In this article, Amit Kramer, Kwon Hee Han, Yun Kyoung Kim, and Yun Kyoung Kim reflect on the hypotheses and observations that led to their article, “Inefficiencies and bias in first job placement: the case of professional Asian nationals in the United States,” found in the Journal of Industrial Relations. Their reflection can be found below the paper’s abstract. We study whether the quality of the first job is lower for professional Asian nationals than for non-Asian nationals in the USA. With over a million professionals from Asia entering the US labor market in the past deca ..read more

It is often remarked that Spanish should be more widely spoken or understood in the scientific community given its number of speakers around the world, a figure the Instituto Cervantes places at almost 600 million. However, millions of speakers do not necessarily grant a language strength in academia. This has to be cultivated on a scientific, political and cultural level, with sustained efforts from many institutions and specialists. The scientific community should communicate in as many languages as possible By some estimates, as much as 98 percent of the world’s scientific research is publi ..read more

Bernice Pescosolido, a distinguished professor of sociology at Indiana University, will deliver the annual Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors distinguished lecture for the National Institutes of Health’s Officer of Behavioral and Social Science Research. Four early-stage investigators will also deliver lectures on their work. Bernice Pescosolido Pescosolido, a medical sociologist, is the founding director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research and of the Irsay Family Research Institute, which targets research in the sociomedical sciences. Her resea ..read more

Here’s a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There’s a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money — “get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.” Economist Tavneet Suri has done more than just think about that; her fieldwork includes handing out money across villages in two rural areas in Kenya to see what happens. Her experiments include giving out a lump sum of cash and also spre ..read more

Aurélie Ouss will deliver the 2024 Mark Kleiman Innovation for Public Policy Memorial Lecture at the National Academy of Sciences Building. This lecture memorializes the late Mark Kleiman — a policy analyst, teacher, and long-time member of the National Academy’s Committee on Law and Justice — by awarding an early career scholars who has innovative ideas for public policy.  Ouss is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship aims to make the criminal justice system fairer and more efficient. She primarily does empirical resea ..read more

This month’s installment of The Evidence explores how leading ethics experts are responding to the urgent dilemma of gender bias in AI. In 2014, Maria Perez-Ortiz completed work on a machine-learning model to help doctors prioritize liver transplant waiting lists. Two years later, Perez-Ortiz discovered a critical issue: the model was assigning hardly any transplants to women. For Perez-Ortiz, now UNESCO co-chair in artificial intelligence, this discovery was a wake-up call. She realized that “AI is simply a microcosm that reflects the world.” In other words, AI entrenches inequalities and amp ..read more

Major components of modern society are set up to manage and control criminals and what they perpetrate. The police, laws, and their operation are a major part of any economy. The prison system and other forms of punishment, or attempts to rehabilitate offenders, use massive resources. Then there is the large-scale commercial enterprise of insurance and protection against crime. On top of this, it is impossible to turn on the television, enter a bookshop, or search the internet without coming across crime fact and fiction. What would society be without crime? But beyond all these consequences o ..read more

On May 5, 2023, a 19-year-old hiker named Matthew Read headed out on a roughly 12-mile trek in an underpopulated part of Glacier National Park in Montana. Read, a chemical engineering student, had stopped in Glacier while driving home to Michigan, and the pine-surrounded path he embarked on was known for its big views of the Livingston Range, a set of jagged peaks to the east. He would get a longer look at them than he anticipated. By Sunday, two days later, the young hiker had yet to return. That afternoon, national park rangers started a ground search; that night, a helicopter team scanned f ..read more

Thanks to a new collaboration between the United States government’s Office of Management & Budget and the General Services Administration (GSA), a new opportunity to engage is federal evidence is now open for applications. The President’s Management Agenda Learning Agenda: Public Participation & Community Engagement Evidence Challenge is dedicated to forming a strategic, evidence-based plan that federal agencies and external researchers can use to solve big problems. This project is expected to create new and innovative tools for government evaluation of community engagement and publi ..read more

Diane M. Bergeron discusses the transformative effects of bereavement and the motivation behind her article, “Monday Mourning: A Call for the Study of Bereavement in the Workplace,” which was recently published in the Journal of Management Inquiry. Someone once asked what motivated me to pursue this research. Beyond grandparents, I’ve experienced two significant bereavements. When I was 17, my young brother was hit by a car. Fifteen years ago, one of my sons died. There is so much that people don’t understand about bereavement, which is exacerbated by societal misconceptions (e.g., the ‘f ..read more