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...

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy with Distorting Taxes

By Christopher A. Sims

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2025

When government debt pays a lower return than private assets, the reasoning in Friedman's (1969) essay on the optimal quantity of money suggests that it would be optimal to expand the debt until its return matched that on private assets. When the only oth...

The Fake News Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News

By Michael Thaler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people have preconceiv...

John Bates Clark Medal

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Awarded annually to the American economist under the age of forty with the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge

American Economic Association Announces Spring Award Recipients for 2026

[News]

April 06, 2026

View the AEA Member Announcement from April 7, 2026.

AEA Honors and Awards

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Ludwig Straub, Clark Medalist 2026

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Co-Impact Grant: Second Call for Proposals

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Co-Impact Grant: Second Call for Proposals

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Delivering clean water

[Research Highlight]

April 08, 2026

Fiona Burlig discusses an experiment in rural India that measured the value poor households place on potable water.

The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence from Rural India

By Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan

American Economic Review, March 2026

Over 2 billion people lack clean drinking water. Existing solutions face high costs (piped water) or low demand (point-of-use chlorine). Using a 60,000 household cluster-randomized experiment, we test an alternative approach: decentralized treatment and h...

Economics Job Market "Scramble" for new PhDs

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Leading Departments and Workplaces

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Editorial Policy

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Editorial Policy

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Editorial Policy

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AEA-CEE Members

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Current Members of the Education Committee

Disemployment Effects of Unemployment Insurance: A Meta-analysis

By Jonathan P. Cohen and Peter Ganong

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2026

We systematically review studies of how unemployment benefits affect unemployment duration. Statistically significant findings are eight times more likely to be published. Correcting for publication bias cuts the average elasticity by a third. Meta-analys...

Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back

By Abel Brodeur, Mathias Lé, Marc Sangnier, and Yanos Zylberberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

Using 50,000 tests published in the AER, JPE, and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained solely by journals favoring rejection of the null hypothesis. We observe a two-humped camel shap...

Central Bank Digital Currency and Monetary Architecture

By Dirk Niepelt

Journal of Economic Literature

We provide a guide to the macroeconomic literature on retail central bank digital currency (CBDC), organizing the discussion around a CBDC-irrelevance result. We identify both fundamental and policy-related sources of relevance, or departures from neutral...