Libertarian Paternalism

By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

American Economic Review, May 2003

Competitive Bank Liability Design

By Saki Bigio, Pierre-Olivier Weill, and Diego Zúñiga

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We study how competitive banks design liabilities that function as money in an economy with asymmetric information. Assets differ in risk exposure, and sufficiently risky assets cannot circulate in decentralized trade. Banks commit to state-contingent pay...

Studying Optimal Paternalism, Illustrated by a Model of Sin Taxes

By Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Review, May 2003

Institutional Design for Environmental Acts

By Louise Guillouet and David Martimort

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

Environmental decisions often involve irreversibility and uncertainty. We develop a dynamic model in which actions yield flow benefits, but, once an unknown tipping point is crossed, the accumulated stock of past actions raises the risk of irreversible ca...

The Informational Role of Emission Markets: Prices versus Quantities with Dispersed Information about Externalities

By Derek Lemoine

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

I study asymmetric information about the social cost of an externality, as opposed to asymmetric information about private costs of abatement. I show that quantity regulation with bankable permits has an informational advantage because the permit market a...

Decision Making with Naive Advice

By Andrew Schotter

American Economic Review, May 2003

Long Wars

By Sandeep Baliga and Tomas Sjöström

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2026

We study whether the Coase conjecture holds for bargaining during war. Two players, A and B, contest a divisible resource until one side collapses or agreement is reached. If player B is militarily strong, then he insists on getting a large share. However...

Breaking Bad News

By Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn ⓡ Simon Board

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2026

We study how information disclosure shapes social learning about a potentially harmful product. Increased transparency helps early agents avoid harm, which may undermine learning by later agents. Despite this conflict of interest, we show that full transp...

The Theory of Financial Stability Meets Reality: A Unifying Framework for Bank Regulation and Accounting Discretion

By Nina Boyarchenko, Kinda Hachem, and Anya Kleymenova

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2026

A large literature at the intersection of economics and finance offers prescriptions for regulating banks to increase financial stability. This literature abstracts from the discretion that accounting standards give banks over financial reporting, creatin...

A New Approach to Risk-Spreading via Coverage-Expansion Subsidies

By John Holahan, Len M. Nichols, Linda J. Blumberg, and Yu-Chu Shen

American Economic Review, May 2003

The persistently large number of uninsured, roughly 40 million per year since 1993, continues to elicit bipartisan policy interest. Coverage-expansion proposals without mandates, by far the most common since the defeat of the Clinton plan, must address ri...

Optimal Design of Market Access

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study a data provider's problem of optimally designing and selling marketing lists that enable a retailer with private types to access consumers with heterogeneous characteristics. When virtual values satisfy a particular form of convexity (named bound...

Exploiting Rivals' Strengths

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We analyze oligopolistic competition in which firms use contracts contingent on what buyers purchase from their rivals. We present a new mechanism through which a dominant firm, by using these contracts, can gain more from exploiting its rivals than from ...

Higher-Order Beliefs and (Mis)learning from Prices

By Kevin He and Jonathan Libgober

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study misperceptions of private-signal correlation in an incomplete-information Cournot duopoly game. Exaggerating the correlation between players' demand signals is beneficial when agents hold flexible beliefs about price elasticity but is harmful whe...

Data Linkages and Privacy Regulation

By Rossella Argenziano and Alessandro Bonatti

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We assess the efficacy of privacy regulation when consumers are privacy conscious. We develop a model of data linkages where a consumer interacts sequentially with two firms: One firm collects data on consumer behavior, and the other firm leverages the da...

Additionality and Asymmetric Information in Environmental Markets: Evidence from Conservation Auctions

By Karl M. Aspelund and Anna Russo

American Economic Review, August 2026

Mechanisms that aim to reduce environmental degradation at low cost can be undermined when participants' conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive—or "additional"—as the lowest-cost participants may not be the highest social value. We inv...

Designing Dynamic Reassignment Mechanisms: Evidence from GP Allocation

By Ingrid Huitfeldt, Victoria Marone, and Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Review, August 2026

We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism when agents' preferences over objects change over time. In the context of Norway's system for (re)assigning patients to general practitioners (GPs), we provide direct evidence of misalloca...

Leniency Designs: An Operator's Manual

[Symposium: Instrumental Variables]

By Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, and Michal Kolesár

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

We develop a step-by-step guide to leniency (a.k.a. judge or examiner instrument) designs, drawing on recent econometric literatures. The unbiased jackknife instrumental variables estimator (UJIVE) is purpose-built for leveraging exogenous leniency variat...

Contextually Private Mechanisms

By Andreas Haupt and Zoë Hitzig

American Economic Review, September 2026

A designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations—information learned that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no prot...

Thanatology and Economics: The Behavioral Economics of Death

By Joel Slemrod

American Economic Review, May 2003

Average Debt and Equity Returns: Puzzling?

By Ellen R. McGrattan and Edward C. Prescott

American Economic Review, May 2003