The Economics of Noncompete Clauses

[Symposium: Competition in Labor Markets]

By Evan Starr

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

For over 600 years, debates over noncompete clauses have centered on whether they function as efficient contracting tools or anticompetitive restraints on workers. This article reassesses that debate in light of recent policy attention and new empirical a...

Occupational Licensing in the United States

[Symposium: Competition in Labor Markets]

By Janna E. Johnson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Occupational licensing—the requirement that individuals attain a license to legally perform a specific job—is now necessary for over a fifth of the US workforce. The policy is intended to protect consumers by ensuring members of licensed occupations m...

Family Institutions and the Global Fertility Transition

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By Paula E. Gobbi, Anne Hannusch, and Pauline Rossi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Much of the observed cross-country variation in fertility aligns with the predictions of classic theories of the fertility transition: countries with higher levels of human capital, higher GDP per capita, or lower mortality rates tend to exhibit lower fer...

Global Labor Mobility between Shrinking and Growing Labor Forces

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By Lant Pritchett

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Falling fertility and improved mortality create a powerful and inexorable demographic arithmetic of ageing in the coming decades around the world, with three patterns. The richest countries, along with China and the Former Soviet Union, will see absolute ...

How Much Would Continued Low Fertility Affect the US Standard of Living?

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By David N. Weil

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

I assess the effect of continued sub-replacement fertility on age-adjusted consumption per capita. Channels assessed include transfers from working-age adults to children and the elderly, the effect of the labor force growth rate on required capital inves...

The Likelihood of Persistently Low Global Fertility

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

For the world as a whole, average birth rates have been falling for decades—from about 5 in 1950 to a little above 2 today. Two-thirds of people today live in a country where the birth rate is below an average of two children per two adults, which means...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Rainfall Inequality, Political Power, and Ethnic Conflict in Africa

By Andrea Guariso and Thorsten Rogall

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

How are ethnic inequality and ethnic violence related? We empirically investigate this question using an innovative measure of resource inequality between ethnic groups, based on rainfall on ethnic homelands during the plant-growing season. Our main da...

Previous Data and Code Availability Policy (February 2024 - February 2026)

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Previous AEA Data and Code Availability Policies

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Who Profits from Amateurism? Rent-Sharing in Modern College Sports

By Craig Garthwaite, Nicole Holz, Jordan Keener, and Matthew Notowidigdo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US have historically prevented student-athletes from receiving market wages, creating substantial economic rents that are primarily generated by men’s football and basketball programs. Using financial data from...

Designing Incentives for Impatient People: An RCT Promoting Exercise to Manage Diabetes

By Shilpa Aggarwal, Rebecca Dizon-Ross, and Ariel Zucker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Many people are impatient. We introduce domain-specific discounting to a contracting model and test a prediction for how to make incentives work well when people are im- patient over effort: implement time-bundled contracts that make the payment for fut...

Serial Entrepreneurship in China

By Loren Brandt, Ruochen Dai, Gueorgui Kambourov, Kjetil Storesletten, and Xiaobo Zhang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

This paper studies entrepreneurship and firm creation through the lens of serial entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs who establish more than one firm. Using data covering the universe of Chinese firms, we document key facts about serial and non-serial entre...

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