Eliciting Ambiguity with Mixing Bets

By Patrick Schmidt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

Preferences for mixing can reveal ambiguity perception and attitude on a single event. The validity of the approach is discussed for multiple preference classes, including maxmin, maxmax, variational, and smooth second-order preferences. An experimental i...

Estimating Models of Supply and Demand: Instruments and Covariance Restrictions

By Alexander MacKay and Nathan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We consider the identification of empirical models of supply and demand with imperfect competition. We show that a restriction on the covariance between unobserved demand and cost shocks can resolve endogeneity and identify the price parameter. We demonst...

One Man, One Vote

By Romans Pancs and Tridib Sharma

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

In the United States, electoral districts must be equipopulous. This requirement is known as the one man, one vote doctrine. We propose welfare-based justifications for this requirement under the economic view, according to which voters care about the pol...

Commitment and Conflict in Unanimity Bargaining

By Topi Miettinen and Christoph Vanberg

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We theoretically investigate how the application of unanimity rule can lead to inefficient delay in collective decision-making. We do so in the context of a distributive multilateral bargaining model featuring strategic precommitment. Prior to each bargai...

A Random Dictator Is All You Need

By Itai Arieli, Yakov Babichenko, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, and Konstantin Zabarnyi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We study information aggregation with a decision-maker aggregating binary recommendations from symmetric agents. Each agent's recommendation depends on her private information about a hidden state. While the decision-maker knows the prior distribution ove...

Scoring Strategic Agents

By Ian Ball

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The sender prefers "hi...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2025

Robust Monopoly Regulation

By Yingni Guo and Eran Shmaya

American Economic Review, February 2025

We study how to regulate a monopolistic firm using a robust-design, non-Bayesian approach. We derive a policy that minimizes the regulator's worst-case regret, where regret is the difference between the regulator's complete-information payoff and his real...

Regulating Conglomerates: Evidence from an Energy Conservation Program in China

By Qiaoyi Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, and Daniel Yi Xu

American Economic Review, February 2025

We study a prominent energy regulation affecting large Chinese manufacturers that are part of broader conglomerates. Using detailed firm-level data and difference-in-differences research designs, we show that regulated firms cut output and shifted some pr...

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...

The Benefits of Revealing Race: Evidence from Minority-Owned Local Businesses

By Abhay Aneja, Michael Luca, and Oren Reshef

American Economic Review, February 2025

Is there latent demand to support Black-owned businesses? We explore this question by analyzing a new feature that made it easier to identify Black-owned restaurants on an online platform. We find that labeling restaurants as minority-owned increased cust...

The Good Wife? Reputation Dynamics and Financial Decision-Making inside the Household

By Nina Buchmann, Pascaline Dupas, and Roberta Ziparo

American Economic Review, February 2025

We study reputation dynamics within the household in a setting where women regularly receive transfers from their husbands for household purchases. We propose a signaling model in which wives try to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of their husbands...

A Theory of Dynamic Inflation Targets

By Christopher Clayton and Andreas Schaab

American Economic Review, February 2025

Should central banks' inflation targets remain set in stone? We study a dynamic mechanism design problem between a government and a central bank. The central bank has persistent private information about structural shocks. Firms learn the state from the c...

Sticky Wages on the Layoff Margin

By Steven J. Davis and Pawel M. Krolikowski

American Economic Review, February 2025

We design and field an innovative survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients that yields new insights about wage stickiness on the layoff margin. A majority of UI recipients would accept pay cuts of 5–10 percent to save their jobs, and one-third w...

Empowering Adolescents to Transform Schools: Lessons from a Behavioral Targeting

By Sule Alan and Elif Kubilay

American Economic Review, February 2025

We test the effectiveness of a behavioral program grounded in the idea that status granting and self-persuasion might yield a robust behavioral change in disadvantaged adolescents. We enlist socially connected senior middle school students with high emoti...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

The Long-Run Effects of California's Paid Family Leave Act on Women's Careers and Childbearing: New Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design and US Tax Data

By Martha Bailey, Tanya Byker, Elena Patel, and Shanthi Ramnath

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We use administrative tax data to analyze the cumulative, long-run effects of California's 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (CPFL) on women's employment, earnings, and childbearing. A regression-discontinuity design exploits the sharp increase in the weeks of p...

Fighting Poverty One Family at a Time: Experimental Evidence from an Intervention with Holistic, Individualized, Wraparound Services

By William N. Evans, Shawna Kolka, James X. Sullivan, and Patrick S. Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Families in poverty face numerous barriers to establishing stable economic footing. This paper estimates experimental effects of a holistic, individualized wraparound service intervention for low-income individuals. The intervention includes a detailed as...

Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging

By Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer, and Shaun McRae

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

This paper quantifies the value of electric vehicle (EV) charging networks and the marginal value of network speed and density. We estimate a model of gasoline drivers' refueling preferences and simulate how these potential future EV drivers value refueli...

The Great Recession and the Widening Income Gap between Alumni of Elite and Less Selective Universities

By Russell Weinstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Using mobility report card data, I show the income gap between alumni of elite and less selective universities widened for cohorts graduating during the Great Recession. This is evident for mean and median incomes and access to high earning percentiles. R...