Research Highlights Featured Chart

December 23, 2025

2025 in Featured Charts

Economists addressed issues related to policing, unemployment benefits, bank bailouts, and more.

The top ten Featured Charts of 2025 covered a wide variety of topics.

Tyler Smith

Research Highlights Featured Charts provide snapshots of charts or figures from the latest published articles, including some context of how the chart relates to the authors' findings. The top ten charts of 2025 covered policing, unemployment benefits, bank bailouts, and more. You can view the most popular charts from 2025 below. The rankings are based on overall page views. Check out more on our website.   

 

1. The immigration–crime link

Economists Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres assembled the first comprehensive picture of immigrant incarceration rates spanning 150 years of US history. Their findings repudiate widely held assumptions about immigration and public safety and reveal new patterns in immigration–crime data. Read more.

Figure 1 from Abramitzky et al. (2024)

 

2. The George Floyd Effect

Researchers Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik, Jesse Bruhn, and Ellora Derenoncourt uncovered a substantial decline in crime reporting across US cities in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police. The finding suggests that high-profile acts of police violence erode community engagement with law enforcement. Read more.

Figure 3 from Ang et al. (2025)

 

3. Bias in academic networking

Economists Nicolás Ajzenman, Bruno Ferman, and Pedro C. Sant'Anna uncovered evidence of discrimination in how academic economists form professional networks on social media, revealing systematic favoritism based on race, university prestige, and gender. Read more.

Figure 1 from Ajzenman et al. (2025)

 

4. Regulation and conglomerate production

Researchers Qiaoyi Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, and Daniel Yi Xu found that energy use quotas on China's most energy-intensive firms did not result in increasing energy efficiency. Instead, targeted firms largely complied by cutting their output. Much of this reduction was offset as production shifted to other firms in their conglomerate network, a phenomenon known as “leakage.” Read more.

Figure 3 from Chen et al. (2025)

 

5. The effects of unemployment benefit duration

In December 2013, when Congress failed to reauthorize the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act, many prominent economists predicted a substantial decline in employment and labor force participation. Economists Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, and Kurt Mitman show, to the contrary, that this abrupt end to unemployment benefits actually led to a surge in employment and labor force growth, especially in states with larger cuts in benefit duration. Read more.

Figure 1 from Hagedorn et al. (2025)

 

6. Tackling gender inequality in the labor market

Researchers Jack Blundell, Emma Duchini, Ştefania Simion, and Arthur Turrell show that a pay transparency mandate in the United Kingdom successfully reduced the gender pay gap, but not by boosting women’s salaries. Read more.

Figure 2 from Blundell et al. (2025)

 

7. Moving toward the center

Researchers Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons show that political candidates systematically move toward the center between the first and second rounds of an election, specifically adjusting to mirror whomever they're facing in the final round. Read more.

Panel A of Figure 5 from Di Tella et al. (2025)

 

8. The effect of informational and financial interventions on student outcomes

Economist Laetitia Renée found that helping students to navigate complex educational decisions and develop concrete plans may yield higher college enrollment and better long-term returns than covering tuition costs. Read more.

Figure 1 from Laetitia Renée (2025)

 

9. Still too big to fail?

Researchers Antje Berndt, Darrell Duffie, and Yichao Zhu provide evidence that instead of increasing after the Global Financial Crisis, market expectations of a government bailout for globally systemically important banks (GSIBs) actually decreased. Read more.

Figure 3 from Berndt et al. (2025)

 

10. Beating the heat

Economists Kevin Kuruc, Melissa LoPalo, and Sean O'Connor estimate that by the end of this century, the extra discomfort from hotter temperatures could cost Americans billions of dollars per year. The findings come from an unexpected place: America’s favorite pastime. Read more.

Figure 2 from Kuruc et al. (2024)

 

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