W.E.B. Du Bois is remembered as a civil rights leader, sociologist, and author of The Souls of Black Folk. But before he became famous for his empirical studies of Black life in America, Du Bois was a graduate student at Harvard studying cutting-edge economic theory. In 1891, at age 23, he submitted a 158-page manuscript entitled A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory to a Harvard prize competition. The manuscript sat in the Harvard archives for over a century, largely unexamined by trained economists.

Author Daniel Kuehn recently requested that Harvard digitize the manuscript so that he could analyze its contents. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, he explores how Du Bois anticipated the application of marginalist ideas in economics to the determination of wages.

Kuehn recently spoke with Tyler Smith about Du Bois's contributions to wage theory, why these contributions went unrecognized, and how his time in Berlin redirected him toward the historical and empirical work for which he is known.

Guidance counselors generally advise college applicants to diversify their applications across schools they believe to be safeties, matches, and reaches. Yet, prevailing economic theories of school choice suggest that such hedging strategies are suboptimal and that applicants should focus on applying to the best schools they have a chance of getting into.

In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors S. Nageeb Ali and Ran I. Shorrer show how incorporating correlations among admissions decisions rationalizes the motive to hedge. Their findings highlight the tradeoffs applicants face under realistic assumptions and may offer insights into the optimal design of admission processes.

Ali and Shorrer recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how the admissions process can be correlated and the implications for students.

Between 1997 and 2011, opioid dispensing in the United States more than tripled, fueling what would become the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. This surge in the supply of opioids was concentrated among a small subset of doctors: roughly 1 percent of the doctors who prescribed opioids accounted for almost 50 percent of all domestic opioid doses prescribed.

In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, author Adam Soliman examined what happened when federal authorities cracked down on "rogue" doctors who overprescribed opioids.

He found that removing a single doctor from the opioid supply chain reduced county-level dispensing by 10 percent, with no negating increases in neighboring areas. Yet these interventions came with a trade-off—while overall drug mortality declined, heroin overdoses increased by 50 percent, likely as a result of existing users seeking alternatives.

Soliman recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he untangled these complex enforcement effects and what his findings mean for combating drug epidemics that begin in the legal pharmaceutical market.