Education

An Opportunity to Partner on Postsecondary Success

To teenagers, choosing whether to study for next week’s history test instead of hanging out with friends is hard enough. As they transition to postsecondary education after high school or later in life, these types of choices grow in number and importance. Consequently, even the best laid plans for higher education can go awry. This […]

New White Paper: Using Behavioral Economics for Postsecondary Success

America’s future economic competitiveness, individuals’ economic opportunity, and reducing income inequality all depend heavily on increasing the number of graduates of quality postsecondary education programs. Fortunately, there is now a general consensus for the need to improve this hard-to-move outcome. The focus has turned to figuring out what is cost-effective and designing postsecondary policies and […]

New Working Paper: Behavioral Design for Development

Behavioral economics’ most successful large-scale impacts have so far been in the developed world, with notable successes including the headway made on getting Americans to save for retirement or the many successes of Britain’s Nudge Unit. But at ideas42, we believe that behavioral economics can also dramatically change the way development programs work (for the […]

A Chat About Behavioral Economics

One from the archives: back in 2010, ideas42 co-founder Sendhil Mullainathan and New York University’s Glenn Loury had a wide-ranging discussion about behavioral economics, which you can listen to here. Lots of food for thought in there, including the behavioral economics of the snooze button, why single mothers are like air-traffic controllers, and sundry other […]