Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States and are on track to become the largest immigrant group by 2050. Yet, researchers have devoted much less attention to this population than to other immigrant groups.

In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Hannah M. Postel helps to fill that gap. She traces Asian immigration to the United States across three policy eras—1882–1943, 1943–1965, 1965–present—and explores how they affected the characteristics of those admitted, where they settled, and what work they were allowed to do.

Postel recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the origins of the US federal immigration system, the history of Asian immigration, and how current policy might shape immigration going forward.

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.