Same as It Ever Was: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity Differences in Promotion for Academic Economists

By Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, and Daria Milakhina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Using 2009–2022 data from Academic Analytics linked to publications and multiple race-identification approaches, we examine gender and racial/ethnicity differentials in economists' promotion in economics and noneconomics departments. Results are mixed. ...

How Does the Intersection of Sex and Nonbinary Gender Identity Affect Hiring Discrimination? Evidence from a Correspondence Field Experiment

By Taryn Eames

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study examines the intersection of sex and nonbinary gender identity in hiring discrimination using a resume audit study, where sex was signaled via first name and nonbinary identity via "they/them" pronoun disclosure. Results show male and female no...

The Economic Impact of Discriminatory Policies: Insights from Same-Sex Marriage Bans

By Lei Gao, Steve Liu, and Ying Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study examines the unintended economic costs, with significant fiscal implications, associated with discriminatory policies, focusing specifically on same-sex marriage bans in the United States. Drawing on a body of empirical studies, we show that th...

The End of an Impossible Choice: Removing Infertility as a Prerequisite for Legal Gender Recognition

By Ylva Moberg, Rinni Norlinder, J. Lucas Tilley, and Emma von Essen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Until 2013, transgender people in Sweden were required to undergo sterilization surgery and destroy stored reproductive cells before changing their legal gender marker, rendering them permanently infertile. Using population-wide administrative data, we do...

The Test-Optional Puzzle

By Wouter Dessein, Alex Frankel, and Navin Kartik

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

US colleges often justify test-optional admissions policies as promoting diversity by reducing their reliance on standardized test scores. But a college that mandates test scores can decide how to use those scores. Wouldn't more information allow a colleg...

Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy Plus Colleges

By John N. Friedman, Bruce Sacerdote, Douglas O. Staiger, and Michele Tine

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades. Standardized test scores predict academic outcome...

Examining Key Impacts of the Test-Optional Movement for Early Adopters

By Brianna Felegi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

By 2019, about 250 postsecondary institutions adopted a test-optional policy. This paper uses a difference-in-difference design to examine the impact of this reform on schools that switched policies between 2006 and 2014. I find that adopting a test-optio...

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...

Access to Justice and Social Protection

By Diogo Britto, Lorenzo Germinetti, François Gerard, Joana Naritomi, and Breno Sampaio

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Governments in developing countries are expanding social protection policies, yet coverage remains imperfect. This paper explores how the justice system influences coverage and the consequences of unequal access to justice for targeting. Using administrat...

Heterogeneity in Effects of Poverty-Alleviating Interventions

By Robert Garlick ⓡ John Walker ⓡ Kate Orkin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

To what extent are poverty-alleviating interventions general tools? We revisit a 415-village cluster-randomized field experiment involving 8,300 women living in poverty in rural Kenya. We estimate the extent of heterogeneity in a cash transfer interventio...

Targeted Treatment Assignment Using Data from Randomized Experiments with Noncompliance

By Susan Athey, Kosuke Inoue, and Yusuke Tsugawa

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This paper considers randomized experiments with noncompliance where individuals in the treatment group become eligible for a treatment but some do not receive it. We study the estimation and evaluation of treatment assignment policies targeted to individ...

Instrumental Variables Methods Reveal Larger Effects of Menopausal Hormone Therapy in the Landmark Women's Health Initiative Clinical Trial

By Joshua Angrist, Amanda E. Kowalski, Ljubica Ristovska, and Marcia L. Stefanick

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Landmark results from the Women's Health Initiative trial showed that random assignment to menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) elevated risks of breast cancer and other adverse events. Recent analyses argue that MHT risks are small. These analyses report int...

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...

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...

Silent Partners: Corporate Ownership, Risk, and the Gender Asset Gap in Antebellum New England

By B. Zorina Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Little is known about corporate ownership, personal wealth, and the composition of investment portfolios by gender during early US industrialization. A sample of 42,500 shareholders in over 200 corporations highlights women's increasing contributions to c...

Gender Gaps in Entrepreneurship: Business Networks and Collaborations in Ghana

By Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Edward Asiedu, Francesca Truffa, and Ashley Wong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study examines the characteristics of business networks and how they contribute to gender disparities in entrepreneurship. We conduct a survey on a sample of 1,487 young, highly educated male and female agribusiness owners in Ghana. We document that ...

The Inverted U-Shaped Relationship between Female Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

By Nava Ashraf, Alexia Delfino, Edward L. Glaeser, and Irene Solmone

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the share of entrepreneurs who are women first rises and then falls with national income, while female labor force participation has the opposite U-shaped pattern. We present a model in which gender-based disadvantages...

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...