Do Embedded Supports Promote Engaged Learning? Experimental Evidence on Resource Use among Community College Students

By Kelli A. Bird and Benjamin L. Castleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We report results from an experimental evaluation of an intervention in which tutoring and advising services were embedded directly into “gateway” community college courses and targeted to students identified by faculty and staff as at risk of not com...

School’s in for Summer? The Effect of Encouraging Summer Community College Enrollment

By Scott E. Carrell, Michal Kurlaender, Paco Martorell, and Christina Sun

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We present evidence from a field experiment examining whether encouraging summer community college enrollment affects early postsecondary outcomes. Graduating high school seniors, participating in a college intentions survey, were randomly assigned to rec...

When Intensity Meets Modality: The Effects of Condensed Course Formats in Online and In-Person Instruction

By XunFei Li and Di Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Condensed courses, which deliver the same instructional content over a shorter time frame, have been increasingly used by colleges to expand scheduling flexibility. Emerging evidence suggests that these formats often improve course performance, but little...

Inducing Cross-Sector Enrollment for Community College Students through Burden Reduction

By Rachel Baker, Michael Hill, Gala Ledezma, Joshua Dorman, Loris Fagioli, Pablo Bezem, Michael Cooper, and XunFei Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Although most community college students intend to earn a bachelor’s degree, few successfully transfer to a four-year university. California’s cross-enrollment policy was intended to reduce transfer barriers by allowing community college studen...

Leveraging Subjective Expectations for Production Functions

By Steve Bond, Agnes Norris Keiller, Áureo de Paula, and John Van Reenen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Norris Keiller, de Paula, and Van Reenen (2024) (NPR) propose estimating production functions using firms' subjective expectations of future output and inputs, data which are becoming increasingly available in surveys. This note compares their proposed e...

Production Functions under Imperfect Competition: A Quality-Equivalent Cournot Model

By Daniel A. Ackerberg and Jan De Loecker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We discuss the limitations of using unit quantity data to measure output in the estimation of production functions. We introduce a simple model, the quality-equivalent Cournot model, where revenue or deflated revenue is the preferable measure of output as...

A Generalized Control Function Approach to Production Function Estimation

By Ulrich Doraszelski and Lixiong Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We develop a generalized control function approach to production function estimation. Our approach accommodates settings in which productivity evolves jointly with other unobservable factors such as latent demand shocks and the invertibility assumption un...

Dynamic Difference-in-Differences with Interference

By Ruonan Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Interference/spillover is a common concern in place-based policy evaluation. This paper develops a difference-in-differences framework that accounts for interference using panel data with multiple posttreatment periods and potentially staggered treatment ...

When Should Pre-trends Be Parallel?

By Dalia Ghanem, Pedro H. C. Sant’Anna, and Kaspar Wüthrich

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We analyze pre-trends tests through the lens of how units select into treatment. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for pre-trends and trends to be parallel with and without covariates. These conditions show that even in the absence of structur...

Event Studies with Feedback

By Irene Botosaru and Laura Liu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Event studies often conflate direct treatment effects with indirect effects operating through endogenous covariate adjustment. We develop a dynamic panel event study framework that separates these effects. The framework allows for persistent outcomes and ...

Nonlinear Difference-in-Differences with Repeated Cross Sections

By Jeffrey M. Wooldridge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

I show how to extend to repeated cross sections the nonlinear difference-in-differences estimators with panel data for staggered interventions in Wooldridge (2023). Implementation of pooled quasi-maximum likelihood is straightforward for both lags only an...

Measuring the Growth of Skills

By James Heckman, Haihan Tian, Zijian Zhang, and Jin Zhou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in measuring the growth of knowledge and comparing the skills of people. New skills emerge that are not just more of the previously acquired skills. Psychometric convention forces these skills into arbitrarily co...

How Universal Preschool Shapes Boys’ and Girls’ Outcomes in Poor and Better-Off Households: Evidence from Mexico

By Jere R. Behrman, Susan W. Parker, Petra E. Todd, and Weilong Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This research evaluates Mexico’s 2002 universal preschool mandate using a local difference-in-differences design to isolate policy impacts from school-entry-age effects. Although the mandate significantly boosted cognitive test scores, particularly for ...

The Power of Anecdotes

By Arjada Bardhi and Nina Bobkova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Anecdotes pervade public discourse. In a sender-receiver framework, we formalize why anecdotes persuade even when an aggregate statistic—rather than individual cases—is what matters. A single anecdote reveals information about similar cases, shifting ...

From Ports to Prices: The Inflationary Effects of Global Supply Chain Disruptions

By Yang Jiao, Ting Lan, Yang Liu, and Xinrui Zhou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines the inflationary effects of shipping delays. We construct a novel measure of port-to-port shipping time using real-time Automatic Identification System maritime data and link it with granular port-level trade and item-level price data....

Who Is Biased? Heterogeneity in Gender Bias in Evaluations

By Stephanie El Khoury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Professor review websites are widely used by students but may transmit biased information. This paper examines who generates gender bias in teaching evaluations. Using scraped instructor data from RateMyProfessor.com, I document descriptive evidence of a ...

Recent Trends in Labor Supply Decisions among Married Couples in the United States

By Seonyoung Park and Nicole B. Simpson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines changes in joint labor supply among married US households during the period of trend reversal in aggregate labor supply from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. Married women, particularly those with children, exhibit the most significa...

Beyond Time and Money: Parental Occupation and Early Childhood Development

By Hyun Soo Suh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines how parental occupation shapes early cognitive and noncognitive child development. Using the Millennium Cohort Study and the British Household Panel Survey, I document that parents allocate time in home production and market work diffe...

Digital Incentives in Surveys: Response Rates and Sociodemographic Effects in a Large-Scale Parental Nudge Intervention

By Kalena E. Cortes, Brian Holzman, Melissa Gentry, and Miranda Lambert

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This study examines how digital incentives influence survey participation and engagement in a large randomized controlled trial of parents across six school districts. We test how incentive amount and information about vendor options affect response behav...

The Harder They Fall: Diverging Black-White Wealth in Older Age Using the Health and Retirement Study

By Teegawende H. Zeida, William A. Darity Jr., Samuel L. Myers Jr., and Illenin O. Kondo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we document that wealthier Black households experience slower wealth accumulation compared to White households with similar, higher initial wealth. Racial wealth accumulation gaps widen racial disparities in we...