The Shape of Regulation: 40 Years of Florida Flood Maps

By Abigail Ostriker and Anna Russo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Many regulations are geographically targeted. We study the evolution of the spatial targeting of floodplain regulation over four decades of regulatory map updates in Florida. We focus on changes in shape irregularity of regulated areas, measured using dif...

Housing Supply and Natural Hazards within and across US Cities

By Augusto Ospital

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This paper investigates the link between housing supply restrictions and increased exposure to natural hazard risks in the United States, considering a wide range of extreme climate threats. It shows that urban growth has heightened exposure to these risk...

Private Markets and Public Assistance for Natural Disaster Supplies

By Michael Dinerstein, Nadia Lucas, Ishan Nath, and Johanna Rayl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We document existing allocation mechanisms for natural disaster survival goods, such as flashlights, batteries, food, and water and show that Americans face widespread and frequent exposure to natural disasters, that disasters bring a substantial risk of ...

Emission Prices, Biomass, and Biodiversity in Tropical Forests

By Lars Peter Hansen and José A. Scheinkman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We investigate how external emission prices influence robustly optimal reforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and the biodiversity impacts. Extending the findings of Assuncao et al. (2023), we revisit their spatial-dynamic model of land allocation under un...

The Economics of Blended Finance

By Caroline Flammer, Thomas Giroux, and Geoffrey M. Heal

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Projects with high societal impact—such as biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation—often offer financial returns that are too low, or too risky, to attract private capital. Under such circumstances, it can be difficult to raise adequat...

The Effectiveness of Local Conservation Ballots

By Dylan Hogan, Eyal G. Frank, Joséphine Gantois, and Anouch Missirian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Global action to slow biodiversity loss is critically needed but comes at substantial cost. In this article, we assess the effectiveness of local ballot measures for land-based conservation projects in the United States as a way to increase bird abundance...

Nature Loss and Climate Change: The Twin-Crises Multiplier

By Stefano Giglio, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Olivier Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study the economic effects of the interaction of nature loss and climate change in a model that incorporates important aspects of both processes. We capture the distinct ways in which they affect economic activity—with nature constituting a key facto...

Kindergartens and Intergenerational Mobility

By Philipp Ager, Francesco Cinnirella, Katherine Eriksson, and Viktor Malein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We evaluate the impact of free public kindergartens in the early twentieth-century United States on intergenerational mobility for children of immigrant and native parents. Using linked Census and newly digitized kindergarten enrollment data, we find that...

Political Polarization and US-Mexico Migration

By María Esther Caballero, Giuseppe Ippedico, and Giovanni Peri

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study how the US presidential election of 2016 affected the subsequent inflow of Mexican-born immigrants. We use the Matricula Consular de Alta Seguridad data to construct proxies for annual inflows and internal movements of Mexican-born individuals, i...

Native–Refugee Education Gap

By Cevat Giray Aksoy, Gaurav Khanna, Victoria Marino, and Semih Tumen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study the education gap between Syrian refugee children and their Turkish peers using administrative data from Turkiye (2011–2018). Our analysis reveals significant disparities: Refugee students score 8 points lower in mathematics and 13 points lower...

Home-Country Internet and Immigrants' Well-Being

By Alexander Yarkin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This paper documents the effects of home-country internet expansion on immigrants' health and subjective well-being (SWB). Combining data from the European Social Survey with data on 3G and overall internet expansion, I find that immigrants' SWB increases...

Agglomeration Spillovers from Native Nations: Evidence from Casino Reopenings

By Matthew T. Gregg, Alice Tianbo Zhang, and Elliot Charette

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Gaming establishments provide a significant source of revenue for tribal governments, but little is known about the impact of such large investments outside of reservations. Using high-frequency data from millions of mobile devices and the differential re...

Can Incorrect Beliefs about the Racial Composition of Welfare and Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries Be Changed?

By Jeffrey Carpenter, Jakina Debnam Guzman, Peter Hans Matthews, and Erin L. Wolcott

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Some argue that support for the social safety net in the United States is influenced by beliefs about the beneficiaries' race. Information treatments have the potential to change these beliefs, but for them to be policy relevant, their effects must last b...

Immigrant Age at Arrival and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identification among Mexican Americans

By Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Analyzing microdata from the 2000 US census and the 2001–2019 American Community Surveys, we show that the age at arrival of Mexican immigrants exerts an important influence on ethnic identification not only for these immigrants but also for their US-bo...

Cross-Policy Effects: Lockdown Stringency, Race, and the COVID-19 Vaccine in US Nursing Homes

By Roland Pongou, Ghislain Junior Sidie, Guy Tchuente, and Jean-Baptiste Tondji

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In a health crisis, how do early mitigation policies affect the effectiveness of later interventions? Using the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, we show that the stringency of early public health and safety interventions increased vacci...

Root Causes of the Racial Wealth Gap: A Critique of the Fed View

By William A. Darity Jr. and Stephan Lefebvre

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We address the Federal Reserve's model for Black–White wealth inequality. The Fed view has it that the Black–White wealth gap, when measured with an "expanded wealth concept," is smaller than previously thought and primarily explained by income differ...

Labor Market Shocks and Immigration Enforcement

By Sergio Barrera, Brianna Felegi, and Sarina Heron

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study the effects of labor market shocks on immigration enforcement by evaluating the impact of the Great Recession on the likelihood that commuting zones partner with immigration authorities through 287(g) agreements and early adoption of Secure Commu...

The Racial Dynamics of US Neighborhoods and Their Housing Prices from 1950 through 1990

By Daniel Hartley, Jonathan Rose, and Becky Schneirov

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In this paper, we use k-medians clustering to categorize urban neighborhoods according to the evolution of their Black population share from 1950 through 1990. We use the resulting classifications to compare the dynamics of median home values and...

Are Loans to Minority-Owned Firms Mispriced?

By William D. Bradford, Chunbei Wang, Magnus Lofstrom, and Michael Verchot

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We use survey data on small business loans granted in 2022 and 2023 to explore racial disparities in the terms of loans to small firms. Similar data have not been available since the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances. We find that for Hispanic-, Asia...

Historical Differences in Female-Owned Manufacturing Establishments: The United States, 1850–1880

By Ruveyda Gozen, Richard Hornbeck, Anders Humlum, and Martin Rotemberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using digitized manuscripts from the US Census of Manufactures (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output rati...