N. Gregory Mankiw, Distinguished Fellow 2026

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Robert A. Margo, Distinguished Fellow 2026

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Marjorie McElroy, Distinguished Fellow 2026

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Do Carbon Offsets Offset Carbon?

By Raphael Calel, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre, and Matthieu Glachant

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

We develop and implement a new method for identifying wasted subsidies and use it to provide systematic evidence of the misallocation of carbon offsets in the Clean Development Mechanism—the world's largest carbon offset program. Using newly constructed...

Employed in a SNAP? The Impact of Work Requirements on Program Participation and Labor Supply

By Colin Gray, Adam Leive, Elena Prager, Kelsey Pukelis, and Mary Zaki

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Work requirements are common in US safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals. Using linked administrative data on food stamps (S...

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy with Distorting Taxes

By Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2025

When government debt pays a lower return than private assets, the reasoning in Friedman's (1969) essay on the optimal quantity of money suggests that it would be optimal to expand the debt until its return matched that on private assets. When the only oth...

The Fake News Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News

By Michael Thaler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people have preconceiv...

John Bates Clark Medal

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Awarded annually to the American economist under the age of forty with the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge

American Economic Association Announces Spring Award Recipients for 2026

[News]

April 06, 2026

View the AEA Member Announcement from April 7, 2026.

AEA Honors and Awards

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Ludwig Straub, Clark Medalist 2026

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Demo Home Page 2

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Co-Impact Grant: Second Call for Proposals

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Co-Impact Grant: Second Call for Proposals

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Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets

By Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ashley Langer, and Mar Reguant

American Economic Review

Natural gas has replaced coal as the dominant fuel for U.S. electricity generation. However, utilities in regulated U.S. states have retired coal more slowly than others. We build a structural model of rate-of-return regulation during an energy transiti...

Ideological Alignment and Evidence-Based Policy Adoption

By Jorge García-Hombrados, Marcel Jansen, Angel Martínez, Berkay Özcan, Pedro Rey-Biel, and Antonio Roldán-Monés

American Economic Review

The implementation of evidence-based policies hinges on the dissemination of evidence to policymakers, a process influenced by the attributes of the sender. We conducted a nationwide RCT with ideologically opposite think tanks, major newspapers, and a res...

Self-Fulfilling Fluctuations in HANK Economies

By Sushant Acharya and Jess Benhabib

American Economic Review

We show that in Heterogeneous-Agent New-Keynesian (HANK) economies with countercyclical risk the natural interest rate is endogenous and co-moves with output, leaving the economy susceptible to self-fulfilling fluctuations. Unlike in Representative-Age...

Understanding High-Wage Firms: Monopoly, Monopsony, and Bargaining Power

By Horng Chern Wong

American Economic Review

I study how firm market power and worker bargaining power shape wages and welfare. Using French micro-data, I document patterns linking wages and firm market power that existing models cannot explain. A model in which firms produce vertically different...

Delivering clean water

[Research Highlight]

April 08, 2026

Fiona Burlig discusses an experiment in rural India that measured the value poor households place on potable water.

The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence from Rural India

By Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan

American Economic Review, March 2026

Over 2 billion people lack clean drinking water. Existing solutions face high costs (piped water) or low demand (point-of-use chlorine). Using a 60,000 household cluster-randomized experiment, we test an alternative approach: decentralized treatment and h...