Starting early

[Research Highlight]

May 28, 2019

What are the effects of enrolling younger children in a pre-K program?

Turning to cartels

[Research Highlight]

June 03, 2019

When factories leave town, does violence get worse?

Entertainment and the rise of populism

[Research Highlight]

July 02, 2019

How can watching apolitical television programs drive voter behavior?

Passing the buck

[Research Highlight]

July 25, 2019

Who pays for a raise in the minimum wage and how does it affect job growth?

Casting a wider tax net

[Research Highlight]

August 01, 2019

A threat paired with insights from behavioral economics can help ensure companies pay their taxes.

Tax evasion and the 1 percent

[Page]

What can the Panama Papers tell us about inequality?

Newspapers and doing more with less

[Research Highlight]

September 04, 2019

This video looks at how French dailies responded when commercial TV posed competition for ad revenue.

Screened out

[Page]

How do increased "application costs" for disability benefits affect who gets assistance?

The persistence of poverty and insecurity

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2020

An AEA interview with 2020 John Bates Clark Medalist Melissa Dell.

The price is not always right

[Page]

How do consumers estimate inflation?

The Return of the Nirvana Fallacy: A Review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics

By Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn

Journal of Economic Literature

John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics surveys 250 years of capitalism's history through the eyes of roughly thirty critics, from the Luddites, early utopians and Marx to modern communitarians, antigrowth proponents, free trade opponents, and sc...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Agency Pricing and Bargaining: Evidence from the E-Book Market

By Babur De los Santos, Daniel P. O'Brien, and Matthijs R. Wildenbeest

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

This paper studies the pricing implications of wholesale and agency contracts when input terms are determined through bargaining. We develop a structural Nash-in-Nash bargaining model and show that the distribution of bargaining power determines whether a...

Dynamic Preference "Reversals" and Time Inconsistency

By Philipp Strack and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We study the possibility of identifying time-inconsistent preferences in empirical designs where preferences are elicited in advance at time 0 and then again at time 1, after the agent receives additional information. For single-peaked preferences, time c...

On Taking a Skewed Risk More than Once

By Sebastian Ebert and Mats Köster

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Penny-picking refers to the often-observed phenomenon of repeatedly taking negatively skewed risks and seems directly at odds with evidence on (positive-)skewness-seeking as observed in static settings. We show that penny-picking may not only occur despit...

Strategic Evidence Disclosure in Networks and Equilibrium Discrimination

By Leonie Baumann and Rohan Dutta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

A group of agents with ex ante independent and identically uncertain quality compete for a prize, awarded by a principal. Agents may possess evidence about the quality of those they share a social connection with (neighbors), and themselves. In one equili...

Quality and Imperfect Competition

By Germain Gaudin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We study quality distortions when firms hold market power. We develop a model allowing for flexible functional forms of demand in order to extend Spence's (1975) monopoly analysis to imperfect competition. We show that quality distortions are determined b...

The Organization of Innovation: Incomplete Contracts and the Outsourcing Decision

By Thomas Jungbauer, Sean Nicholson, June Pan, Michael Waldman, and Lucy Xiaolu Wang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Why do firms outsource research and development (R&D) for some products while conducting R&D in-house for similar ones? An innovating firm risks cannibalizing its existing products. The more profitable these products, the more the firm wants to limit ...

The Effect of Mergers on Innovation

By Kaustav Das, Tatiana Mayskaya, and Arina Nikandrova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We study the effect of a merger on R&D activity in a dynamic model with uncertainty about the feasibility of innovation. The merger has three effects: It may reduce the number of follow-up innovations (cannibalization effect), increase the probability of ...

Sharing Model Uncertainty

By Chiaki Hara, Sujoy Mukerji, Frank Riedel, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

This paper examines efficient allocations in economies where consumers exhibit heterogeneous smooth ambiguity preferences and face model uncertainty with a common set of identifiable models. Aggregate endowment is ambiguous. We characterize economies wher...