Interest Matters

Interest Matters

Interest is a powerful motivational process that energizes learning, guides academic and career trajectories, and is essential to academic success. Interest is both a psychological state of attention and affect toward a particular object or topic, and an enduring predisposition to reengage over time. Integrating these two definitions, the four-phase model of interest development guides interven...

Activity Matters: Understanding Student Interest in School Science

A genuine interest in science is an important part of scientific literacy, and thus a critical goal for science education. Recent studies, however, have found that school science has not been effective in meeting this goal, an important reason for which is the lack of knowledge about what makes science interesting (or not) to the students. Using instructional episodes as the unit of analysis, t...

On secular stagnation and low interest rates: demography matters

Nominal and real interest rates in advanced economies have been decreasing since the mid-1980s and reached historical low levels in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Understanding why interest rates have fallen is essential for both monetary policy and financial stability. This paper focuses on one of the factors that have been put forward in the literature within the secular stagna...

Black Health Matters: Disparities, Community Health, and Interest Convergence

Monetary Policy: Why Money Matters and Interest Rates Don’t

Since the late 1980s the Fed has implemented monetary policy by adjusting its target for the overnight federal funds rate. Money’s role in monetary policy has been tertiary, at best. Indeed, several influential economists suggest that money is irrelevant for monetary policy: Central banks effect economic activity and inflation by a) controlling a very shortterm nominal interest rate and b) by i...