415 syllabi to 107 million papers to score each course's frontier distance. Frontier courses lift completion, grades, and earnings. 7.8K views · 62 likes · 7 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

GDP is an imperfect measure of living standards: it misses new goods, home production, and longer lives. Trammell & @ChadJonesEcon (NBER, 2026) measure welfare from what people pay to avoid dying. By that measure, welfare rose more than fivefold since 1940. 1.8K views · 18 likes · 2 reposts · 2 replies Open on X →

Anup Malani ✓@anup_malani6 Jul

Why would a scholarship for one child hurt their siblings? A new experiment finds untreated siblings of funded students were 3.7pp less likely to finish college, about a 30% drop. Parents reallocated toward the winner. 2.9K views · 17 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

Anup Malani ✓@anup_malani6 Jul

Road crashes are a leading killer of young people in poor countries, and most of those deaths come down to how people drive. The obvious fix is to pay drivers to be safer. In a new Kenyan RCT, @davidfromterra, Lane & Kelley (NBER, 2026) find that paying works. 1.1K views · 2 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

Paper: https://t.co/pdMS0Bzhte 437 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 0 replies Open on X →

cc @lymanstoneky @JesusFerna7026 — if the shortfall is parity progression, not childlessness, is it cheaper to move one-kid parents to a second child (fixed costs already sunk) than to move childless adults to a first? 524 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 2 replies Open on X →

One caveat I take seriously, from Tomas Sobotka: cohort data can blur forgone births with postponed ones, so part of the gap may close later. Even so, the target shifts. What moves fertility is parents going from one child to two, not the childless having a first. 446 views · 1 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

And it isn't only a rich-world story. In Indian districts, childlessness explains just 6% of the gap between high-fertility and below-replacement districts. India's fertility is falling the same way: parents stopping at one or two, not couples forgoing children. 854 views · 4 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

A birth rate can fall two ways: more women have no children, or mothers have fewer of them. They separate the two channels. Drop the childless from the data entirely and completed fertility among mothers, across much of the rich world, is already below replacement. 974 views · 7 likes · 0 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

Most explanations of collapsing birth rates picture adults who never have kids at all. @MikeGeruso & Dean Spears (NBER, 2025) decompose the decline: childlessness explains only 38% of it in rich countries. The fall is mostly parents having fewer children. 16.2K views · 48 likes · 11 reposts · 3 replies Open on X →

Anup Malani ✓@anup_malani5 May

@anup_malani The CUNY campus in Manhattan that specializes in accounting has a peculiarly trustworthy looking student body -- a whole bunch of young people who look like they'd do an honest, diligent jobs on your taxes. 13.3K views · 209 likes · 1 reposts · 7 replies Open on X →

Paper: https://t.co/sTI8VskRc1 15K views · 65 likes · 7 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

cc @davidautor @JustinWolfers @tylercowen — I wonder if the policy implication is underappreciated: if you want to move the income distribution, resource allocation to high-access publics probably dominates prestige subsidies. 16.8K views · 72 likes · 2 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

CUNY and Cal State campuses rank among the highest mobility schools in the country. Not because their outcomes are better than Yale's (conditional on attendance, elite schools look fine). But because they actually enroll the students for whom mobility is the whole point. 19.9K views · 413 likes · 31 reposts · 2 replies Open on X →

Chetty and co-authors linked college records to tax data for millions of students. They define mobility rate as: share of bottom-quintile students who reach the top quintile. That's access times success. Elite privates score near the bottom. Mid-tier publics score near the top. 26.6K views · 163 likes · 1 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →

We assume prestige signals opportunity. And elite colleges do produce great outcomes — for the students they enroll. But that's the catch. Harvard's students mostly arrive rich. So by definition, Harvard can't move many people up the economic ladder. 27.8K views · 373 likes · 10 reposts · 1 replies Open on X →