Political Social Learning: Short-Term Memory and Cycles of Polarization

By Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin

American Economic Review, February 2025

This paper investigates the effect of voters' short-term memory on political outcomes by considering politics as a collective learning process. We find that short-term memory may lead to cycles of polarization and consensus across parties' platforms. Foll...

Tax Privacy

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

Implementing an equitable and efficient tax system requires that the government have access to certain information about taxpayers. If the demand for privacy implies limiting government's access to relevant information, it constrains the extent to which a...

Surviving Bad News: Health Information without Treatment Options

By Alberto Ciancio, Fabrice Kämpfen, Hans-Peter Kohler, and Rebecca Thornton

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

When there is no treatment available for a life-threatening disease, providing personal health information could lead to despair or fatalistic behaviors resulting in negative health outcomes. We document this possibility utilizing an experiment in Malawi ...

When Big Data Enables Behavioral Manipulation

By Daron Acemoglu, Ali Makhdoumi, Azarakhsh Malekian, and Asuman Ozdaglar

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

We build a model of online behavioral manipulation driven by AI advances. A platform dynamically offers one of n products to a user who slowly learns product quality. User learning depends on a product's "glossiness," which captures attributes that make p...

Deep Learning for Economists

By Melissa Dell

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2025

Deep learning provides powerful methods to impute structured information from large-scale, unstructured text and image datasets. For example, economists might wish to detect the presence of economic activity in satellite images, or to measure the topics o...

Revisiting Kindness and Confusion in Public Goods Experiments

By Daniel Houser and Robert Kurzban

American Economic Review, September 2002

A Unified Model of Learning to Forecast

By George W. Evans, Christopher G. Gibbs, and Bruce McGough

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2025

We propose a model of boundedly rational and heterogeneous expectations that unifies adaptive learning, k-level reasoning, and replicator dynamics. Level-0 forecasts evolve over time via adaptive learning. Agents revise over time their depth of reasoning ...

Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products

By Susan Athey

American Economic Review, April 2025

This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to ...

Fighting Climate Change: International Attitudes toward Climate Policies

By Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Adrien Fabre, Tobias Kruse, Bluebery Planterose, Ana Sanchez Chico, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, April 2025

This paper explores global perceptions and understanding of climate change and policies, examining factors that influence support for climate action and the impact of different types of information. We conduct large-scale surveys with 40,000 respondents f...

Search Costs and Context Effects

By Heiko Karle, Florian Kerzenmacher, Heiner Schumacher, and Frank Verboven

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2025

Empirical search cost estimates are often large and increasing in the size of the transaction. We conduct an online search experiment in which we manipulate the price scale while keeping the physical search effort per price quote constant. Additionally, w...

Ideological Bias and Trust in Information Sources

By Matthew Gentzkow, Michael B. Wong, and Allen T. Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2025

We study the role of endogenous trust in amplifying ideological bias. Agents in our model learn a sequence of states from sources whose accuracy is ex ante uncertain. Agents learn these accuracies by comparing their own reasoning about the states based on...

Buy Baits and Consumer Sophistication: Field Evidence from Instant Rebates

By Matthias Rodemeier

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

Are consumers in the marketplace aware of their cognitive limitations? I answer this question in the context of a ubiquitous form of price discrimination: instant rebates that require active redemption. In a large-scale field experiment with a major onlin...

Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States

By Nicola Mastrorocco and Arianna Ornaghi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

Do US municipal police departments respond to news coverage of local crime? We address this question exploiting an exogenous shock to local crime reporting induced by acquisitions of local TV stations by a large broadcast group, Sinclair. Using a unique d...

Informing Mothers about the Benefits of Conversing with Infants: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Pascaline Dupas, Camille Falezan, Seema Jayachandran, and Mark Walsh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We evaluate a low-cost intervention designed to boost parents' verbal engagement with infants, which tends to be limited in developing countries. In our randomized experiment, recent or expectant mothers watched a three-minute informational video and rece...

Communicating Program Eligibility: A Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Field Experiment

By Jeffrey Hemmeter, John Phillips, Elana Safran, and Nicholas Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We conducted a direct mail field experiment with 4,016,461 individuals to test several key hypotheses about why take-up of Supplemental Security Income among individuals age 65 and above is so low. Communicating likely eligibility in a basic letter genera...

When Do "Nudges" Increase Welfare?

By Hunt Allcott, Daniel Cohen, William Morrison, and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Review, May 2025

We use public finance sufficient statistic approaches to characterize the welfare effects of "nudges," such as simplified information and warning labels, in markets with taxes and endogenous prices. While many studies focus on average effects, we show tha...

Lessons for the United States from Pharmaceutical Regulation Abroad

[Symposium: Drug Pricing and Regulation]

By Margaret K. Kyle

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

Pharmaceutical markets are characterized by barriers to entry and information problems. Many countries intervene in the pricing and reimbursement of drugs to a greater extent than the US government to date. Continued pressure from politicians and recent l...

Anonymous Attention and Abuse

By Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Kyle Jensen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We analyze the content of the anonymous online discussion forum Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) and document its evolving interactions with external information sources. We focus on three key aspects: the prevalence and impact of links to external doma...

Subjective Models of Workers and Managers for Macroeconomic Expectations

By Claudia Bruschi, Francesco D'Acunto, Saten Kumar, and Michael Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We propose a measure of subjective models of the macroeconomy for firms and workers. Subjective models are highly heterogeneous across agents, and their distribution is similar within the groups of firm managers and workers. At the same time, the beliefs ...

The Impact of Air Pollution and Information Access on Women's Fertility Decisions: Evidence from Thailand

By Pasita Chaijaroen and Pallavi Panda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Despite increased exposure to air pollution concentration (PM2.5) and access to information, household fertility response to climate anxiety remains understudied in developing countries. To assess if individuals actively increase information ga...