Quasilinearity and Its Discontents: Public-Good Regulation with Consumer Risk Aversion and Income Effects

By Edward E. Schlee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In the partial-equilibrium literature on regulation, the usual measure of social welfare is a weighted average of expected profit and expected consumers' surplus. It is justified if two strong quasilinearity assumptions hold on each consumer's von Neumann...

Institutional Design for Environmental Acts

By Louise Guillouet and David Martimort

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Environmental decisions often involve irreversibility and uncertainty. We develop a dynamic model in which actions yield flow benefits, but, once an unknown tipping point is crossed, the accumulated stock of past actions raises the risk of irreversible ca...

The Informational Role of Emission Markets: Prices versus Quantities with Dispersed Information about Externalities

By Derek Lemoine

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

I study asymmetric information about the social cost of an externality, as opposed to asymmetric information about private costs of abatement. I show that quantity regulation with bankable permits has an informational advantage because the permit market a...

The Rare-Earth Footprint of the Global Economy: Input-Output Evidence

By Laura Alfaro, Harald Fadinger, Jan Schymik, and Gede Virananda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential inputs in advanced manufacturing and green technologies, yet their role in global production networks remains difficult to quantify due to data limitations. This paper develops a methodology, following Alfaro et al...

Multilateral Export Control Regimes and Aggregate Exports

By Jingting Fan, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limão

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Export controls have become a central instrument of international economic policy, governing trade in dual-use and sensitive technologies among allies and rivals alike. Despite their prominence, little is known about how multilateral export control regime...

Can Sanctions Deter Wars? The Russia-Ukraine Case

By Thierry Mayer, Isabelle Méjean, and Mathias Thoenig

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Our paper simulates a model of trade, diplomacy, and wars, calibrated to be relevant for analyzing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The quantitative results show that Ukraine’s decoupling from Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea reduced i...

Reexamining Geographic Variation in Health and Health Care

By Amy Finkelstein and Matthew Gentzkow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

A large literature has documented widespread variation in health care spending per capita across areas of the United States without correspondingly better health outcomes. Recent work has used "mover designs" to estimate the causal impact of place on both...

International Comparison of Physician Incomes

By Aidan Buehler, Joshua D. Gottlieb, Jeffrey Hicks, Lisa Laun, Mårten Palme, Maria Polyakova, Victoria Udalova, and Maria Ventura

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We compare physician incomes using tax data from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Physicians are concentrated in the top percentiles of the income distribution in all four countries, especially in the United States and certain speci...

Explaining the Atomistic versus Ecological Fallacies in SES-Health Gradients

By William Parker and Johannes Spinnewijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

A large literature in economics and public health studies the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, often relying on area-based measures when individual data are unavailable. Using comprehensive Dutch administrative data, we examine ...

The Effect of Noncompete Enforceability on Productivity: Evidence from a New State-Level Manufacturing Dataset

By Katherine Chang, Matthew Johnson, Kurt Lavetti, Michael Lipsitz, and Devesh Raval

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Roughly 20 percent of US workers have noncompete agreements (NCAs), restricting their ability to join or form competing firms after separating from their employer. While there is now evidence that stricter NCA enforceability reduces wages, effects on prod...

Noncompetes and Firm Heterogeneity

By Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompetes often cover highly trained, high-paid workers but are also widespread in low-skill, low-pay service jobs. This paper asks where they hurt workers more. Using a dynamic monopsony job-ladder framework, we show that noncompetes depress wages by r...

Noncompete Agreements and Bargaining Power

By Bhargav Gopal, Xiangru Li, and Luke Rawling

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCs) present a trade-off between firm investment incentives and allocative efficiency. We illustrate this trade-off using a contract choice model in which NCs encourage industry-specific investments and wages are determined by barga...

The Impact of Noncompetes on Wages and Job Tenure: New Evidence from NLSY Data

By Tristan Potter, André Kurmann, and Bart Hobijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCAs) are pervasive even in low-wage labor markets, yet most evidence relies on variation in enforceability rather than NCA incidence. Using longitudinal data from the NLSY97, we study how signing an NCA affects wage trajectories an...

Fintech and Customer Capital

By Bianca He, Lauren Mostrom, and Amir Sufi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Financial Technology (fintech) firms invest significantly more in customer capital relative to traditional financial firms, and such investment builds valuable customer capital. Higher investment by fintech firms is not accounted for by sectoral focus or ...

Producing Tangible and Intangible Capital

By Matthieu Gomez and Emilien Gouin-Bonenfant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We compare the production technologies of tangible and intangible investment using Bureau of Economic Analysis input-output tables and Integrated Industry-Level Production Account (KLEMS). We show that intangible investment is built mainly with domestic, ...

R&D Uncertainty and Cycles

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Investment in equipment and structures is one of the most cyclical components of GDP, a fact often associated with a negative response to heightened uncertainty in recessions. R&D investment, by contrast, is only mildly procyclical. We show that this diff...

Understanding Students’ Expected Earnings Beliefs after College at an HBCU

By Gerald Daniels, Damon Jones, Lesley J. Turner, and Brianna Youngblood

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Black borrowers tend to have higher student loan debt and worse financial outcomes than other racial groups, underscoring the importance of understanding how Black borrowers account for their ability to repay loans. This paper examines students’ baselin...

Does Lowering Entry Costs to Economics for Underrepresented Students Affect Outcomes? Preliminary Experimental Evidence

By Jesse Buchsbaum, Michael Greenstone, and Olga Rostapshova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Economics lags other disciplines in inclusivity both as a field of study and career track. We conduct the first longitudinal randomized controlled trial of a diversity program in economics to evaluate the causal impact of the University of Chicago’s EDE...

Belief Updating, Observability, and Race in the Labor Market

By Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Emma Rackstraw

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Inaccurate beliefs about racial gaps in productivity can have wide-ranging implications in the workplace. In an online experiment, we hired a nationally representative sample of Prolific workers to assess the performance of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers ...

SNAP Work Requirements, Administrative Burden, and Procedural Denials

By Jason Cook, Elizabeth Cox, and Chloe N. East

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Administrative burdens in public assistance create barriers to program access. Some argue that work requirements impose new paperwork and compliance costs, but this has been difficult to test empirically. One signifier of administrative burdens is procedu...