American Economic Association

American Economic Association 2024-2025 Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by John J. Siegfried, Elizabeth Braunstein and Ryan Kustaborder. Published in volume 115, pages 724-27 of AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We examine trends in author representation, research topics, and impact of citations to articles in the American Economic Review and what was formerly its Papers & Proceedings (P&P). Over what we refer to as the P&P expansion period (2008-2017), we see a significant shift toward greater diversity of P&P authors with respect to gender and institutions, and the range of topics covered. Importantly, the rise in inclusivity during this time period occurred without any loss of impact, with P&P article citations actually rising relative to regular-issue articles. Thus, our analysis suggests there is no trade-off between impact and inclusion.

In traditional economic models, taxes change behavior by changing prices. In empirical analyses, factors other than price are thought to be relevant, but any nonprice factors are usually assumed to be held constant as taxes vary. We contend that violations of this assumption are expected when laws are passed changing sin taxes. In support of this claim, we document that state-level cigarette tax increases are concomitant with increases in antismoking appropriations, media coverage on smoking, lobbying efforts, and place-based smoking restrictions. The influence of these nonprice factors is easily confused with price effects, and we find evidence suggesting that controlling for them substantially reduces the estimated demand responsivity to the tax itself.

In the United States and many other countries, taxpayers can file a protest to legally reduce their property taxes. While tax protests can provide a unique opportunity to study the (un)willingness to pay taxes, they have received little attention from researchers. To fill that gap, we study what motivates households to protest their property taxes. Using a field experiment and a quasiexperiment, we show that both expected savings and filing frictions play significant roles. We estimate the magnitude of filing frictions using a money metric. We also discuss how low-cost interventions targeted at disadvantaged groups can mitigate existing economic and racial disparities in the system of tax appeals.

Undergraduate degrees awarded in economics by U.S. colleges and universities were stagnant from 2010 (2009–2010) through 2013, increased rapidly (almost 14 percent) over the 2 years from 2013 through 2015, but have subsequently leveled off from 2016 through 2019.

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 food-and water-borne diseases. In addition to studying interventions such as treating sewage and setting strict bacteriological standards for milk, which have received little attention in the literature, we provide new evidence on the effects of water filtration and chlorination, extending the work of previous scholars. Contrary to the consensus view, we find that none of the interventions under study contributed substantially to the observed declines in total and infant mortality.

Abstract We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong nonroutine cognitive abilities, while the unincorporated and their firms perform tasks demanding relatively strong manual skills. People who become incorporated business owners tend to be more educated and—as teenagers—score higher on learning aptitude tests, exhibit greater self-esteem, and engage in more illicit activities than others. The combination of “smart” and “illicit” tendencies as youths accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs. Individuals tend to experience a material increase in earnings when becoming entrepreneurs, and this increase occurs at each decile of the distribution.