Report on the State of Available Data for the Study of International Trade and Foreign Direct Investment

This report, prepared for the Committee on Economic Statistics of the American Economic Association, examines the state of available data for the study of international trade and foreign direct investment. Data on values of imports and exports of goods are of high quality and coverage, but price data suffer from insufficient detail. It would be desirable to have more data measuring value-added in trade as well as prices of comparable domestic and imported inputs. Value data for imports and exports of services are too aggregated and valuations are questionable, while price data for service exports and imports are almost non-existent. Foreign direct investment data are of high quality but quality has suffered from budget cuts. Data on trade in intellectual property are fragmentary. The intangibility of the trade makes measurement difficult, but budget cuts have added to the difficulties. Modest funding increases would result in data more useful for research and policy analysis.

Mantle Degassing Lifetimes through Galactic Time and the Maximum Age Stagnant-lid Rocky Exoplanets can Support Temperate Climates

The ideal exoplanets to search for life are those within a star's habitable zone. However, even within the habitable zone planets can still develop uninhabitable climate states. Sustaining a temperate climate over geologic ($\sim$Gyr) timescales requires a planet contain sufficient internal energy to power a planetary-scale carbon cycle. A major component of a rocky planet's energy budget is the heat produced by the decay of radioactive elements, especially $^{40}$K, $^{232}$Th, $^{235}$U and $^{238}$U. As the planet ages and these elements decay, this radiogenic energy source dwindles. Here we estimate the probability distribution of the amount of these heat producing elements (HPEs) that enter into rocky exoplanets through Galactic history, by combining the system-to-system variation seen in stellar abundance data with the results from Galactic chemical evolution models. Using these distributions, we perform Monte-Carlo thermal evolution models that maximize the mantle cooling rate. This allows us to create a pessimistic estimate of lifetime a rocky, stagnant-lid exoplanet can support a global carbon cycle and temperate climate as a function of its mass and when it in Galactic history. We apply this framework to a sample of 17 likely rocky exoplanets with measured ages, 7 of which we predict are likely to be actively degassing today despite our pessimistic assumptions. For the remaining planets, including those orbiting TRAPPIST-1, we cannot confidently assume they currently contain sufficient internal heat to support mantle degassing at a rate sufficient to sustain a global carbon cycle or temperate climate without additional tidal heating or undergoing plate tectonics.Comment: Accepted to ApJ Letter

Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood

Detecting and responding appropriately to social information in one’s environment is a vital part of everyday social interaction. We report two well-powered, pre-registered experiments that examined how social attention develops across the lifespan, comparing adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old) and older (60-80 years old) adults. In two real-world tasks, participants were immersed in different social interaction situations – a face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment – and their attention to social and non-social content was recorded using eye-tracking glasses. Results revealed that, compared to young adults, adolescents and older adults attended less to social information (i.e. the face) during face-to-face conversation, and to people when navigating the real-world. Thus, we provide evidence that real-world social attention undergoes age-related change, and these developmental differences might be a key mechanism that influences Theory of Mind among adolescents and older adults, with potential implications for predicting successful social interactions in daily life