Report from the Ad Hoc Committee on the Use of Social Media in Economics

[News]

January 16, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from January 16, 2025.

The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency

By Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, Kristof Titeca, Haoyang (Stan) Xie, Aimable Amani Lameke, and Albert Malukisa Nkuku

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper provides insight into a corruption scheme in Kinshasa's traffic police agency. First, various data collection branches show that the agency's revenue is five times that from fines and is derived from a coalition of traffic police officials, the...

Register Now for the Live Workshop Hosted by the Ombuds Team on Wednesday, January 22

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January 21, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from January 21, 2025.

CSWEP Board: Bart Lipman

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CSWEP Board: Danielle "Dani" Sandler

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CSWEP Board: Galina Hale

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CSWEP Board: Nitya Pandalai-Nayar

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CSWEP Board: Usha Nair-Reichert

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CSWEP Board: Caitlin Myers

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The returns to industrial policy

[Research Highlight]

January 22, 2025

Panle Jia Barwick and Myrto Kalouptsidi discuss how China subsidized its rise to becoming the world’s leading shipbuilder.

Report on the Status of Social Media Use in Economics and Recommendations for Best Practices

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Beating the heat

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How much are people willing to pay to avoid uncomfortable temperatures?

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

The Modern Wholesaler: Global Sourcing, Domestic Distribution, and Scale Economies

By Sharat Ganapati

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

Half of all transactions in the $6 trillion market for manufactured goods in the United States were intermediated by wholesalers in 2012, up from 32 percent in 1992. Seventy percent of this increase is due to the growth of "superstar" firms—the largest ...

The Inner Workings of a Hub-and-Spoke Cartel in the Automotive Fuel Industry

By Daniel Chaves and Marco Duarte

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We study the inner workings of a hub-and-spoke cartel in the Brazilian automotive fuel industry. Based on court documents and detailed price and sales data, we discuss how gas station owners (spokes) operating inside the federal capital received help from...

Long-Term Relationships in the US Truckload Freight Industry

By Adam Harris and Thi Mai Anh Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

This paper provides evidence on the scope and incentive mechanisms of long-term relationships in the US truckload freight industry. In this setting, shippers and carriers engage in repeated interactions under fixed-rate contracts that allow for inefficien...

Eliciting Time Preferences When Income and Consumption Vary: Theory, Validation, and Application to Job Search

By Michèle Belot, Philipp Kircher, and Paul Muller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We propose a simple method for eliciting individual time preferences without estimating utility functions even in settings where background consumption changes over time. It relies on eliciting preferences for receiving high stakes lottery tickets at diff...

Triplet Embeddings for Demand Estimation

By Lorenzo Magnolfi, Jonathon McClure, and Alan Sorensen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We propose a method to augment conventional demand estimation approaches with crowd-sourced data on the product space. Our method obtains triplets data ("product A is closer to B than it is to C") from an online survey to compute an embedding—i.e., a lo...

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...