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 ...

Financial Spillover Effects from Electronic Government Transfers: Evidence from an At-Scale Experiment in Indonesia

By Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Elan Satriawan, and Sudarno Sumarto

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In 2018, Indonesia launched a new electronic voucher system for distribution of food subsidies in randomly selected districts. Banks were assigned the goal of operating at least two remote banking agents in each village in selected districts. We find that...

Mean Reversion in Randomized Controlled Trials: Implications for Program Targeting and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

By Marcella Alsan, John Cawley, Joseph J. Doyle, and Nicholas Skelley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Eligibility criteria for interventions can induce an Ashenfelter Dip, and subsequent mean reversion results in improvement over time even absent the intervention. We investigate these dynamics for a food-as-medicine program to treat diabetes, where eligib...

Food Transfers and Child Nutrition: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Aditya Shrinivas, Kathy Baylis, and Benjamin Crost

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

India's National Food Security Act of 2013 (NFSA) led to one of the biggest expansions in food transfers in history, affecting over 500 million people. We use plausibly exogenous variation created by the NFSA to estimate the effect of food transfers on ch...

Development programs in war zones

[Research Highlight]

July 29, 2025

Did development aid in Afghanistan help counter the Taliban’s insurgency?

Mobile money and migration

[Research Highlight]

January 13, 2021

An experiment in Bangladesh showed that its new urban workers can use mobile banking to help support their families in the countryside.

Reviewing residential segregation

[Research Highlight]

September 10, 2025

Trevon Logan and John Parman discuss the meaning of segregation and how it has shaped US history.

Reexamining the Contribution of Public Health Efforts to the Decline in Urban Mortality

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Daniel I. Rees

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

Using data on 25 major American cities for the period 1900⁠–⁠1940, we explore the effects of municipal-level public health efforts that were viewed as critical in the fight against foodborne and waterborne diseases. In addition to studying intervent...

The Dynamic Effects of Cash Transfers to Agricultural Households

By Shilpa Aggarwal, Jenny C. Aker, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Little is known about the evolution and persistence of the effects of one-time cash transfers, especially in rural agricultural settings with limited productive investment opportunities. We use bi-monthly phone surveys to estimate dynamic impacts for ca...

Social Welfare Portability and Migration: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Travis Baseler, Ambar Narayan, Odyssia Ng, and Sutirtha Sinha Roy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies a new program designed to make food entitlements portable throughout India. We first characterize the state of food entitlement portability using mystery shoppers and surveys of migrants and distributors. We then inform households about...

Invisible Wounds: How Mental Disability Benefits Shape Veteran Well-Being

By David Silver and Jonathan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study impacts of VA disability compensation on the health and well-being of the large and rapidly growing population of veterans claiming mental disorders. We leverage quasi-random assignment of veterans to medical examiners with varying assessing tend...

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...

Employed in a SNAP? The Impact of Work Requirements on Program Participation and Labor Supply

By Colin Gray, Adam Leive, Elena Prager, Kelsey Pukelis, and Mary Zaki

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Work requirements are common in US safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals. Using linked administrative data on food stamps (S...

How valuable is access to the social safety net in early childhood?

[Research Highlight]

April 03, 2016

The effects of the Food Stamp Program rollout are still visible decades later

Are there "missing" cancer drugs?

[Research Highlight]

April 14, 2016

Long clinical trials may skew the research agenda for drug companies

Do Chinese government inflation data hold up to scrutiny?

[Research Highlight]

July 12, 2016

Engel curves reveal a more complicated story about inflation and growth than official statistics

Lack of Uniform Prices or Lack of Uniform Retailers?

By Seula Kim and Michael A. Navarrete

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Standard models assume uniform pricing across stores (DellaVigna and Gentzkow 2019). We show that uniform pricing varies across products within food categories. Even when product-chain prices are nearly uniform, cross-market differences in retailer and pr...

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...