More News from IWER

Senior lecturer Eric Rosengren said: "It's not that there's isn't any economic data, there's just no federal government economic data. It's not a great situation for the Federal Reserve to have to be dealing with noisier data."

While probationary periods give workers and their employers a chance to assess fit, they also present some risks to workers, said professor Emilio J. Castilla. If an employer uses the trial period as a tool to maintain a temporary workforce, for example, rather than hire for the long term, that would be an "unintended consequence of a practice that initially was meant to reduce risks for both the employer and the employee," Castilla said.

Principal research scientist Florian Berg wrote: "For those concerned about the threats to the world from climate change, some of the signals this year from institutional investors and investment banks are alarming. But there are reasons to be hopeful about the resilience of efforts to tackle environmental issues at the corporate level."

Professor Yasheng Huang says that academic institutions should "claim a larger share of the value they generate for society." Instead of relying on increasingly unreliable public funding, they should develop strategies to capture the wealth they produce.

Dina Sherif, executive director of the MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship, and co-author wrote: "Today, policymakers, academics and business leaders alike recognize that 20th-century growth models are no match for 21st-century challenges. If we continue chasing GDP while ignoring human development, the future risks becoming one of high output but low well-being. However, if we recalibrate and work on putting people, equity, innovation and sustainability at the core, we can enter a new era of prosperity."

Professor Andrew W. Lo has stated that a fully reliable decision-making AI is still "five years away," saying: "Until an AI assumes full fiduciary duty, it remains a smart toy, not a trustworthy advisor."

A study by senior lecturer Robert Pozen and co-authors found that in Britain, the shift to semiannual reporting didn't lead to longer-term thinking by corporate managers. "If they had more long-term thinking, you would predict that capital investment would go up" along with research and development. "But neither was true," said Pozen. He added, though, that "stock market volatility went up," probably because of long periods of scant data about the companies, causing the market to react abruptly when information finally appeared. "That's a real cost for investors," he said.

Many economists believe claims by CEOs and the tech industry are — at least on an economy-wide level — overblown. "There is a lot of pressure on managers to do something with AI and there is the hype that is contributing to it," said Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. "But not many people are doing anything super creative with it yet."

Michael Siegel, director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS), believes cyberattacks are becoming increasingly effective and accurate, as cybercriminals are leveraging tools like artificial intelligence. He also cited politics as a potential problem. "We can't control the state. There are many attacks concentrated in certain countries," he emphasized.

"Careful risk management enables investments with significant results," said professor Andrew W. Lo. "In the healthcare sector, investments in deep-tech have produced more drugs on the market than the major players. It's therefore an example of how thoughtful risk management can yield enormous opportunities. In this specific case, products that enhance our most precious asset: life."