Inventories, Integration, Productivity, and Welfare

By George Alessandria, Shafaat Yar Khan, and Armen Khederlarian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We augment a heterogeneous firm trade model with rich logistic frictions—order costs and delivery times—that differ by source and tariffs to evaluate how trade influences the aggregate economy. These frictions lead importers to order larger amounts le...

The Cost of Delivery Delays

By Maria-Jose Carreras-Valle and Alessandro Ferrari

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The rise in supply disruptions after COVID-19 affected businesses across the United States. Yet, measures of disruptions or delays are difficult to estimate. Here, we provide a model-based measure of delays using aggregate manufacturing inventory data and...

Measuring the Average Period of Production

By Pol Antràs and Vitalii Tubdenov

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Building on Böhm-Bawerk (1889), we propose a measure of the average period of production defined as a weighted average temporal distance between the time at which a firm employs its inputs and the time at which these inputs deliver finished goods to cons...

Metacognitive Awareness and Academic Performance

By Jarod Apperson, A. Nayena Blankson, Francesina Jackson, Angelino Viceisza, Bruce Wade, and Jimmeka Guillory Wright

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Roughly 25 percent of first-year college students do not return for a second year. This has led to a range of policies and interventions to increase persistence in college. In this article, we assess whether cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) has the po...

Gender Salience and Chat-Based Communication in Teams

By Rebecca Jack

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

I use a lab experiment to study the effect of gender priming on chat-based communication in mixed- and same-gender teams with a real-effort task. I find that priming gender seems to evoke stereotypes about men's and women's roles in communication, causing...

What Deters Women from Economics

By Kristy Buzard, Katelyn Cranney, Laura K. Gee, and Olga Stoddard

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We survey undergraduate students at two US universities to investigate the perceptions of the economics major by gender. Women report a significantly lower interest in economics relative to men. In exploring potential mechanisms, we find that women antici...

Returns to Education: The Roles of Income, Gender, and Occupations

By Siyu Wang, Hui Xu, Meng Shen, and Delong Meng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study explores how broader educational returns information shapes students' aspirations, focusing on gender-specific income differences and occupational education requirements. Our experiment with 582 middle school students in northeast China shows t...

SMEs and Workers during Crises: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Uganda

By Selim Gulesci, Francesco Loiacono, Andreas Madestam, and Miri Stryjan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We use a five-year panel of Ugandan SMEs, supplemented with phone-survey data from August 2020, to analyze how the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic affected profits and employment. Most firms had employees, enabling us to investigate whether—and how—the...

Discrimination Expectations in the Credit Market: Survey Evidence from India

By Stefano Fiorin, Joseph Hall, and Martin Kanz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We present results from a representative survey and an information experiment to provide evidence on discrimination expectations. We find that discrimination based on gender, caste, and religion is perceived to be widespread in society overall and in the ...

Head Start Access: No Evidence of Changes to Lifetime Fertility

By Esra Kose, Siobhan O'Keefe, and Maria Rosales-Rueda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study investigates the effect of early childhood access to the Head Start program on long-term fertility outcomes. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, we exploit the staggered rollout of Head Start from 1966 to 1980 across US counties for w...

Explaining Variation in Child SSI Receipt: The Role of Medical CDRs

By Jeffrey Hemmeter, Michael Levere, and David Wittenburg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The administrative processes that govern the delivery of social safety net benefits have important implications for beneficiaries. We use variation in the occurrence of medical continuing disability reviews (CDRs) to explain trends of children receiving S...

What Is the Value of the Child and Dependent Care Credit?

By Gabrielle Pepin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC) subsidizes child care costs for working families. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 increased the CDCC's generosity during 2021 only. I find that while the CDCC is of rela...

Does Old-Age Social Security Help Children? The Impact of Social Security on Grandchild Resources

By Lucie Schmidt, Lara Shore-Sheppard, and Tara Watson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Though Social Security is typically considered a program to support retirees, nearly one in ten children live in a home reporting Social Security income, twice as many as traditional cash welfare. We use the sharp increase in eligibility for Social Securi...

Economic Measurement Lost in a Random Forest? A Case Study of Employment Data

By Abe Dunn, Eric English, Kyle Hood, Lowell Mason, and Brian Quistorff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Big data and machine learning (ML) offer transformative potential for economic measurement. This study evaluates the use of alternative employment data from a payroll processor to improve on timely measures of regional employment estimates, comparing ML m...

From Online Job Postings to Economic Insights: A Machine Learning Approach to Structuring Naturally Occurring Data

By Tatjana Dahlhaus, Reinhard Ellwanger, Gabriela Galassi, and Pierre-Yves Yanni

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This paper develops a matched vacancy-company dataset by combining daily Canadian online job postings with smartphone-derived visits to points of interest. To address inconsistencies in company names, we enhance natural language processing algorithms for ...

Nowcasting Distributional National Accounts for the United States: A Machine Learning Approach

By Gary Cornwall and Marina Gindelsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Inequality statistics are usually calculated from high-quality microdata, typically available with a one-to-two-year lag. In turbulent times, policymakers and data users need timely estimates. We use an elastic net to nowcast the overall Gini coefficient ...

The Role of Representational and Computational Complexity in Belief Formation

By Cuimin Ba, J. Aislinn Bohren, and Alex Imas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We examine how representational and computational complexity interact to influence belief updating. Building on the two-stage belief updating model of Ba, Bohren, and Imas (2024), we show that when no salience cues are present, attentional and processing ...

Extracting Statistical Relationships from Observational Data: Predicting with Full or Partial Information

By Guillaume R. Fréchette, Emanuel Vespa, and Sevgi Yuksel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Decision-makers sometimes rely on past data to learn statistical relationships between variables. However, when predicting a target variable, they must adjust how they aggregate past information depending on the observables available. If agents have infor...

Real and Assumed Information

By Ned Augenblick, Matthew Backus, Andrew T. Little, and Don A. Moore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We consider a simplified version of the model in Augenblick et. al (2025), in which people use models to translate data into beliefs and predictions. We posit that they make correct inferences given a model but not unconditionally, forgetting model uncert...

Energy Hogs and Energy Angels: What Does Residential Electricity Use Really Tell Us about Profligate Consumption?

By Severin Borenstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

High residential volumetric electricity prices are partially justified as placing more of the cost burden on less prudent households, so-called "energy hogs." I show that the difference in means between above-median and below-median household consumption ...