'Less Is More': Consumer Spending and the Size of Economic Stimulus Payments

By Michelle Andreolli and Paolo Surico

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We study how consumption responds to unexpected, transitory income gains of different sizes using hypothetical questions from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Affluent households exhibit higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) out...

Energy, the Stock Market, and the Putty-Clay Investment Model

By Chao Wei

American Economic Review, March 2003

Financial Frictions: Micro versus Macro Volatility

By Renato Faccini, Seungcheol Lee, Ralph Luetticke, Morten O. Ravn, and Tobias Renkin

American Economic Review, February 2026

We argue that consumer credit spreads matter for household choices and that time-varying spreads have important distributional consequences. Studying Danish household data, we show that consumer credit spreads have heterogeneous impact on asset dynamics a...

Do Consumers React to Anticipated Income Changes? Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, March 2003

"3rd of tha Month": Do Social Security Recipients Smooth Consumption Between Checks?

By Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Review, March 2003

Breadwinner's Burden: The Effect of Financial Concerns on Sleeplessness

By Claire Duquennois and Maulik Jagnani

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2026

Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that eligible household heads surveyed just after an unconditional cash transfer in Indonesia report a 0.4 standard deviation improvement in sleep quality compared to those surveyed just before, and they pe...

The Long-Term Impacts of Mixing the Rich and Poor: Evidence from Conscript Dorms

By Elias Einiö

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

To what extent is economic success determined by with whom individuals interact socially? We tackle this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment in the Finnish conscription. Our research design is based on the alphabetization of dorms, whi...

Large Firms, Consumer Heterogeneity, and the Profit Share

By Robert C. Feenstra, Luca Macedoni, and Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We examine the relationship between large firms and the rising profit share in a model that features oligopolistic competition and consumer heterogeneity. Conditional on the sales distribution, consumer heterogeneity increases firm-level markups and the p...

Weak Instruments: Diagnosis and Cures in Empirical Econometrics

By Jinyong Hahn and Jerry Hausman

American Economic Review, May 2003

The Gender Gap in Wages, circa 2000

By June O'Neill

American Economic Review, May 2003

Stock-Market Participation, Intertemporal Substitution, and Risk-Aversion

By Annette Vissing-Jørgensen and Orazio P. Attanasio

American Economic Review, May 2003

Measuring Unilateral Market Power in Wholesale Electricity Markets: The California Market, 1998-2000

By Frank A. Wolak

American Economic Review, May 2003

What Do Bargainers' Preferences Look Like? Experiments with a Convex Ultimatum Game

By James Andreoni, Marco Castillo, and Ragan Petrie

American Economic Review, June 2003

The ultimatum game, by its all-or-nothing nature, makes it difficult to discern what kind of preferences may be generating choices. We explore a game that convexifies the decisions, allowing us a better look at the indifference curves of bargainers while ...

One Size Fits All? Heckscher-Ohlin Specialization in Global Production

By Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, June 2003

This paper introduces a new technique for testing the Heckscher-Ohlin model that allows for the possibility that countries with sufficiently disparate endowments specialize in unique subsets of goods. Results based upon industry-level data reject one-size...

Relational Incentive Contracts

By Jonathan Levin

American Economic Review, June 2003

Standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced. This paper studies the design of self-enforced relational contracts. I show that optimal contracts often can...

Pregnancy and the Demand for Cigarettes

By W. David Bradford

American Economic Review, December 2003

Dynamic Pricing in the Presence of Antidumping Policy: Theory and Evidence

By Bruce A. Blonigen and Jee-Hyeong Park

American Economic Review, March 2004

Antidumping (AD) trade protection policies allow government agencies to recalculate AD duties based on foreign firms' most recent pricing behavior. We examine the resulting dynamic pricing problem of a foreign firm facing such policy. We show that the exp...

Understanding Trend and Cycle in Asset Values: Reevaluating the Wealth Effect on Consumption

By Martin Lettau and Sydney C. Ludvigson

American Economic Review, March 2004

The Impact of Labor Strikes on Consumer Demand: An Application to Professional Sports

By Martin B. Schmidt and David J. Berri

American Economic Review, March 2004

Policy Options in a Liquidity Trap

By Gauti B. Eggertsson and Michael Woodford

American Economic Review, May 2004