AEA Research Highlights

Since the 1990s, developers in Florida who want to build on wetlands have been required to buy offset credits from "wetland mitigation banks," private restoration projects that convert degraded land, often former pasture, back into functioning wetland elsewhere in the same region. Like other environmental offset markets, the program has proved controversial. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Daniel Aronoff and Will Rafey found that wetland offsets generated roughly $2.4 billion in private gains from trade but also a significant increase in overall flood damage because wetlands were moved away from places where they protected existing homes. Rafey recently spoke with Tyler Smith about what the results mean for the design of environmental markets and wetland regulations.

More than two billion people around the world do not have safe drinking water at home. Piped water infrastructure remains out of reach for much of the developing world, and cheaper alternatives like chlorine tablets have low take-up rates even when given away for free. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan explore a third option. Working with a private company in rural Odisha, one of India's poorest states, the researchers ran a randomized experiment across roughly 60,000 households to test the effectiveness of delivering treated water directly to people's doors. Burlig recently spoke with Tyler Smith about revealed-preference measurements of the value of clean water and steps governments might take toward reaching the goal of universal access.

W. E. B. Du Bois is remembered as a civil rights leader, sociologist, and author of The Souls of Black Folk. But before he became famous for his empirical studies of Black life in America, Du Bois was a graduate student at Harvard studying cutting-edge economic theory. In 1891, at age 23, he submitted a 158-page manuscript entitled A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory to a Harvard prize competition. The manuscript sat in the Harvard archives for over a century, largely unexamined by trained economists. Author Daniel Kuehn recently requested that Harvard digitize the manuscript so that he could analyze its contents. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, he explores how Du Bois anticipated the application of marginalist ideas in economics to the determination of wages. Kuehn recently spoke with Tyler Smith about Du Bois's contributions to wage theory, why these contributions went unrecognized, and how his time in Berlin redirected him toward the historical and empirical work for which he is known.

Between 1997 and 2011, opioid dispensing in the United States more than tripled, fueling what would become the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. This surge in the supply of opioids was concentrated among a small subset of doctors: roughly 1 percent of the doctors who prescribed opioids accounted for almost 50 percent of all domestic opioid doses prescribed. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, author Adam Soliman examined what happened when federal authorities cracked down on "rogue" doctors who overprescribed opioids. He found that removing a single doctor from the opioid supply chain reduced county-level dispensing by 10 percent, with no negating increases in neighboring areas. Yet these interventions came with a trade-off—while overall drug mortality declined, heroin overdoses increased by 50 percent, likely as a result of existing users seeking alternatives. Soliman recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he untangled these complex enforcement effects and what his findings mean for combating drug epidemics that begin in the legal pharmaceutical market.

Most Americans agree that housing costs are too high, often blaming developers and landlords. Many feel that the problem can be solved with price controls, development restrictions, and mandates on providing below-market-rate units. But these ideas are at odds with standard economic policy prescriptions, which suggest that the way to bring down costs is by increasing the housing supply. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, authors Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, Stan Oklobdzija explore how the public thinks about housing markets through surveys of thousands of urban and suburban residents. They found that while people understand supply and demand in markets like cars and agriculture, they struggle to apply the same logic to housing. The authors' results may help efforts to shape better economic messaging geared toward the general public. Elmendorf recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he and his coauthors measured public beliefs about housing markets and why these beliefs differ from economic consensus.

For decades, the United States enjoyed what some called an exorbitant privilege—the ability to spend more than it earned without accumulating much debt to the rest of the world. But that privilege has ended. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Andrew Atkeson, Jonathan Heathcote, and Fabrizio Perri found that the United States started accumulating significant liabilities to foreigners after the Great Recession. The researchers say that a surge in the value of US corporations relative to companies in other countries is the driver of this development. Due to large international capital flows in recent decades, foreign investors now own about 40 percent of US corporate equity, while US investors also hold a large amount of foreign companies in their portfolio. When American companies become more profitable and their stock prices soar, much of the gains flow overseas, without a corresponding flow to US investors from foreign companies, and this erodes the net foreign asset position of the United States. Atkeson recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how to interpret the US net foreign asset position and what its recent swings mean for American households.

Drug prices have become a hot-button issue in the United States, with politicians across the spectrum agreeing that American consumers pay too much for prescription medications. But bringing down drug prices raises fundamental economic challenges that affect innovation, access, and healthcare costs worldwide. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Margaret K. Kyle examines how different countries approach pharmaceutical pricing regulation and the lessons to be learned from international experience. Her work reveals that while the United States does pay significantly higher prices for drugs, the story is more nuanced than a simple comparison suggests. Kyle recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why economists generally support market solutions but make an exception for pharmaceuticals, how "pay-for-performance" contracts and subscription pricing models could bring down costs, and why simple solutions like copying other countries' prices might backfire.

The Clean Air Act has been an essential tool for reducing air pollution in the United States. But standard estimation methods may overstate its impact, according to a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Authors Lutz Sager and Gregor Singer reexamined the 2005 regulations targeting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and found that improvements in air quality were closer to a 3 percent reduction in pollutants rather than the 10 percent suggested by conventional methods. However, they also found that the benefits from cleaner air may be larger than previous estimates suggested. Sager and Singer recently spoke with Tyler Smith about methods for properly estimating regulatory impacts that feature time trends and the implications for other measures based on estimates of air quality improvements.

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A growing number of US households hire advisers to assist with major financial decisions, such as planning life events or making portfolio choices for retirement. But some advisers exploit the inherent complexity of these decisions and the lack of sophistication of their clients to benefit themselves. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru show that about 7 percent of financial advisers have serious misconduct records, with rates reaching nearly 30 percent in some regions and firms. The authors explain why misconduct clusters in certain firms and geographic areas, particularly those with wealthy but less financially sophisticated populations. Importantly, the researchers also show that widely publicizing the names of the firms with the highest misconduct rates can lead to a substantial reduction in misconduct. Egan recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how the complex regulatory landscape of financial advising creates potential confusion for consumers and the best ways to clean up the industry.

A half a century ago, new high-yield varieties of crops were introduced to India, and it transformed the country's farming. This so-called "Green Revolution" significantly boosted agricultural output, allaying concerns about famine and food security. But it may have had some unanticipated consequences for long-term health outcomes. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Sheetal Sekhri and Gauri Kartini Shastry show that the areas where agricultural productivity accelerated the most also saw the highest rates of diabetes among men later in life. The authors argue that substantial changes to the diets of mothers and young children, in the form of higher levels of rice consumption, likely increased the risks of chronic diseases. The findings suggest that dietary diversification should accompany efforts to promote agricultural production. Sekhri recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how the Green Revolution changed diets in India and why it led to a rise in diet-related diseases like diabetes.

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the hopes that it would keep businesses from laying off workers during government shutdown measures taken to contain the spread of the disease. Initial estimates of the direct impacts have been mixed, with some studies suggesting that the cost was hundreds of thousands of dollars per job saved. But a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy looked beyond the labor market at a second order effect showing a clear and positive benefit. Authors Sumit Agarwal, Brent W. Ambrose, Luis A. Lopez, Xue Xiao found that the PPP reduced mortgage delinquencies for commercial real estate by roughly $36 billion in 2020 and likely played an important role in averting wider distress in financial markets. Ambrose recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the impact of PPP loans on the commercial real estate market and ways in which the program could have been better targeted.

In 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed with bipartisan support and near universal endorsement by economists. In hindsight, the economic costs and political consequences were far greater than many contemporary observers would have imagined. In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Jiwon Choi, Ilyana Kuziemko, Ebonya Washington, and Gavin Wright found that US counties most exposed to NAFTA and Mexican import competition saw their total employment drop by roughly 6 percent compared to those with little exposure to the trade deal. However, workers in these communities didn't respond by moving away to find better opportunities, and many, feeling betrayed by the Democratic party, embraced the Republican party instead. Choi and Wright recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the economic and political history of NAFTA and what economists have learned since its passage.