Is More Better? Evaluating Interventions to Increase Female Students’ Interest in Economics

By Ann L. Owen, Evelyn Skoy, and Wei Zhan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We implement a two-year randomized controlled trial in an introductory economics course at a liberal arts college to evaluate the impact of combining easy-to-implement interventions on students’ likelihood of taking additional economics courses. Interve...

Improving Introductory Microeconomics Outcomes through Concurrent Support Courses

By George Orlov and Douglas McKee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Math skills are strong predictors of success in economics courses, yet we know little about what kind of support works best for students with weaker quantitative preparation. This study estimates treatment‑on‑the‑treated and intent‑to‑treat effe...

Quality-Adjusted Unit Value Index: Are Changes in Average Prices Inflation or Quality Change?

By John Haltiwanger, R. Benjamin Rodriguez, Ron Jarmin, and Matthew D. Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

The growing availability of digitized item-level transaction data has led to widespread use of the average selling price, called the unit value index (UVI) by researchers, to track price change. Though commonly used by retailers and market analysts as ind...

When Do Chained Deflators for IT Goods Overstate Quality Change?

By Ana Aizcorbe and Daniel Ripperger-Suhler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In general, chained deflators for IT goods will have a commingling problem that causes them to overstate quality growth. We base this on a comparison of chained superlative indexes with a multilateral index that does not have the commingling problem—the...

Look Within: Demographic Grouping Masks Inflation Inequality

By Kelsey O’Flaherty

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

The recent inflation surge prompted renewed assessments of inflation inequality. Examinations of inflation by income or other demographic groups point to a shrinking or stable inflation gap between high- and low-income households in 2022. At the same time...

Lack of Uniform Prices or Lack of Uniform Retailers?

By Seula Kim and Michael A. Navarrete

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Standard models assume uniform pricing across stores (DellaVigna and Gentzkow 2019). We show that uniform pricing varies across products within food categories. Even when product-chain prices are nearly uniform, cross-market differences in retailer and pr...

Quasilinearity and Its Discontents: Public-Good Regulation with Consumer Risk Aversion and Income Effects

By Edward E. Schlee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In the partial-equilibrium literature on regulation, the usual measure of social welfare is a weighted average of expected profit and expected consumers' surplus. It is justified if two strong quasilinearity assumptions hold on each consumer's von Neumann...

Institutional Design for Environmental Acts

By Louise Guillouet and David Martimort

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Environmental decisions often involve irreversibility and uncertainty. We develop a dynamic model in which actions yield flow benefits, but, once an unknown tipping point is crossed, the accumulated stock of past actions raises the risk of irreversible ca...

The Informational Role of Emission Markets: Prices versus Quantities with Dispersed Information about Externalities

By Derek Lemoine

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

I study asymmetric information about the social cost of an externality, as opposed to asymmetric information about private costs of abatement. I show that quantity regulation with bankable permits has an informational advantage because the permit market a...

The Rare-Earth Footprint of the Global Economy: Input-Output Evidence

By Laura Alfaro, Harald Fadinger, Jan Schymik, and Gede Virananda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential inputs in advanced manufacturing and green technologies, yet their role in global production networks remains difficult to quantify due to data limitations. This paper develops a methodology, following Alfaro et al...

Multilateral Export Control Regimes and Aggregate Exports

By Jingting Fan, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limão

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Export controls have become a central instrument of international economic policy, governing trade in dual-use and sensitive technologies among allies and rivals alike. Despite their prominence, little is known about how multilateral export control regime...

Can Sanctions Deter Wars? The Russia-Ukraine Case

By Thierry Mayer, Isabelle Méjean, and Mathias Thoenig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Our paper simulates a model of trade, diplomacy, and wars, calibrated to be relevant for analyzing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The quantitative results show that Ukraine’s decoupling from Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea reduced i...

Reexamining Geographic Variation in Health and Health Care

By Amy Finkelstein and Matthew Gentzkow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

A large literature has documented widespread variation in health care spending per capita across areas of the United States without correspondingly better health outcomes. Recent work has used "mover designs" to estimate the causal impact of place on both...

International Comparison of Physician Incomes

By Aidan Buehler, Joshua D. Gottlieb, Jeffrey Hicks, Lisa Laun, Mårten Palme, Maria Polyakova, Victoria Udalova, and Maria Ventura

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We compare physician incomes using tax data from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Physicians are concentrated in the top percentiles of the income distribution in all four countries, especially in the United States and certain speci...

Explaining the Atomistic versus Ecological Fallacies in SES-Health Gradients

By William Parker and Johannes Spinnewijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

A large literature in economics and public health studies the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, often relying on area-based measures when individual data are unavailable. Using comprehensive Dutch administrative data, we examine ...

The Effect of Noncompete Enforceability on Productivity: Evidence from a New State-Level Manufacturing Dataset

By Katherine Chang, Matthew Johnson, Kurt Lavetti, Michael Lipsitz, and Devesh Raval

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Roughly 20 percent of US workers have noncompete agreements (NCAs), restricting their ability to join or form competing firms after separating from their employer. While there is now evidence that stricter NCA enforceability reduces wages, effects on prod...

Noncompetes and Firm Heterogeneity

By Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompetes often cover highly trained, high-paid workers but are also widespread in low-skill, low-pay service jobs. This paper asks where they hurt workers more. Using a dynamic monopsony job-ladder framework, we show that noncompetes depress wages by r...

Noncompete Agreements and Bargaining Power

By Bhargav Gopal, Xiangru Li, and Luke Rawling

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCs) present a trade-off between firm investment incentives and allocative efficiency. We illustrate this trade-off using a contract choice model in which NCs encourage industry-specific investments and wages are determined by barga...

The Impact of Noncompetes on Wages and Job Tenure: New Evidence from NLSY Data

By Tristan Potter, André Kurmann, and Bart Hobijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCAs) are pervasive even in low-wage labor markets, yet most evidence relies on variation in enforceability rather than NCA incidence. Using longitudinal data from the NLSY97, we study how signing an NCA affects wage trajectories an...

Fintech and Customer Capital

By Bianca He, Lauren Mostrom, and Amir Sufi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Financial Technology (fintech) firms invest significantly more in customer capital relative to traditional financial firms, and such investment builds valuable customer capital. Higher investment by fintech firms is not accounted for by sectoral focus or ...