The Economics of Age at School Entry: Insights from Evidence and Methods

By Mariagrazia Cavallo, Elizabeth Dhuey, Luca Fumarco, Levi Halewyck, and Simon ter Meulen

Journal of Economic Literature

This article reviews the growing literature on age at school entry and its effects over the life course. Age at school entry affects a broad range of outcomes, including education, labor-market performance, health, social relationships, and family formati...

The First 1,000 Days and Beyond: The Process of Child Development

By Orazio P. Attanasio

Journal of Economic Literature

This paper reviews recent research in the economics of human development, focusing on the early years of life as a critical period for shaping long-term outcomes. Early childhood development is inherently multidimensional: cognitive and socioemotional ski...

The Private Provision of Public Services: Evidence from Random Assignment in Medicaid

By Danil Agafiev Macambira, Michael Geruso, Anthony Lollo, Chima D. Ndumele, and Jacob Wallace

American Economic Review

This paper examines the effects of privatizing social health insurance. We exploit a natural experiment in Medicaid, wherein nearly 100,000 enrollees were randomly assigned between a publicly-operated fee-for-service system and private managed care. Man...

Spatial Spillovers of Conflict in Somalia

By Marco Alfano and Thomas Cornelissen

American Economic Review

Conflict along transportation routes during Somalia’s al-Shabaab insurgency significantly increases maize prices at distant locations, decreasing food security, health, and education. Estimated conflict risk has strong price effects independently of r...

The Productivity of Professions: Evidence from the Emergency Department

By David Chan and Yiqun Chen

American Economic Review

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus...

Real-World Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine in Young Children

By Michael L. Anderson, Carlos Dobkin, Devon Gorry, and Hung-Fu Tseng

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Influenza causes substantial illness among children. RCTs demonstrate that the influenza vaccine reduces active-surveillance-detected influenza but have insufficient samples to examine outcomes such as health care provider visits. This study documents tha...

The Impact of Dating Apps on Young Adults: Evidence from Tinder

By Berkeren Büyükeren, Alexey Makarin, and Heyu Xiong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Online dating apps have transformed the dating market, yet their broader effects remain unclear. We study Tinder's impact on college students using its initial marketing focus on Greek organizations for identification. We show that the full-scale launch o...

Making Bricks from Straw: Resources and Productivity in Health Care

By Edward N. Okeke

American Economic Review, April 2026

Why do health facilities in developing countries do so poorly? This paper examines the role of financial constraints. I describe an experiment in which we surprised health workers in randomly selected public health clinics in Nigeria with a ₦600,000 gra...