Publications

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to misconduct and fraud in academic scholarship, particularly in scientific research. As shown in Figure 7.1, retraction rates among publications in scientific journals have increased astronomically – roughly ten-fold since 2000 (Steen, Casadevall, and Fang 2013; Van Noorden 2011). That trend seems both stunning and perplexing if one considers the typical narrative provided to explain these events: Some individual scientist, succumbing to avarice, insecurity, or incompetence, whether knowingly or unwittingly, publishes erroneous findings. His peers nevertheless discover this deviance and ensure its correction. In essence, errant research, whether intentional or not, comes from a set of “bad apples.” But given the slow rate at which turnover occurs in the population of scientists, this explanation would appear to have little purchase in explaining the dramatic rise in retractions over the past decade. Other putative causes – such as the increased competition for scarce funding and positions and improvements in the ability to detect errors and fraud – have also changed far more gradually and slowly than the rate of retractions. Therefore, they would appear incomplete, at best, as explanations for this trend.

During the Great Depression, over half of America's elderly population lacked sufficient income to support themselves, prompting the creation of the Social Security Act in 1935. The Act, designed by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt two years after his inauguration, introduced old-age pensions funded by contributions from employees and employers, aimed at providing a minimal income for individuals over the age of 65. The program was designed as a social insurance scheme, ensuring that support was based on earnings during working years rather than a means-tested system. It required an extensive record-keeping infrastructure to track individual incomes and expanded gradually to cover more job categories and increase benefit levels.

In the 2010s, the Social Security fund faces significant challenges. The aging population, with life expectancies continuing to rise, has increased the number of beneficiaries, putting pressure on the system’s financial sustainability. Additionally, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is declining, exacerbating the strain on the fund. Political debates persist on how to ensure its solvency, with suggestions ranging from privatization to increasing taxes or adjusting benefits. 

A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients with the highest expected returns. We assess both sources of inefficiency, exploiting variation in rates of negative imaging tests for pulmonary embolism. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing conditional on patient population, which explains the negative relationship between physicians' testing rates and test yields. Furthermore, doctors do not target testing to the highest risk patients, reducing test yields by one-third. Our calibration suggests misallocation is more costly than overuse.