The Life Cycle of Businesses and Their Internal Organization

By Elizabeth Weber Handwerker, Sara Moreira, and David Piccone Jr.

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We document new stylized facts on the occupational mix of businesses in the United States and how their internal organization evolves over their life cycles. Our main empirical finding is that younger businesses have fewer hierarchical layers and lower sp...

Does Advisor Gender Affect Women's Persistence in Economics?

By Serena Canaan and Pierre Mouganie

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Women persist in the field of economics at significantly lower rates than men. We show that the gender of an academic advisor is an important determinant of female undergraduates' persistence in economics. We use data from a four-year college where first-...

Who Belongs? The Determinants of Selective Membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research

By Marieke Kleemans and Rebecca L. Thornton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the determinants of membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using data from all tenured and tenure-track economists at R1 universities in the United States. We construct an annual panel of employment, research productivi...

The Family Origin of the Math Gender Gap Is a White Affluent Phenomenon

By Gaia Dossi, David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, and Paola Sapienza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Previous research has shown that norms around the role of women in society could help explain the gender gap in mathematics and that these norms could be transmitted within the family. Using data from the Florida Department of Education combined with birt...

Can Women Teach Math (and Be Promoted)? A Meta-analysis of Gender Differences across Student Evaluations of Teaching

By Amanda J. Felkey and Cassondra Batz-Barbarich

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Academic women in economics have different experiences and outcomes than men and women in other social science fields do, including bias within their performance evaluation instruments, student teaching evaluations (STEs). Despite research citing biases i...

Gender Bias in Assessments of Teacher Performance

By Sabrin Beg, Anne Fitzpatrick, and Adrienne M. Lucas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

To measure whether principals exhibit gender bias when assessing teacher effectiveness, we compare principals' subjective evaluations against teachers' self-evaluations and objective effectiveness in Ghanaian primary schools. Female and male teachers rate...

American Economic Association 2020–2021 Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics

By Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Report of the AEA Ombudsperson

By Leto Copeley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Impacts of Private Prison Contracting on Inmate Time Served and Recidivism

By Anita Mukherjee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

This paper examines the impact of private prison contracting by exploiting staggered prison capacity shocks in Mississippi. Motivated by a model based on the typical private prison contract that pays a per diem for each occupied bed, the empirical analysi...

Well-Being, Poverty, and Labor Income Taxation: Theory and Application to Europe and the United States

By François Maniquet and Dirk Neumann

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

In a model where agents differ in wages and preferences over labor time–consumption bundles, we study labor income tax schemes that alleviate poverty. To avoid conflict with individual well-being, we require redistribution to take place between agents o...

Call for Papers: Twenty-Second International BIOECON Conference

[News]

May 07, 2021

The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2021.

Nondisclosures and naive consumers

[Research Highlight]

May 17, 2021

When do markets force companies to reveal the quality of their products?

Building a family dynasty

[Page]

How much do extended family members impact the growth of human capital for future generations?

American capitalism and incarceration

[Research Highlight]

May 10, 2021

Anita Mukherjee discusses the consequences of private prisons for inmates in the United States.

The pros and cons of collaboration

[Research Highlight]

May 18, 2021

Benjamin Jones discusses the rise of team research and implications for professional advancement.

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2021

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2021

Feedbacks: Financial Markets and Economic Activity

By Markus Brunnermeier, Darius Palia, Karthik A. Sastry, and Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Review, June 2021

Is credit expansion a sign of desirable financial deepening or the prelude to an inevitable bust? We study this question in modern US data using a structural VAR model of 10 monthly frequency variables, identified by heteroskedasticity. Negative reduced-f...

Discrete Choice under Risk with Limited Consideration

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, and Matthew Thirkettle

American Economic Review, June 2021

This paper is concerned with learning decision-makers' preferences using data on observed choices from a finite set of risky alternatives. We propose a discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity in consideration sets and in standard risk aversion...

The Selection of Talent: Experimental and Structural Evidence from Ethiopia

By Girum Abebe, A. Stefano Caria, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

American Economic Review, June 2021

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms' ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more talented applicants by offering a small monetary incentive for making a job a...