Mean Reversion in Randomized Controlled Trials: Implications for Program Targeting and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

By Marcella Alsan, John Cawley, Joseph J. Doyle, and Nicholas Skelley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Eligibility criteria for interventions can induce an Ashenfelter Dip, and subsequent mean reversion results in improvement over time even absent the intervention. We investigate these dynamics for a food-as-medicine program to treat diabetes, where eligib...

Historical Differences in Female-Owned Manufacturing Establishments: The United States, 1850–1880

By Ruveyda Gozen, Richard Hornbeck, Anders Humlum, and Martin Rotemberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using digitized manuscripts from the US Census of Manufactures (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output rati...

Silent Partners: Corporate Ownership, Risk, and the Gender Asset Gap in Antebellum New England

By B. Zorina Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Little is known about corporate ownership, personal wealth, and the composition of investment portfolios by gender during early US industrialization. A sample of 42,500 shareholders in over 200 corporations highlights women's increasing contributions to c...

Gender Gaps in Entrepreneurship: Business Networks and Collaborations in Ghana

By Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Edward Asiedu, Francesca Truffa, and Ashley Wong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study examines the characteristics of business networks and how they contribute to gender disparities in entrepreneurship. We conduct a survey on a sample of 1,487 young, highly educated male and female agribusiness owners in Ghana. We document that ...

The Inverted U-Shaped Relationship between Female Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

By Nava Ashraf, Alexia Delfino, Edward L. Glaeser, and Irene Solmone

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the share of entrepreneurs who are women first rises and then falls with national income, while female labor force participation has the opposite U-shaped pattern. We present a model in which gender-based disadvantages...

Emission Prices, Biomass, and Biodiversity in Tropical Forests

By Lars Peter Hansen and José A. Scheinkman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We investigate how external emission prices influence robustly optimal reforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and the biodiversity impacts. Extending the findings of Assuncao et al. (2023), we revisit their spatial-dynamic model of land allocation under un...

The Economics of Blended Finance

By Caroline Flammer, Thomas Giroux, and Geoffrey M. Heal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Projects with high societal impact—such as biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation—often offer financial returns that are too low, or too risky, to attract private capital. Under such circumstances, it can be difficult to raise adequat...

The Effectiveness of Local Conservation Ballots

By Dylan Hogan, Eyal G. Frank, Joséphine Gantois, and Anouch Missirian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Global action to slow biodiversity loss is critically needed but comes at substantial cost. In this article, we assess the effectiveness of local ballot measures for land-based conservation projects in the United States as a way to increase bird abundance...

Nature Loss and Climate Change: The Twin-Crises Multiplier

By Stefano Giglio, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Olivier Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study the economic effects of the interaction of nature loss and climate change in a model that incorporates important aspects of both processes. We capture the distinct ways in which they affect economic activity—with nature constituting a key facto...

The Long-Run Impacts of Mentoring Underrepresented Minority Groups in Economics

By Francisca M. Antman, Sheng Qu, Bruce A. Weinberg, and Trevon D. Logan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We conduct a long-run evaluation of one of the oldest professional mentoring programs for underrepresented groups in economics, the American Economic Association Mentoring Program (AEAMP). The AEAMP was established to address the underrepresentation of ra...

Did Board Gender Quotas Break the Glass Ceiling in Europe?

By David A. Matsa and Amalia R. Miller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Nine European countries adopted gender quotas for companies' boards of directors between 2005 and 2021 before the European Parliament adopted an EU-wide quota in 2022. Using 25 years of data, we estimate the quotas' effects on female shares of corporate d...

Enabling Employment: How Do Employer Disability Practices Affect Disability Employment Outcomes?

By Lawrence Houston and Douglas Kruse

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We use panel data from 235 firms from 2019–2023 to examine how disability-related practices affect disability employment outcomes, using a detailed annual survey of large US companies in the National Organization on Disability, which collectively employ...

Rigidities in Transportation and Supply Chain Disruptions

By Giulia Brancaccio, Myrto Kalouptsidi, and Theodore Papageorgiou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In this paper, we provide a simple and intuitive story for supply chain disruptions driven by the rigidities in the transportation sector. Focusing on maritime shipping, we argue that the frequent macroeconomic shocks that shape demand for transportation ...

Spatial Externalities, Inefficiency, and Sufficient Statistics

By Gabriel Kreindler and Kartik Patekar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

How much economic inefficiency is generated by spatial externalities such as agglomeration or congestion? What can we learn with data and variation around an inefficient equilibrium? We express deadweight loss in an equilibrium model with spatial external...

Sea Level Rise and Urban Infrastructure

By Allan Hsiao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

How exposed are cities to the threat of sea level rise? I quantify this exposure worldwide with a focus on urban infrastructure. I document three facts. First, Asian cities are highly exposed. Second, poorer cities and neighborhoods are less exposed. Thir...

Optimizing Electric Vehicle Infrastructure

By Costas Arkolakis, Kenneth T. Gillingham, and Seung-Yong Yoo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

What are the welfare gains from upgrading electric vehicle infrastructure? This paper develops a model of electric vehicle charging location decisions incorporating the transportation network structure, allocation of travel, and the effect on electric veh...

Economic Sanctions and Intermediated Trade

By Maxim Chupilkin, Beata Javorcik, Aleksandra Peeva, and Alexander Plekhanov

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Circumvention undermines economic sanction effectiveness, yet evidence on the precise mechanisms remains limited. This paper documents two strategies deployed to work around trade sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022: intermediated trade through Caucasus a...

Dodging Trade Sanctions? Evidence from Military Goods

By Lisa Scheckenhofer, Feodora A. Teti, and Joschka Wanner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to unprecedented sanctions aimed at denying Russia access to critical technologies essential for sustaining its war efforts. This paper examines whether trade sanctions targeting military goods were undermined b...

Trade Sanctions against Russia: Stylized Facts

By Konstantin Egorov, Vasily Korovkin, Alexey Makarin, and Dzhamilya Nigmatulina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Using a novel comprehensive dataset on sanctions imposed on the exports to Russia after 2022, we document four stylized facts. First, these sanctions covered 33 percent of Russia's pre-2022 imports in value. Second, though most of the sanctions were conce...

Long-Run Consequences of Sanctions on Russia

By David Baqaee and Hannes Malmberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We analyze the long-run economic consequences of Western sanctions on Russia. Using a new framework for balanced growth path analysis, we find that allowing for capital adjustment amplifies consumption loss due to sanctions, contrary to the intuition that...