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 predict behavioral responses using labor supply elasticities estimated from recent state-level reforms. Our microsimulation suggests that a $1,000 per-child credit phasing out at $50,000 would reduce poverty among children under age six by 6.3 percent and lead 0.6 percent of working parents with young children to exit employment at an annual cost of $11 billion.

Macroeconomic models and policymakers' language have evolved significantly. Today's policy discussions center on New Keynesian (NK) synthesis, which builds on the neoclassical growth model and the AS-AD framework. It incorporates nominal and real rigidities, financial and labor market frictions, and the importance of expectations, and it inspired terms policymaker terms such as “inflation expectations” and “forward guidance.” While essential for communication during the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic, these events also revealed the NK model's limitations. Newer models incorporating heterogeneous agents potentially offer richer policy insights but add complexity and the challenge of distilling their main policy implications going forward.

How adverse is the impact of fiscal policy uncertainty on economic and financial variables? To answer this question, we construct a novel cross-country database of news-based fiscal policy uncertainty indicators. Importantly, we track fiscal events that attract global attention, which we refer to as “global” fiscal policy uncertainty. We find that heightened fiscal policy uncertainty triggers contractionary effects, lowering industrial production in both advanced and emerging market economies. It also raises sovereign borrowing costs, generates synchronous movements in global financial variables including risk aversion, and strengthens the US dollar, even after accounting for US monetary policy shocks.

Nine European countries adopted gender quotas for companies' boards of directors between 2005 and 2021 before the European Parliament adopted an EU-wide quota in 2022. Using 25 years of data, we estimate the quotas' effects on female shares of corporate directors and senior executives of large public companies. We find that while the female share of nonexecutive directors increased by 20 percentage points within 6 years after a quotas' adoption, women's representation among CEOs or other senior executives hardly changed. These results suggest that policymakers interested in increasing gender diversity among senior executives might need to consider more targeted policies.

I use a lab experiment to study the effect of gender priming on chat-based communication in mixed- and same-gender teams with a real-effort task. I find that priming gender seems to evoke stereotypes about men's and women's roles in communication, causing men to make significantly more chat entries and women to write significantly fewer words and fewer chat entries. While same-gender teams communicate more with each other in the absence of gender priming, mixed-gender teams perform better on the assigned task, pointing to the value of gender diversity in the workplace.

This paper studies emergency financial assistance for people at risk of homelessness using federal tax and census data. We use an established quasi-experimental research design to examine how assistance affects address histories, number of children, and receipt of food benefits (SNAP) in Illinois. We find no evidence that assistance affects moves or children, but we observe a small increase in SNAP uptake among the lowest-income callers. We consider whether prior studies that limit focus to local geography estimate treatment effects with bias; we find that limiting outcomes to Illinois does not noticeably change observed treatment effects.

Using a novel comprehensive dataset on sanctions imposed on the exports to Russia after 2022, we document four stylized facts. First, these sanctions covered 33 percent of Russia's pre-2022 imports in value. Second, though most of the sanctions were concentrated in a few high-tech product categories, at least as much import within these categories remained unsanctioned. Third, substantial variation exists in the specific sets of banned products across countries despite coordinating efforts. Fourth, most sanctioning countries have already prohibited most of their pre-2022 exports to Russia, limiting their future ability to impose additional trade sanctions.

Report of the Committee on Economic StatisticsThe AEA Committee on Economic Statistics (AEAStat) promotes AEA member access to current, detailed, useful economic statistics provided by the federal government and other sources.To this end, AEAStat undertakes formal and informal educational activities, mostly in Washington, DC, that aim to

Using linked insurance claims and birth records, we provide new evidence on the gender gap in parents' work among physicians. On typical weekdays, women are 10 percent less likely than men to bill any claims. On minor holidays (e.g. Columbus Day)--when many physicians' offices remain open, but schools close--this gender gap in work grows to 25 percent. However, on major holidays (e.g. Christmas)--when most offices close--men and women bill at equally low rates. These results suggest that a mismatch between workplace expectations and predictable disruptions in childcare may exacerbate the gender gap in work.