In an article for The New York Times about the impact of patent laws on drug development, Austin Frakt highlights Prof. Benjamin Roin’s research that indicates pharmaceutical companies reject unpatentable drugs. To counter this problem, Frakt explains that Roin suggests “a period of market exclusivity…to any organization addressing an unmet medical need with a drug that isn’t patentable.”
Bruce Arntzen, the executive director of MIT’s Supply Chain Management Program, writes for The Wall Street Journal that companies have to take steps to make their supply chains more resilient to economic downturns. “We know a recession will hit at some point but do little to get ready for the impending storm,” argues Arntzen.
A new study co-authored by Prof. Jonathan Gruber found that while Quebec’s low-cost child-care system may help children academically, students who participate in the program may “have worse outcomes when it comes to health, life satisfaction and crime rates,” reports Jordan Press for The Huffington Post.
Bourree Lam reports for The Atlantic on an interactive map of U.S. counties produced using Prof. Amy Glasmeier’s Living Wage Calculator. “Glasmeier says that firms can use it to estimate how to pay their employees fairly,” writes Lam.
Ana Swanson reports for The Washington Post on an interactive map created by Prof. Amy Glasmeier that displays the gap between minimum wages and living wages across the U.S. The map shows that the East Coast “is one of the most challenging places for minimum-wage workers to make ends meet.”
Using their “Living Wage Calculator,” Prof. Amy Glasmeier’s team has created a map of the communities in the U.S. that have the widest gaps between living wages and minimum wages, reports Rob Wile for The Huffington Post.
Boston.com reporter Megan Turchi writes that MIT researchers have developed a map that compares the cost of living and minimum wage for households across the U.S. Prof. Amy Glasmeier explains that one of her goals for the map is to “to inspire policy makers to step up and ensure their wage scales were livable.”
Prof. Andrew Lo speaks with Michael Regan of Bloomberg News about the recent volatility in the stock market. “We have a number of different forces that are all coming to a head,” explains Lo. Due to automated trading “we’re seeing much choppier markets than we otherwise would have five or 10 years ago.”
New research by Prof. Andrew Lo shows that the criteria currently used to evaluate whether drugs are safe and effective is too strict, reports Carolyn Johnson for The Washington Post. The study suggests that, “for many devastating diseases, the current standards are too risk-averse, erring on the side of keeping drugs off the market.”
Prof. Yasheng Huang writes for The Boston Globe about the Chinese government’s active role in the country’s economy and how this is negatively impacting growth. “Chinese growth in the future will be limited until the government makes fairly substantive structural reforms,” writes Huang.
Money reporter Penelope Wang writes about a new study by Prof. James Poterba that examined why Americans often did not have enough money saved for retirement. The researchers found that, “how much subjects had the first year their assets were measured showed the strongest determinant of the amount of the wealth they had at the end of life.”
Professor Yasheng Huang writes for The New York Times about the role of the government in the recent downturn in Chinese markets. “The current mess is entirely due to the active encouragement by the authorities to invest in the markets and to lax regulations," Huang writes.
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Professor Amy Finkelstein’s survey of low-income Oregonians in which she determined that those given access to Medicaid spent more on healthcare than the uninsured. “There’s overwhelming evidence from our study and others that when you cover people with health insurance, they use more health care,” said Finkelstein.
Megan Turchi writes for Boston.com about ‘The Good Jobs Score,’ a method for evaluating food retailers based on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and productivity, developed by Professor Zeynep Ton. Ton hopes “the score will bring attention to some of the drivers of success that are rarely included in annual reports.”
Research led by Professor Paul Osterman in 2013 indicates that policymakers’ focus on the “skills gap” among American workers may be misplaced, writes David Scharfenberg for The Boston Globe. According to the study, “employers, for the most part, are simply not demanding the high-level talents that the skills gap rhetoric would suggest.”