Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs Are Helping Single Women Find Partners and Jobs, New Research Finds

nber

• A new NBER study finds that single women who started GLP-1 drugs for weight loss saw their marriage or cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among non-working women rise by 27 percentage points after 18+ months.
• Crucially, the gains appeared only at the point of forming new relationships and jobs — existing partnerships didn't dissolve and already-employed women didn't get promoted — suggesting weight bias operates mainly when people are first sizing each other up.
• The findings offer some of the first real-world economic evidence that the 'obesity penalty' for women is largely about first impressions and new-match formation, not just health or on-the-job productivity.

China's WTO-era pollution came from coal power plants, not exporters — and that's a lesson for developing countries today

voxeu

• A new study finds that Chinese factories that increased exports actually got locally cleaner, and cleaner practices spread to their suppliers — but the electricity grid running on coal turned surging export demand into dirtier air around power plants.
• The net result was that China's export boom worsened air quality overall, but the culprit was the coal-heavy power sector, not the exporters themselves.
• The lesson for developing countries pursuing export-led growth: trade isn't the environmental villain, but without a clean power grid and environmental safeguards, the Chinese experience is likely to repeat itself.

AI Is Already Widespread in US Firms, but the Productivity Payoff Hasn't Fully Arrived Yet

voxeu

• A survey of 734 senior executives finds AI adoption is broad across US industries but shallow — most firms are subscribing to tools like ChatGPT rather than making deep capital investments, and near-term employment effects are small.
• Executives report positive productivity gains and expect bigger ones ahead, but measured revenue-per-worker improvements lag behind what executives say they're experiencing — a pattern reminiscent of how the internet took years to show up in economic statistics.
• The bigger story may be workforce composition: routine clerical jobs are expected to shrink while skilled technical roles grow, and productivity gains so far are coming mainly from better products and customer reach, not cost-cutting.

In the News

American Pride Is at Its Lowest Point in 25 Years, Just as the Country Turns 250

gallup

• Only 33% of Americans say they are 'extremely proud' to be American, the lowest share since Gallup began asking in 2001, down 8 points from last year alone.
• The partisan gap is at a record high: 70% of Republicans express extreme pride versus just 14% of Democrats, a 56-point chasm.
• Pride has fallen especially sharply among women, younger adults, and people of color, with less than half of each group now expressing high levels of national pride.

Analysis

Poor neighborhoods stay poor because the people who escape them move away

nber

• New research using administrative data finds that residents of poor neighborhoods actually experience earnings growth at rates similar to people in wealthier areas — but when their incomes rise, they tend to move to better neighborhoods.
• This "success and exit" dynamic means the neighborhood itself stays poor even as individual residents climb the economic ladder, because the upwardly mobile are continuously replaced by lower-income arrivals.
• The finding reframes a longstanding puzzle in urban economics: the problem isn't that poor neighborhoods trap people forever, but that the people who do escape take their gains elsewhere.

Also Worth a Look

• China Has Climbed the Economic Ladder — and Is Now Pulling It Up Behind It (hoover)
• China Is Stealing America's AI Breakthroughs by Secretly Harvesting Model Outputs — and the U.S. Doesn't Have a Real Answer Yet (itif)
• Tariffs and Capital Controls Could Erode the Dollar's Global Dominance, New Research Finds (nber)
• The Private Credit Boom Has a Hidden Fragility Problem That Could Hit Retail Investors Hard (nber)
• AI Search Could Hollow Out the Web by Starving Publishers of the Traffic That Funds Good Journalism (nber)
• Why the AI Job Shock Will Probably Hit Workers Much Less Hard Than the China Trade Shock Did (eig)
• A Massive Earthquake Has Hit Venezuela at the Worst Possible Moment for Its Fragile Political Transition (csis)