Quality Adjustment in Industry Deflators Strengthens Estimated Innovation-Productivity Relationships

By Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, Nicole Kimmel, and Chad Syverson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This article studies how industry innovation translates into subsequent productivity growth. It reviews a method that uses gaps between consumer- and producer-facing price indices to estimate mismeasurement in industry TFP growth. Measured productivity gr...

Markups and the Manufacturing Productivity Slowdown

By Benjamin Bridgman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines whether mismeasurement due to markups is responsible for the decline in US manufacturing productivity growth. It estimates markups using a model to estimate the user cost of capital to split capital payments into regular returns and ec...

The Productivity Paradox in US Manufacturing: A Firm- and Industry-Level Perspective

By Danial Lashkari and Jeremy Pearce

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

US manufacturing productivity growth grew rapidly in the 1987–2007 period but has been nearly zero since 2010. We decompose this productivity slowdown across industries and firms and find it to be pervasive. More specifically, it appears in the initiall...

Employment Preferences of Favela Residents

By Mayara Felix, Beatriz Marcoje, Ieda Matavelli, and Maria Clara Rodrigues

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We document employment preferences of workers at the margin of informality using open-ended questions and discrete choice experiments in Brazil's largest favela complex. Stated preferences emphasize pay and tangible job attributes rather than meaning or p...

When Outsiders Become Insiders: Beliefs and the Persistence of Exclusionary Norms

By Luisa Cefalà, Franck Irakoze, Pedro Naso, and Nicholas Swanson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Do exclusionary norms unravel as outsiders become insiders? Using a randomized trial in Burundian labor markets generating exogenous skill acquisition, we find incumbent insiders' attitudes remain largely stable while newly skilled workers rapidly adopt e...

Gatekeepers of Disparities: Variation in Prosecutors’ Effects on Racial Gaps in Incarceration

By Emma Harrington and Hannah Shaffer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Prosecutors serve as gatekeepers between arrest and sentencing, giving them influence over how racial disparities evolve through the criminal justice system. Using the quasi-random assignment of cases within North Carolina prosecutor offices, we estimate ...

Stop and Frisk around the Country

By David S. Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This project assembles over eight million pedestrian- and vehicle-stop records from 16 major US cities to provide the first large-scale analysis of stop-and-frisk policing practices. We document striking cross-city variation—nearly two orders of magnitu...

Reform Prosecutors and the Footprint of the Criminal Justice System

By Amanda Agan, Jennifer L. Doleac, Anna Harvey, Anna Kyriazis, and Lauren Schechter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Elected prosecutors exercise substantial discretion over criminal charges and case dispositions, shaping the footprint of the criminal justice system. We study how the election of reform-minded prosecutors affects charging and conviction outcomes using va...

Hormone Therapy Is Associated with Decreased Risk of Running Away among Transgender Adolescents

By Travis Campbell and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper uses the 2015 US Transgender Survey to estimate the association between gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) initiation and the risk of running away among transgender adolescents during the first year of treatment. Our event study approach c...

Men’s Classified Ads and Risky Health Behaviors

By Hasan Shahid

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Risky health behaviors are private and rarely observed. This paper introduces a novel dataset of over 170,000 men’s classified advertisements published between 1975 and 1992 in The Advocate, the largest and longest-running national LGBT magazine ...

Prejudice in Sub-Saharan Africa: (Why) Is Homophobia Different?

By Jon Denton-Schneider and Teevrat Garg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Prejudices against sexual minorities have been understudied in economics, especially in the low- and middle-income countries where they are harshest. We examine homophobia in Sub-Saharan Africa and show that it is qualitatively different from other biases...

Health and Sociocultural Disparities by Sex Characteristics in Chile

By Ercio Muñoz, Melanie Saavedra, and Dario Sansone

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This study provides evidence on health and sociocultural disparities by sex characteristics using data from the 2022–2023 Chilean National Health, Sexuality, and Gender Survey, one of the first nationally representative surveys in the world to include s...

Student Representation in Undergraduate Economics: The Impact of STEM Designation

By Anthony Underwood, Emily C. Marshall, and Eren Bilen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines the impact of optional practical training reforms on student representation in US undergraduate economics programs. As of 2023, economics degrees, designated as STEM by the US Department of Homeland Security, comprise around 48% of all...

The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Undergraduate Economics Courses

By Laura J. Ahlstrom, Carlos J. Asarta, and Cynthia Harter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using data from the 2025 national quinquennial “Chalk and Talk” survey, we examine how instructor, departmental, and institutional characteristics affect instructors’ use of AI in teaching and stances on student use of AI tools in four types of unde...

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...