Hegemony and International Alignment

By Fernando Broner, Alberto Martin, Josefin Meyer, Christoph Trebesch, and Jiaxian Zhou Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This article explores the interplay between economic hegemony and political alignment. Using theoretical and empirical insights from Broner et al. (2024), we posit that hegemonic states, like the United States, foster political alignment, which enhances g...

Changing Global Linkages: Bridging Geopolitical Fragments

By Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Andrea F. Presbitero, and Petia Topalova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The recent surge in geopolitical tensions and trade restrictions raises important questions about the global allocation of production, investment, and trade across countries. Using bilateral sectoral data on FDI, trade, and trade distortive measures over ...

Nobel Lecture: Institutions, Technology, and Prosperity

By Daron Acemoglu

American Economic Review, June 2025

This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize th...

Nobel Lecture: The Institutional Origins of Shared Prosperity

By Simon Johnson

American Economic Review, June 2025

Social Preferences: Fundamental Characteristics and Economic Consequences

By Ernst Fehr and Gary Charness

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2025

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particul...

Aggregate Shocks and the Formation of Preferences and Beliefs

By Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2025

A growing body of work highlights how aggregate shocks shape preferences and beliefs. This review synthesizes findings from sociology, social psychology, and economics to explore the significance of these shocks, how the period in which they are experienc...

Culture, Institutions, and Social Equilibria: A Framework

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2025

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We interpret culture as a repertoire, consisting of (cultural) attributes and allowing rich cultural responses to political changes. Combinations of attribute...

The Impact of Trade Liberalization in the Presence of Political Distortions

By Sebastian Jävervall and Roza Khoban

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

Political distortions are prevalent in many developing countries, implying substantial productivity losses. This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on political distortions in India. First, using variation in political turnover, we iden...

Fiscal Rules and the Selection of Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Italy

By Matteo Gamalerio and Federico Trombetta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Fiscal rules, or constraints on the policymaking discretion of elected officials, are widely used to regulate fiscal policies. Using data on Italian municipalities, we employ a difference-in-discontinuity design to provide evidence of the negative effect ...

Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany

By Navid Sabet, Marius Liebald, and Guido Friebel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We document that right-wing terrorism leads to significant increases in vote share for the right-wing, populist AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) party in Germany. To identify causal effects, we exploit quasi-random variation between successful and failed...

Pandering in the Shadows: How Natural Disasters Affect Special Interest Politics

By Ethan Kaplan, Jörg L. Spenkuch, and Haishan Yuan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We exploit the quasi-random timing of natural disasters to study the connection between public attention to politics and legislators' support for special interests. We show that when a disaster strikes, the news media reduce coverage of politics in genera...

Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient

By Anne Case, Darren Lubotsky, and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, December 2002

The well-known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood. Not only is children's health positively related to household income, but the relationship between household income and children's health becomes more...

Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections

By Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, August 2025

We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center...

The Folk Economics of Housing

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said ...

Two-Class Voting: A Mechanism for Conflict Resolution

By Ernst Maug and Bilge Yilmaz

American Economic Review, December 2002

We discuss two-class voting procedures where voters are divided into classes and a separate majority is required in each class. Examples include Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and some political mechanisms. We investigate how voting mechanisms aggregat...

How Congress Designed the Federal Reserve to Be Independent of Presidential Control

By Gary Richardson and David W. Wilcox

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Conventional wisdom traces the origins of the Federal Reserve's independence to the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. That rendition of history is inaccurate. The principal source of the Fed's monetary-policy independence is the Banking Act of 1935, which created...

Preferences for Firearms

By Sarah Moshary, Bradley T. Shapiro, and Sara Drango

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

This paper provides a critical input into crafting effective firearms policy: an understanding of consumer demand for guns. We estimate individual-level price sensitivity and substitution patterns across gun types using stated-choice experiments. We find ...

A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory

By Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs

American Economic Review, September 2025

We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discredit...

Racial Residential Segregation in the United States

By Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the United States. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and health care. There is an ever-evolving literature across the soci...

Choosing Wisely: A Multibidding Approach

By David Pérez-Castrillo and David Wettstein

American Economic Review, December 2002