Digital Gems

Many renters seeking to move in New York City have to pay up to 15 percent of an annual lease to brokers — regardless of whether they helped find the apartment. After a legal battle, the state affirmed this week that broker fees were legal.

Nationwide puts annual rise at highest for seven years, with buyers looking for bigger homes and gardens

Nationally, 42% of Black households live in a home they owned compared with 72% of White households

Since 2003, U.S. household debt has doubled to over $14.5 trillion. We break down the components of this colossal figure.

California was a pioneer in minimum parking mandates, which drive up housing costs and climate emissions. Now the state is ready to lead the nation in reclaiming our cities from parking lots.

A tax exemption allows millions of Americans to skip taxes when they sell their homes at a profit. A Biden administration proposal would take a larger bite from some sellers with the biggest gains.

Prices grew 13.3% annually in March, according to Case-Shiller. Other data due out this week will offer clues about whether the housing supply crunch will continue.

Prices and demand surged, just as supplies dwindled.

Potential home-buyers are using rentals to help assess new places to live.

Real-estate developers and websites are offering short-term rentals with no strings attached, so renters can test-drive new homes and new cities.

Fashion rental platform Rent the Runway is getting into resale, the company said Wednesday.

America’s poor foot much of the bill for credit card points, miles, and cash back.

The NFT market has collapsed nearly 90% since the bubble popped last month, and crypto collectibles like CryptoPunks are fading fast.

New evidence shows that the pandemic’s effects have largely not—or at least not yet—translated into dramatically higher delinquencies or defaults among small businesses.

Many businesses that closed during the pandemic may not be able to reopen.

The majority of Etsy sellers’ businesses held steady or thrived during the pandemic

Flawed assessments for America’s $500 billion in annual property taxes hit Black neighborhoods hardest.

The Society Pages (TSP) is an open-access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota

A survey by sociologist Karl Pillemer revealed that about 25% of people live with some kind of family estrangement, and those damaged relationships take a toll — mentally and physically.

"I don’t see any end in sight for money coming in."

Oxford Risk has launched a landmark study of human noise and inconsistencies in the advice process.

Owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses.

Listen now (22 min) | Estimating the size of the file drawer problem

Experiments that produce null results face a higher barrier to publication than those that yield statistically significant differences. Whether this is a problem depends on how many null but otherwise valid results might be trapped in the file drawer. Franco et al. use a Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences archive of nearly 250 peer-reviewed proposals of social science experiments conducted on nationally representative samples. They find that only 10 out of 48 null results were published, whereas 56 out of 91 studies with strongly significant results made it into a journal. Science , this issue p. [1502][1] We studied publication bias in the social sciences by analyzing a known population of conducted studies—221 in total—in which there is a full accounting of what is published and unpublished. We leveraged Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), a National Science Foundation–sponsored program in which researchers propose survey-based experiments to be run on representative samples of American adults. Because TESS proposals undergo rigorous peer review, the studies in the sample all exceed a substantial quality threshold. Strong results are 40 percentage points more likely to be published than are null results and 60 percentage points more likely to be written up. We provide direct evidence of publication bias and identify the stage of research production at which publication bias occurs: Authors do not write up and submit null findings. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1255484

(Forthcoming Article) - Given a scarcity of journal space, what is the optimal rule for whether an empirical finding should be published? Suppose publications inform the public about a policy-relevant state. Then journals should publish extreme results, meaning ones that move beliefs sufficiently. This optimal rule may take the form of a one- or a two-sided test comparing a point estimate to the prior mean, with critical values determined by a cost-benefit analysis. Consideration of future studies may additionally justify the publication of precise null results. If one insists that standard inference remain valid, however, publication must not select on the study’s findings.

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