Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2025

Imperfect Competition and Rents in Labor and Product Markets: The Case of the Construction Industry

By Kory Kroft, Yao Luo, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

American Economic Review, September 2025

We develop, identify, and estimate a model of imperfect competition in both labor and product markets. Our context is the US construction industry, where firms compete for workers, private market projects, and government procurements. Our empirical approa...

Nested Bundling

By Frank Yang

American Economic Review, September 2025

A nested bundling strategy creates menus in which more expensive bundles include all the goods of less expensive ones. We study when nested bundling is optimal and determine which nested menu is optimal, when consumers differ in one dimension. We define a...

Labor Market Power, Self-Employment, and Development

By Francesco Amodio, Pamela Medina, and Monica Morlacco

American Economic Review, September 2025

This paper shows that self-employment shapes labor market power in low-income countries, with implications for industrial development. Using Peruvian data, we find that wage-setting power increases with employer concentration but less so where self-employ...

Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

By Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker

American Economic Review, September 2025

We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This "offset" ...

The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income

By Amelia Hawkins, Christopher Hollrah, Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, Gloria Aldana, and Mitchell Wong

American Economic Review, September 2025

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthl...

Test-Optional Admissions

By Wouter Dessein, Alex Frankel, and Navin Kartik

American Economic Review, September 2025

Many US colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say, with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve decisions? This pap...

Market-Wide Predictable Price Pressure

By Samuel M. Hartzmark and David H. Solomon

American Economic Review, September 2025

We demonstrate that predictable uninformed cash flows forecast aggregate market stock returns. Buying pressure from dividend payments (announced weeks prior) predicts higher value-weighted market returns, with returns for the top quintile of payment days ...

A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory

By Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs

American Economic Review, September 2025

We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discredit...

Drivers of Change: Employment Responses to the Lifting of the Saudi Female Driving Ban

By Chaza Abou Daher, Erica Field, Kendal Swanson, and Kate Vyborny

American Economic Review, September 2025

We conduct a field experiment to quantify the impact of the lifting of the Saudi women's driving ban on women's employment by randomizing rationed spaces in driver's training. Treated women are 41 percent more likely to be employed yet are 19 percent less...

Micro versus Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: The Role of Dynamic Returns to Effort

By Henrik Kleven, Claus Kreiner, Kristian Larsen, and Jakob Søgaard

American Economic Review, September 2025

We investigate long-run earnings responses to taxes in the presence of dynamic returns to effort. First, we develop a theoretical model of earnings determination with dynamic returns to effort. In this model, earnings responses are delayed and mediated by...

ASSA 2026 Participant Information

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The Big Short (Interest): Closing the Loopholes in the Dividend-Withholding Tax

By Elisa Casi, Evelina Gavrilova, David Murphy, and Floris T. Zoutman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We study the effect of stricter enforcement of the dividend-withholding tax (DWT). We focus on a 2016 Danish enforcement reform and compare Denmark to its Nordic neighbors. Throughout the Nordic stock markets, shares on loan spike sharply around dividen...

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

This paper examines how wholesale and agency contracts affect retail prices under bargaining. In wholesale, downstream firms set prices; in agency, upstream firms do. Depending on bargaining power, agency leads to higher or lower prices relative to wholes...

Strategic Evidence Disclosure in Networks and Equilibrium Discrimination

By Leonie Baumann and Rohan Dutta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

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 (neighbours), and themselves. In one eq...

The Impact of Unions on the Wage Distribution: Evidence from Higher Education

By Michael Baker, Yosh Halberstam, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, and Derek Messacar

American Economic Review: Insights

We estimate the impact of unionization on the wage distribution of Canadian university faculty using longitudinal administrative data on salaries and exploiting the staggered rollout of unionization across institutions. We find that unionization compres...

Small Group Breakfast Meeting for URM Scholars

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Generative AI for Economic Research: Use Cases and Implications for Economists

By Anton Korinek

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2023

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize research. I analyze how large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can assist economists by describing dozens of use cases in six areas: ideation and feedback, writing, backgro...

The Economics of Attention

By George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Attention is an important resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics with a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain documented ...

Declining Wage Inequality in Developing Countries: The Case of Brazil

By Sergio Firpo and Alysson Portella

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Despite rising inequality in rich countries, many developing economies have experienced a decline in inequality in recent decades. Brazil is a notable example. From 1995 to 2015, its Gini index decreased from 58 to 48 points. An extensive body of research...