Report of the Search Committee for the Editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

By Heather Royer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Where Are the Streets of Gold, and Why? A New Approach to Cross-Country Analysis and an Application to Immigrant Assimilation

By Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Many big questions in social sciences concern cross-country differences, yet credible answers are difficult to establish. This lecture proposes a framework that uses cross-country analysis to narrow plausible mechanisms, followed by targeted causal studie...

Gender-Specific Occupational Following and Gender Differences in Occupational Choice

By Samuel M. Solomon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper uses administrative data to show that occupational following—when children enter their parent’s occupation—varies significantly by the gender of the parent and the child. While children are disproportionately likely to choose an occupatio...

The Declining Local Bias of Entrepreneurship in the United States

By Innessa Colaiacovo, Margaret Dalton, Sari Pekkala Kerr, and William R. Kerr

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Multiple studies document a local bias of entrepreneurship (LBE) in recent decades, where self-employed entrepreneurs are systematically more likely than wage workers to operate in their region of birth. This paper documents an important new fact: The LBE...

AI-Accelerated Occupational Decline and the Mobility Trap

By Xi Song, Jennie E. Brand, Sukie Xiuqi Yang, and Michael Lachanski

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Economic transformation challenges workers beyond job creation or loss by reshaping their ability to move across occupations. This paper examines whether AI-driven occupational restructuring, accelerated after 2018 by transformer-based technologies, creat...

Declining Occupations and Career Outcomes in Norway

By Erling Barth, Maria Forthun Hoen, Sari Pekkala Kerr, and William Kerr

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Occupational change is a central feature of modern labor markets. This paper examines the career consequences in Norway of being initially employed in an occupation that subsequently declines during 2007–2024. Workers initially employed in occupations t...

Refining the Definition of the Unbanked

By Elena Falcettoni and Vegard M. Nygaard

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We propose a new way to classify individuals without a bank account, accounting for their actual interest in being banked. Analogous to how unemployment statistics are defined, we differentiate individuals that do not have a bank account and would like to...

Who Remains Unbanked in the United States and Why?

By Paul Calem, Christopher Henderson, and Jenna Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines factors associated with unbanked status among US households from 2015 to 2019 using FDIC survey data with fixed effects and multilevel modeling. With rising incomes reducing unbanked percentages overall, unbanked status became more con...

Beyond Banks: Trust among the Financially Underserved

By Paola Boel, Daniela Puzzello, and Peter Zimmerman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In 2023, over 18 percent of US households were financially underserved. Prior work identifies mistrust in banks as an important factor, but it is unclear whether this mistrust is unique to banks. To address this, we surveyed underserved individuals in the...

Defining Households That Are Underserved in Digital Payment Services

By Claire Greene, Fumiko Hayashi, Alicia Lloro, Oz Shy, Joanna Stavins, and Ying Lei Toh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

US households that lack digital means of making and receiving payments cannot participate fully in an increasingly digitized economy. Assessing the scope of this problem and addressing it requires a definition of households that are underserved in digital...

Assessing Information: The Content of Asynchronous Communication in Hybrid Work

By Kyle Schirmann, Miguel Espinosa, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, and Christos A. Makridis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Organizations are often viewed as information processors, and an efficient, robust information architecture can be a source of competitive advantage. However, measuring the content and flow of information is challenging. We describe three metrics for capt...

Can Remote Work Narrow Gender Gaps in Greedy Jobs?

By Emma Harrington and Matthew E. Kahn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Women are underrepresented in highly paid "greedy jobs" (Goldin 2014). Could flexibility over where to work narrow this gender gap? Our evidence suggests yes. Using hypothetical choice data from Maestas et al. (2023a), we show that women view work from ho...

Younger Firms and CEOs Allow More Work from Home

By Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Katelyn Cranney, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls, and Pablo Zarate

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We establish three facts about work from home (WFH) in the United States. First, employees WFH more often at younger firms—almost twice as often at firms founded after 2015 than before 1990. Second, employees working under younger CEOs have higher level...

Measuring the Ins and Outs of Remote Work: New Evidence from the Gallup Workplace Panel

By Christos A. Makridis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using the Gallup Workplace Panel, a nationally representative longitudinal survey of full-time US workers from 2019 to 2025, this paper measures gross flows across on-site, hybrid, and fully remote work arrangements. Estimated transition matrices show hig...

Geopolitics and Shallow Integration

By Aaditya Mattoo, Michele Ruta, and Robert W. Staiger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

The GATT/WTO system rests on reciprocity, nondiscrimination (MFN), and shallow integration—focusing on border measures while allowing domestic policy flexibility. Previous literature established the economic logic of these principles absent geopolitics....

Sustaining International Rules in a Multipolar World

By Cecilia Carvalho, Nicolas Goulart, Daniel Monte, and Emanuel Ornelas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We study the sustainability of international trading rules in a multipolar world. A rules-based equilibrium is shaped by three forces. A static temptation to exploit market power undermines cooperation, while two dynamic forces support it: the efficiency ...

Global Imbalances and Power Imbalances

By Christopher Clayton, Matteo Maggiori, and Jesse Schreger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We discuss the conditions under which global imbalances, such as China being a large foreign creditor and the United States being a large foreign debtor, might also generate power imbalances. We highlight possible theoretical channels and empirical measur...

Debiasing Estimates of Global Forest Cover Loss

By Matthew Gordon, Eliana Stone, Megan Ayers, and Luke Sanford

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using machine learning predictions as proxies for difficult-to-observe outcome variables can bias empirical estimates when prediction errors correlate with treatment variables. We describe methods for detecting and correcting these biases using a sample o...

Causal Inference with Satellite Imagery: A Comparison of Methods for Forest Conservation Data

By Haya Alsharif, Ashesh Rambachan, Rahul Singh, and Davide Viviano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Can satellite-based predictions substitute for traditional outcome measurements in program evaluation? Using forest cover data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, and Indonesia, we conduct semisynthetic simulations comparing estimation meth...