The 2019 AEJ Best Paper Prizes have been awarded. The papers selected are highlighted below.

AEJ: Applied Economics

In "Expertise versus Bias in Evaluation: Evidence from the NIH," author Danielle Li showed that experts on review panels who were more familiar with a topic were better at predicting which research projects would end up earning more citations in the future. But experts were also more inclined to fund less worthy project. Researchers may see serving as a reviewer as an opportunity to advocate for more resources for their particular subfield. Li’s research helps identify the tradeoffs in using grant reviewers with subject-specific knowledge and the biases they carry in favor of their own fields. (AEJ: Applied Economics, Vol 9, No. 2, April 2017)

Read the Research Highlight here.

AEJ: Economic Policy

In “Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from US Agriculture,” authors Marshall Burke and Kyle Emerick look to see how well American farmers have adapted to temperature changes over recent decades. They use archival weather data to track how the climate changed during the growing season in the eastern U.S. between 1980 and 2000, and find wide variation across different parts of the country, with some counties warming by more than 2ºF and some actually cooling by half a degree. They also examine the impact of extreme heat on corn yields and say that there could be substantial losses in agricultural productivity if steps are not taken to adapt. (AEJ: Economic Policy, Vol 8, No. 3, August 2016)

Read the Research Highlight here

AEJ: Microeconomics

In “A Pseudo-Market Approach to Allocation with Priorities,” authors Yinghua He, Antonio Miralles, Marek Pycia, and Jianye Yan create a new pseudo-market mechanism for allocating indivisible objects, such as a school choice program. They hoped to improve upon the types of ordinal systems often used by school districts, in which students rank their school preferences. Instead, the authors propose a mechanism that elicits cardinal preferences as a way to allocate agents to the most compatible assignments. (AEJ: Microeconomics, Vol. 10, No. 3, August 2018)

AEJ: Macroeconomics

In “The Firm Size Distribution across Countries and Skill-Biased Change in Entrepreneurial Technology,” author Markus Poschke argues that the size of companies in a country is closely related to its level of entrepreneurial development. Previous research believed that poorer countries had smaller firms because of economic distortions. To test his hypothesis, Poschke built a frictionless general equilibrium model of occupational choice with technical progress that favors better entrepreneurs. His model could account for the growth in size and dispersion of US firms and explained half the variation in mean and dispersion of firm size across countries.(AEJ: Macroeconomics, Vol. 10, No. 3, July 2018)