Using a new dataset on manufacturing-industry-level growth rates and banking market concentration for U.S. states during 1899-1929 -- a period when restrictive branching laws segmented the U.S. banking system geographically -- Kris Mitchener and David Wheelock find that banking market concentration was positively correlated with the growth of the manufacturing sector. Such concentration was also correlated with industrial growth. A greater prevalence of branch banking and more banks per capita was associated with the growth of industries that relied relatively heavily on external financing or had greater access to external funding sources.

Does the presence of bankrupt firms negatively affect their non-bankrupt competitors? Effi Benmelech and Nittai Bergman use a novel dataset of secured debt tranches issued by U.S. airlines, which includes a detailed description of the underlying assets serving as collateral for the bankrupt firms. Their estimates suggest that a bankruptcy at one firm in an industry has a sizeable impact on the cost of debt financing of other industry participants.

Bill Encinosa, Didem Bernard, and Avi Dor estimate the impact of diabetics’ adherence to “doctors' orders” with regard to medication on hospitalizations, ER visits, and hospital costs. They find that an increase in diabetic drug adherence from 50 percent to 100 percent is associated with a 23 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate, from 15 percent to 11.5 percent, and a 46 percent reduction in ER visits, from 17.3 to 9.3 percent. While such an increase in adherence increases diabetic drug spending by $776 per year per diabetic, the annual cost savings for averted hospitalizations are larger: $886 per diabetic.

Toward the end of the 20th century, the positive relationship between educational attainment and longevity strengthened substantially. David Cutler, Fabian Lange, Ellen Meara, Seth Richards, and Chris Ruhm show that this was not primarily because of education-related changes in behavioral risk factors, such as smoking and obesity. Smoking declined more for the better educated than the less educated, but not enough to explain the mortality trend. Obesity has risen at similar rates across education groups, and control of blood pressure and cholesterol also has increased fairly uniformly. The researchers find that a substantial part of the effect of education must operate through another channel, because even after controlling for risk factors such as smoking and obesity, educational attainment exhibits a positive, and growing effect on longevity.

Daron Acemoglu and Pierre Yared suggest that militaristic sentiments, which appear to be on the rise among many nations around the globe today, may be a limiting factor for globalization. They show that over the past 20 years, countries that have experienced increasing militarism, measured either by spending on the military or the size of the military, have experienced less growth in trade than less-militaristic nations. In addition, when countries are grouped in pairs, the pairs in which both countries have experienced rising military spending display less growth in bilateral trade than other country pairs with only one, or no, countries that became more militaristic

In an experiment, over 1200 papers were collected from the students in undergraduate courses at a selective post-secondary institution after half of the students had been randomly assigned to complete an anti-plagiarism tutorial. Tom Dee and Brian Jacob find that the likelihood of plagiarism, particularly among students with lower SAT scores who would have been more likely to plagiarize, was reduced substantially in the group that took the tutorial. According to a follow-up survey of the students, that was more because of increased knowledge than because they believed they were more likely to be detected and punished.