Janet Currie, Lucas Davis, Michael Greenstone, and Reed Walker study what happens to housing prices when industrial plants emitting toxic pollutants either open or close. They examine the experience around nearly 1600 plants and find that housing values within one mile of those plants decrease by 1.5 percent when the plants open and increase by 1.5 percent when the plants close. They estimate that this represents an aggregate loss in housing values per plant of about $1.5 million.

Past holdings of a country’s bonds may be an indirect indicator of the fixed costs of entering the market for international investments, because investors have sunk the costs of acquiring information and other costs related to that class of bonds. Livia Chițu, Barry Eichengreen, and Arnaud Mehl find that U.S. holdings of the bonds of a country in 1943 significantly influence U.S. holdings of foreign bonds of that country in 2010, even after controlling for other standard determinants. As much as 15 percent of the worldwide allocation of U.S. investors’ holdings today can be explained by holdings seven decades ago. Moreover, this “history effect” is twice as large for foreign-currency-denominated bonds as for dollar bonds: as much as 30 percent of the worldwide allocation of U.S. investors’ holdings of non-dollar bonds today can be explained by the pattern of such holdings seven decades ago.

Analyzing data from the American Community Surveys of 2009 and 2010, Jennifer Hunt shows that whether immigrants appear to be the "best and brightest" depends upon whether the sample -- in her study, engineers -- is defined based on occupation or education. She finds that among those working in engineering occupations, immigrants have more education and earn almost 10 percent more per hour than natives on average. However, among holders of engineering bachelor's degrees, immigrants earn nearly 10 percent less than natives on average, despite an education advantage. She observes that immigrants tend to work in occupations not commensurate with their education, they are not likely to be promoted out of technical occupations into management, and they are handicapped professionally by their imperfect English and their youth.