Happiness data—survey respondents’ self-reported well-being (SWB)—have become increasingly common in economics research, with recent calls to use them in policymaking. Researchers have used SWB data in novel ways—for example, to learn about welfare or preferences when choice data are unavailable or difficult to interpret. Focusing on leading examples of this pioneering research, the first part of this review uses a simple theoretical framework to reverse-engineer some of the crucial assumptions that underlie existing applications. The second part discusses evidence bearing on these assumptions and provides practical advice to the agencies and institutions that generate SWB data, the researchers who use them, and the policymakers who may use the resulting research. While we advocate creative uses of SWB data in economics, we caution that their use in policy will likely require both additional data collection and further research to better understand the data.

Interpreting individual heterogeneity in terms of probability theory has proved powerful in connecting behavior at the individual and aggregate levels. Returning to Ricardo's focus on comparative efficiency as a basis for international trade, much recent quantitative equilibrium modeling of the global economy builds on particular probabilistic assumptions about technology. We review these assumptions and discuss how they deliver a unified framework underlying a wide range of static and dynamic equilibrium models.

Citizens have long taken to the streets to demand change, expressing political views that may otherwise be suppressed. Protests have produced change at local, national, and international scales, including spectacular moments of political and social transformation. We document five new empirical patterns describing 1.2 million protest events across 218 countries between 1980 and 2020. First, autocracies and weak democracies experienced a trend break in protests during the Arab Spring. Second, protest movements also rose in importance following the Arab Spring. Third, protest movements geographically diffuse over time, spiking to their peak before falling off. Fourth, a country's year-to-year economic performance is not strongly correlated with protests; individual values are predictive of protest participation. Fifth, the United States, China, and Russia are the most overrepresented countries in academic studies. We discuss each pattern's connections to the existing literature and anticipate paths for future work.

We survey the weak instrumental variables (IV) literature with the aim of giving simple advice to applied researchers. This literature focuses heavily on the problem of size inflation in two-stage least squares (2SLS) two-tailed t -tests that arises if instruments are weak. A common standard for acceptable instrument strength is a first-stage F of 10, which renders this size inflation modest. However, 2SLS suffers from other important problems that exist at much higher levels of instrument strength. In particular, 2SLS standard errors tend to be artificially small in samples where the 2SLS estimate is close to ordinary least squares (OLS). This power asymmetry means the t -test has inflated power to detect false positive effects when the OLS bias is positive. The Anderson-Rubin (AR) test avoids this problem and should be used in lieu of the t -test even with strong instruments. We illustrate the practical importance of this issue in IV papers published in the American Economic Review from 2011 to 2023. Use of the AR test often reverses t -test results. In particular, IV estimates that are close to OLS and significant according to the t -test are often insignificant according to AR. We also show that for first-stage F in the 10–20 range there is a high probability that OLS estimates will be closer to the truth than 2SLS. Hence we advocate a higher standard of instrument strength in applied work.

We review theoretical and empirical work on the economic effects of the United States and China trade relations during the past 20 years. We first discuss the origins of the China shock and its measurement and present methods used to study its economic effects on different outcomes. We then focus on the recent US–China trade war. We review methods used to evaluate its effects, describe its economic effects, and analyze whether this increase in trade protectionism reverted the effects of the China shock. The main lessons learned in this review are that (a) the aggregate gains from US–China trade created winners and losers; (b) China's trade expansion seems not to be the main cause of the decline in US manufacturing employment during the same period; and (c) the recent trade war generated welfare losses, had small employment effects, and was ineffective in reversing the distributional effects due to the China shock.

Gender differences in negotiation are seen as contributing to the persistent gender gaps in labor market outcomes. We review the literature on interventions aiming to mute differences in negotiation and assess their effectiveness in reducing the gender pay gap. We present research on initiatives that aspire to increase how often and how women negotiate, as well as institutional changes that ban negotiations, ban requests for employee salary history, and improve wage transparency. Along with reviewing evidence on the effectiveness of these initiatives, we point to unintended consequences that warrant caution at implementation. The review makes clear that initial efforts to push women to negotiate more like men have shifted to alter instead the conditions of the negotiation. This shift results not only from wanting to consider policies that “fix the institutions” rather than “fixing the women,” but also from evidence that these interventions are more successful in securing pay equity.

This paper compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost more focused home-visiting programs. Successful interventions target both children and their caregivers. They engage caregivers and improve the home lives of children. They permanently boost cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. Long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than program costs for the iconic programs. We investigate the mechanisms promoting successful family lives for participants and report intergenerational effects on their children. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: they activate and promote parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall US Black-White earnings gap.

International trade contributes directly to global greenhouse gas emissions, as the carbon content of high-emission products is priced differently in different countries. This phenomenon is termed carbon leakage. Thus, not putting a price on carbon is theoretically equivalent to an export subsidy, although that would be difficult to challenge in the context of multilateral trade law. Leakage can be alleviated by pricing the carbon embedded in imported products through a border carbon adjustment (BCA), be it a tax, a carbon tariff, or a regulation requiring the purchase of emissions allowances. The design of a BCA is a compromise between environmental effectiveness in preventing leakage, economic effectiveness in preserving competitiveness and ensuring acceptability, technical feasibility of the implementation, and World Trade Organization compatibility. An import-limited BCA is more effective than free emissions allowances in reducing leakage, but it does not preserve the export competitiveness of the country imposing it.

This article surveys the development of nonparametric models and methods for estimation of choice models with nonlinear budget sets. The discussion focuses on the budget set regression, that is, the conditional expectation of a choice variable given the budget set. Utility maximization in a nonparametric model with general heterogeneity reduces the curse of dimensionality in this regression. Empirical results using this regression are different from maximum likelihood and give informative inference. The article also considers the information provided by kink probabilities for nonparametric utility with general heterogeneity. Instrumental variable estimation and the evidence it provides of heterogeneity in preferences are also discussed.

There is widespread dissatisfaction with existing antitrust enforcement. The European Union has enacted comprehensive legislation to address perceived antitrust limitations, and several proposals to amend US antitrust laws have followed its lead. Most of the actual and proposed laws target firms that dominate the digital economy, while others have measures to tighten antitrust enforcement more generally. Market power has increased in the United States and most advanced economies, but it has not been uniformly associated with higher prices or lower productivity. Nonetheless, antitrust reforms can benefit consumers and address concerns about the concentration and exercise of economic power. In the United States, legislation would be desirable to amend rulings that are excessively deferential to antitrust defendants. However, most enacted and proposed reforms include prohibitions or obligations that depart from traditional antitrust principles and create potential risks for consumer welfare.