Noncompetes and Firm Heterogeneity

By Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompetes often cover highly trained, high-paid workers but are also widespread in low-skill, low-pay service jobs. This paper asks where they hurt workers more. Using a dynamic monopsony job-ladder framework, we show that noncompetes depress wages by r...

Noncompete Agreements and Bargaining Power

By Bhargav Gopal, Xiangru Li, and Luke Rawling

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCs) present a trade-off between firm investment incentives and allocative efficiency. We illustrate this trade-off using a contract choice model in which NCs encourage industry-specific investments and wages are determined by barga...

The Impact of Noncompetes on Wages and Job Tenure: New Evidence from NLSY Data

By Tristan Potter, André Kurmann, and Bart Hobijn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Noncompete agreements (NCAs) are pervasive even in low-wage labor markets, yet most evidence relies on variation in enforceability rather than NCA incidence. Using longitudinal data from the NLSY97, we study how signing an NCA affects wage trajectories an...

Fintech and Customer Capital

By Bianca He, Lauren Mostrom, and Amir Sufi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Financial Technology (fintech) firms invest significantly more in customer capital relative to traditional financial firms, and such investment builds valuable customer capital. Higher investment by fintech firms is not accounted for by sectoral focus or ...

Producing Tangible and Intangible Capital

By Matthieu Gomez and Emilien Gouin-Bonenfant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We compare the production technologies of tangible and intangible investment using Bureau of Economic Analysis input-output tables and Integrated Industry-Level Production Account (KLEMS). We show that intangible investment is built mainly with domestic, ...

R&D Uncertainty and Cycles

By Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Investment in equipment and structures is one of the most cyclical components of GDP, a fact often associated with a negative response to heightened uncertainty in recessions. R&D investment, by contrast, is only mildly procyclical. We show that this diff...

Understanding Students’ Expected Earnings Beliefs after College at an HBCU

By Gerald Daniels, Damon Jones, Lesley J. Turner, and Brianna Youngblood

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Black borrowers tend to have higher student loan debt and worse financial outcomes than other racial groups, underscoring the importance of understanding how Black borrowers account for their ability to repay loans. This paper examines students’ baselin...

Does Lowering Entry Costs to Economics for Underrepresented Students Affect Outcomes? Preliminary Experimental Evidence

By Jesse Buchsbaum, Michael Greenstone, and Olga Rostapshova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Economics lags other disciplines in inclusivity both as a field of study and career track. We conduct the first longitudinal randomized controlled trial of a diversity program in economics to evaluate the causal impact of the University of Chicago’s EDE...

Belief Updating, Observability, and Race in the Labor Market

By Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman and Emma Rackstraw

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Inaccurate beliefs about racial gaps in productivity can have wide-ranging implications in the workplace. In an online experiment, we hired a nationally representative sample of Prolific workers to assess the performance of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers ...

SNAP Work Requirements, Administrative Burden, and Procedural Denials

By Jason Cook, Elizabeth Cox, and Chloe N. East

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Administrative burdens in public assistance create barriers to program access. Some argue that work requirements impose new paperwork and compliance costs, but this has been difficult to test empirically. One signifier of administrative burdens is procedu...

Who Participates in TANF? Variation by Exposure to Work Requirements

By Katherine Richard and Lea Bart

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Since its enactment in 1996, participation in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has steadily declined. This paper uses administrative records covering the universe of Michigan TANF participants between 2010 and 2018 to characteriz...

How Do State Child Tax Credits Affect Employment and Poverty?

By Matthew Unrath, Nathan Tollett, Jacob Goldin, Tatiana Homonoff, Neel Lal, and Katherine Michelmore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper projects the employment, poverty, and fiscal effects of introducing unconditional child allowances in states lacking such programs. We use survey data to identify eligible parents, calculate the policy's change to their work incentives, and pre...

A Tale of Two States: Reconciling Medicaid Work Requirement Enrollment Impacts in Georgia and Arkansas

By Morgan Henderson, Laura Spicer, and Alice Middleton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Medicaid work requirements have reemerged as a major federal policy, yet evidence on their enrollment effects is sparse. We reconcile sharply different outcomes from the only two states that implemented Medicaid work requirements: Arkansas, which reported...

A New Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity in African Development

By Pascaline Dupas, Nicolas Suarez, and Zhongyi Tang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Access to basic infrastructure is critical for quality of life and economic development. However, data about infrastructure access in low-income countries are sparse and costly to collect. We leverage satellite imagery and survey data to train a machine l...

How Many (Half) Moons? Measuring Technology Adoption from the Sky and on the Ground

By Jenny C. Aker, Jennifer Burney, Alison Campion, B. Kelsey Jack, and Chuan Liao

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Measuring technology adoption is central to evaluating development policies, yet standard approaches face trade-offs between accuracy, cost, and scalability. Using data from a randomized controlled trial in Niger, we compare four methods for measuring ad...

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...

Representation in Mobility Data in Emerging Cities

By Daniel Björkegren, Alice Duhaut, Oluchi Mbonu, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

How people move has implications for many facets of economic activity. Data from mobile phones have enabled much finer tracking of mobility. However, there are multiple ways to measure mobility. Smartphone data may omit many people in emerging economies, ...

Race, Ethnicity, and Nonpayment of Unemployment Insurance: The Role of the Employer

By Marta Lachowska and Stephen A. Woodbury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We examine worker-employer disputes over unemployment insurance (UI) claims and their relationship to benefit nonpayment. Administrative UI records allow us to use workers who file multiple claims to control for unobserved worker heterogeneity. We observe...

Race, Firm Size, and the School-to-Work Transition

By Lisa B. Kahn and Yang Chang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We examine race differences in labor market entry timing and quality of first jobs. Black workers are more likely to begin their careers at large firms but exhibit delayed entry. White workers increase their odds of starting at a large firm by searching f...

Black-White Gaps in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

By Helen Levy

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Using data from the Current Population Survey for 1988 through 2023, I find that Black-White differences in own-employer health insurance are highly persistent over time but differ sharply by sex: Black male workers are substantially less likely than Whit...