EGC Quarterly Newsletter, Fall 2025

As thousands of students from around the globe congregate in New Haven to begin the Academic Year 2025-26, EGC takes a moment to reflect on our work facilitating the international exchange of ideas through teaching, research, events, and by hosting visitors from across the world.

Below, you will see how EGC affiliates’ empirical work challenges common misconceptions on migration: In the US, our new colleague Leah Boustan’s methodologically innovative work busts myths about economic mobility and cultural assimilation over time. Mushfiq Mobarak and colleagues find that when high-skilled workers emigrate from lower to higher-income countries, the right policies and conditions in the home countries can make it a win-win for their economies and labor markets, resulting in a “brain gain” rather than “brain drain.” 

Also, researchers and policy advisors in dialogue on how budget-constrained countries can make the most of early childhood development investments, and a policymaker discusses the future of African smallholder farming with two of our academic colleagues. Additionally, meet our new affiliated scholars, and learn about our upcoming events

Immigration indisputably shapes economic growth and development in the United States. But today, immigration’s effects on the US economy is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. Using a novel method of linking US Census records across time, new EGC affiliate Leah Boustan traces immigrants’ economic and cultural trajectories – confronting several prevailing myths about immigration in the process.

Amid longstanding concerns that emigration of high-skilled workers causes “brain drain,” new work by EGC affiliate Mushfiq Mobarak and coauthors identifies more complex dynamics at play—and points to emigration’s potential gains for origin countries. The paper, published in Science, identifies the conditions under which migration results in "brain gain" for the home country—adding more skilled workers to the domestic labor market, along with other economic benefits.

How can early childhood investments change the course of lives in lower-income countries? Meghir, a faculty affiliate of EGC and Inclusion Economics, and Hasan, a World Bank economist, share insights from interventions in Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Pakistan.

Former Rwandan Minister of Agriculture and current Vice-President of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development Gérardine Mukeshimana, along with economists Mark Rosenzweig and Christopher Udry dissect one of Africa’s most persistent development challenges: the low productivity of small farms. Despite decades of investment, innovation, and policy reform, yields on African small farms remain significantly below those in high-income countries—even when similar technologies are used.

Read about the exciting research being conducted by incoming EGC postdoctoral scholars across a range of fields including Economic History and Trade.

Argente on the role of demand frictions in how entrants build market share; Arkolakis on optimizing electric vehicle infrastructure; Bergemann on how digital advertising auctions affect product prices; Mobarak on the effects of high-skilled emigration on origin countries; Padró i Miquel on the competitive capture of public opinion; Padró i Miquel with an economic rationale to explain why countries seek to export their pro-labor or pro-capital ideology to other nations; Schott with evidence from transaction-level import data on how firms in different sectors organize their supply chains.