To:Members of the American Economic AssociationFrom:Peter L. Rousseau, Secretary-TreasurerThe 2026 ASSA Meeting took place in Philadelphia, with more than 5,000 registrants. The energy among attendees and colleagues to be back together and the excitement for the new opportunities at the meeting were unmistakable throughout the hotels and meeting areas. Six...
A comprehensive measure of well-being shows that the gap between Black and White Americans is larger than traditional metrics suggest.Source: barsikStandard measures of welfare typically focus on single dimensions like wealth or life expectancy, but these isolated comparisons may substantially understate the extent of the welfare gap in the United States. ...
Date:January 7, 2026To:Members of the American Economic AssociationFrom:Peter L. Rousseau, Secretary-Treasurer The American Economic Association is proud to announce the recipients of the following honors and awards who were recognized at the AEA award ceremonies held during the 2026 ASSA Meeting.AEA Distinguished Service AwardThe recipient of the&nbs...
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), in conjunction with Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), is pleased to announce the 2026 Conference on Auditing and Capital Markets. This year’s conference will be held in person in Washington, D.C. on September 10-11, 2026. Attendance is free and open to academics, Ph.D. students, and fi...
The Research Highlights series features summaries of selected AEA journal articles based on interviews with the authors. The top ten highlights of 2025 include pieces about automation, climate change, industrial policy, and more. You can read the most popular research highlights from 2025 below. The rankings are based on overall page views. Check out more&...
Source: pdb1Only about one in ten students from low-income families earns a bachelor's degree by age 25, while roughly half of students from high-income families do. This gap persists even among students with similar academic abilities, suggesting that factors beyond preparation play a significant role. In a paper in the American Economi...
Source: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential LibraryWhen the economy weakens, central banks respond by lowering interest rates to encourage borrowing and spending. But recent large downturns, such as the Great Recession and Japan’s Long Recession, have highlighted a major limitation of this tool—the zero lower bound. In such extreme circumstances, the ...
Source: WoodysPhotosBetween 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 d...
Source: REDPIXEL.PLIn December 2013, when Congress failed to reauthorize the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act, many prominent economists predicted a substantial decline in employment and labor force participation. In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, authors Marcus Hagedorn, Io...
Source: l i g h t p o e tIt is generally accepted that the housing boom and bust of the 2000s was a key factor leading to the Great Recession. But economists have struggled to reach a consensus on the role that credit availability played in driving house prices during this period. Some researchers have argued that loosened credit standards, such as mortgag...
