It’s one of the paradoxes of economic development: Many countries currently offer large subsidies to their industrial fishing fleets, even though the harms of overfishing are well-known. Governments might be willing to end this practice, if they saw that its costs outweighed its benefits. But each country, acting individually, faces an incentive to keep subsidies in place. This trap evokes the classic “tragedy of the commons” that economists have studied for generations. But despite the familiarity of the problem in theory, they don’t yet have a lot of hard evidence to offer policymakers about ..read more

MIT’s Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design (LEAD) has been awarded a 400,000-euro grant from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, a German service provider focused on international cooperation for sustainable development and international education. The grant aims to create knowledge sharing opportunities for central bank leaders and help low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) design and scale central bank operations and digital public infrastructure (DPI). "Increased research between leading economists and computer scientists is critical, and an eq ..read more

One thing that makes large language models (LLMs) so powerful is the diversity of tasks to which they can be applied. The same machine-learning model that can help a graduate student draft an email could also aid a clinician in diagnosing cancer. However, the wide applicability of these models also makes them challenging to evaluate in a systematic way. It would be impossible to create a benchmark dataset to test a model on every type of question it can be asked. In a new paper, MIT researchers took a different approach. They argue that, because humans decide when to deploy large language mode ..read more

While many studies over the past several years have examined people’s access to and attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines, few studies in sub-Saharan Africa have looked at whether there were differences in vaccination rates and intention between men and women. In a new study appearing in the journal Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, researchers found that while women and men self-reported similar Covid-19 vaccination rates in 2022, unvaccinated men expressed more intention to get vaccinated than unvaccinated women. Women tend to have better health-seeking behaviors than men overall. H ..read more

At the core of Raymond Wang’s work lies a seemingly simple question: Can’t we just get along? Wang, a fifth-year political science graduate student, is a native of Hong Kong who witnessed firsthand the shakeup and conflict engendered by China’s takeover of the former British colony. “That type of experience makes you wonder why things are so complicated,” he says. “Why is it so hard to live with your neighbors?” Today, Wang is focused on ways of managing a rapidly intensifying U.S.-China competition, and more broadly, on identifying how China — and other emerging global powers — bend, break, o ..read more

The next time you cook pasta, imagine that you are cooking spaghetti, rigatoni, and seven other varieties all together, and they need to be separated onto 10 different plates before serving. A colander can remove the water — but you still have a mound of unsorted noodles.   Now imagine that this had to be done for thousands of tons of pasta a day. That gives you an idea of the scale of the problem facing Brendan Smith PhD ’18, co-founder and CEO of SiTration, a startup formed out of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) in 2020.   SiTration, which raised $11.8 ..read more

Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1. “Fotini is well-positioned to guide IDSS into the next chapter. With her tenure as the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and as an associate director of IDSS since 2020, she has actively forged connections between the social sciences, data science, and computation,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis War ..read more

Melissa Choi has been named the next director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, effective July 1. Currently assistant director of the laboratory, Choi succeeds Eric Evans, who will step down on June 30 after 18 years as director. Sharing the news in a letter to MIT faculty and staff today, Vice President for Research Ian Waitz noted Choi’s 25-year career of “outstanding technical and advisory leadership,” both at MIT and in service to the defense community. “Melissa has a marvelous technical breadth as well as excellent leadership and management skills, and she has presented a compelling strategic vi ..read more

Owen Coté PhD ’96, a principal research scientist with the MIT Security Studies Program (SSP), passed away on June 8 after battling cancer. He joined SSP in 1997 as associate director, a role he held for the rest of his life. He guided the program through the course of three directors — each profiting from his wise counsel, leadership skills, and sense of responsibility. “Owen was an indomitable scholar and leader of the field of security studies,” says M. Taylor Fravel, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and the director of SSP. “Owen was the heart and soul of SSP and a ..read more

The Department of Economics has announced David Autor as the inaugural holder of the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professorship in Economics, effective July 1.  The endowed chair is made possible by the generosity of Daniel and Gail Rubinfeld. Daniel Rubinfeld SM ’68, PhD ’72 is the Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law and professor of economics emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, and professor of law emeritus at New York University. “The Rubinfeld Professorship in Economics is important for two reasons,” Rubinfeld says. “First, it allows MIT to wisely manage its resou ..read more