Who Participates in TANF? Variation by Exposure to Work Requirements

By Katherine Richard and Lea Bart

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Since its enactment in 1996, participation in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has steadily declined. This paper uses administrative records covering the universe of Michigan TANF participants between 2010 and 2018 to characteriz...

How Do State Child Tax Credits Affect Employment and Poverty?

By Matthew Unrath, Nathan Tollett, Jacob Goldin, Tatiana Homonoff, Neel Lal, and Katherine Michelmore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper projects the employment, poverty, and fiscal effects of introducing unconditional child allowances in states lacking such programs. We use survey data to identify eligible parents, calculate the policy's change to their work incentives, and pre...

A Tale of Two States: Reconciling Medicaid Work Requirement Enrollment Impacts in Georgia and Arkansas

By Morgan Henderson, Laura Spicer, and Alice Middleton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Medicaid work requirements have reemerged as a major federal policy, yet evidence on their enrollment effects is sparse. We reconcile sharply different outcomes from the only two states that implemented Medicaid work requirements: Arkansas, which reported...

A New Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity in African Development

By Pascaline Dupas, Nicolas Suarez, and Zhongyi Tang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Access to basic infrastructure is critical for quality of life and economic development. However, data about infrastructure access in low-income countries are sparse and costly to collect. We leverage satellite imagery and survey data to train a machine l...

How Many (Half) Moons? Measuring Technology Adoption from the Sky and on the Ground

By Jenny C. Aker, Jennifer Burney, Alison Campion, B. Kelsey Jack, and Chuan Liao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Measuring technology adoption is central to evaluating development policies, yet standard approaches face trade-offs between accuracy, cost, and scalability. Using data from a randomized controlled trial in Niger, we compare four methods for measuring ad...

Predicting Well-Being with Mobile Phone Data: Evidence from Four Countries

By Emily Aiken, Joshua E. Blumenstock, Sveta Milusheva, and M. Merritt Smith

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We provide systematic evidence on estimating household well-being from mobile phone data across four countries (Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi, Togo). Using parallel, standardized machine learning experiments, we assess which welfare measures are m...

Representation in Mobility Data in Emerging Cities

By Daniel Björkegren, Alice Duhaut, Oluchi Mbonu, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

How people move has implications for many facets of economic activity. Data from mobile phones have enabled much finer tracking of mobility. However, there are multiple ways to measure mobility. Smartphone data may omit many people in emerging economies, ...

Race, Ethnicity, and Nonpayment of Unemployment Insurance: The Role of the Employer

By Marta Lachowska and Stephen A. Woodbury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We examine worker-employer disputes over unemployment insurance (UI) claims and their relationship to benefit nonpayment. Administrative UI records allow us to use workers who file multiple claims to control for unobserved worker heterogeneity. We observe...

Race, Firm Size, and the School-to-Work Transition

By Lisa B. Kahn and Yang Chang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We examine race differences in labor market entry timing and quality of first jobs. Black workers are more likely to begin their careers at large firms but exhibit delayed entry. White workers increase their odds of starting at a large firm by searching f...

Black-White Gaps in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

By Helen Levy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using data from the Current Population Survey for 1988 through 2023, I find that Black-White differences in own-employer health insurance are highly persistent over time but differ sharply by sex: Black male workers are substantially less likely than Whit...

Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime

By Leander Andres, Stefan Bauernschuster, Gordon B. Dahl, Helmut Rainer, and Simone Schüller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a reform that automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three fe...

The Birth of Mass Unauthorized Immigration in the United States

By Elizabeth U. Cascio, Ethan G. Lewis, and Aryen Shrestha

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 imposed, for the first time in US history, annual numerical restrictions on lawful immigration from the Western Hemisphere. This paper introduces and implements a method for estimating highly granular local unau...

Unlocking Occupational Opportunity: The Labor Market Effects of DACA

By Aimee Chin, Kalena E. Cortes, and Camila Morales

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

US hiring laws shape the types of jobs undocumented migrants can access, often limiting them to roles with low detection risk. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted temporary work authorization to undocumented childhood arrival...

OPT Reforms and the Relative Supply of STEM Skills

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Kevin Shih

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Since the late 2000s, reforms to the optional practical training (OPT) program have allowed international STEM graduates to work in the United States for up to three years after graduation. We study how these reforms affected the supply of STEM skills in ...

Do Embedded Supports Promote Engaged Learning? Experimental Evidence on Resource Use among Community College Students

By Kelli A. Bird and Benjamin L. Castleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We report results from an experimental evaluation of an intervention in which tutoring and advising services were embedded directly into “gateway” community college courses and targeted to students identified by faculty and staff as at risk of not com...

School’s in for Summer? The Effect of Encouraging Summer Community College Enrollment

By Scott E. Carrell, Michal Kurlaender, Paco Martorell, and Christina Sun

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We present evidence from a field experiment examining whether encouraging summer community college enrollment affects early postsecondary outcomes. Graduating high school seniors, participating in a college intentions survey, were randomly assigned to rec...

When Intensity Meets Modality: The Effects of Condensed Course Formats in Online and In-Person Instruction

By XunFei Li and Di Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Condensed courses, which deliver the same instructional content over a shorter time frame, have been increasingly used by colleges to expand scheduling flexibility. Emerging evidence suggests that these formats often improve course performance, but little...

Inducing Cross-Sector Enrollment for Community College Students through Burden Reduction

By Rachel Baker, Michael Hill, Gala Ledezma, Joshua Dorman, Loris Fagioli, Pablo Bezem, Michael Cooper, and XunFei Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Although most community college students intend to earn a bachelor’s degree, few successfully transfer to a four-year university. California’s cross-enrollment policy was intended to reduce transfer barriers by allowing community college studen...

Leveraging Subjective Expectations for Production Functions

By Steve Bond, Agnes Norris Keiller, Áureo de Paula, and John Van Reenen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Norris Keiller, de Paula, and Van Reenen (2024) (NPR) propose estimating production functions using firms' subjective expectations of future output and inputs, data which are becoming increasingly available in surveys. This note compares their proposed e...

Production Functions under Imperfect Competition: A Quality-Equivalent Cournot Model

By Daniel A. Ackerberg and Jan De Loecker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We discuss the limitations of using unit quantity data to measure output in the estimation of production functions. We introduce a simple model, the quality-equivalent Cournot model, where revenue or deflated revenue is the preferable measure of output as...