Market Segmentation and Product Steering

By Stefan Terstiege and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

A monopolistic seller possesses an inventory containing distinct products, each consumer wishes to buy a single product, and the seller can steer consumers' choices. We fully characterize the producer-consumer surplus pairs induced by market segmentation ...

Heterogeneous Noise and Stable Miscoordination

By Srinivas Arigapudi, Yuval Heller, and Amnon Schreiber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Coordination games feature two types of equilibria: pure equilibria, where players successfully coordinate their actions, and mixed equilibria, where players frequently experience miscoordination. We investigate learning dynamics where agents observe the ...

Underestimating Learning by Doing

By Samantha Horn and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Many economic decisions, such as whether to invest in developing new skills, change professions, or purchase a technology, benefit from accurate estimation of skill acquisition. We examine the accuracy of such predictions by having study participants pred...

(Pro-)Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

By Roland Bénabou and Nikhil Vellodi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback. Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards. When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic). However, agents can disclos...

On the Alignment of Consumer Surplus and Total Surplus under Competitive Price Discrimination

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study the role of information in Bertrand competition with differentiated goods and heterogeneous production costs. When producers know their costs and consumers know their values, consumer surplus and total surplus are aligned, in the sense that the i...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

The Management of Aid and Conflict in Africa

By Jacob Moscona

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This study investigates the relationship between the management of development aid and violent conflict in Africa. I exploit variation in World Bank project management quality driven by the assignment of project leaders of varying ability, combined with g...

Labor Supply Responses and Adjustment Frictions: A Tax-Free Year in Iceland

By Jósef Sigurdsson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Labor income earned in Iceland in 1987 went untaxed. I use this episode to study labor supply responses to temporary wage changes. Using a population-wide dataset of earnings and working time and two identification strategies, I estimate intensive and ext...

Local Labor Market Effects of the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs

By James Lake and Ding Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

President George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs on steel in early 2002. Using US input-output tables and a generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we analyze the local labor market employment effects of these tariffs depending on the local la...

Public Financing and Racial Disparities: Does a Rising Tide Always Lift All Boats?

By Tian Qiu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of local government spending across racial groups. An exogenous increase in spending results in significant improvement in White, but not Black or Hispanic, labor market outcomes such as employment rate, weekly ...

Take-up of Social Benefits: Experimental Evidence from France

By Laura Castell, Marc Gurgand, Clément Imbert, and Todor Tochev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We report on two nationwide experiments with job seekers in France. We first show that a meeting with social services to assess eligibility and help with applications to social benefits increased new benefit take-up by 29 percent. By contrast, an online s...

The Not-So-Uniform Effects of Trade Secret Protection on Business Entry

By Asli Leblebicioğlu and Tanseli Savaşer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We explore the consequences of trade secret protection for new business formation in the United States. We find the states that adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), which enhances intellectual property rights, experience an overall decline in firm ...

Place Effects and Geographic Inequality in Health at Birth

By Eric Chyn and Na'ama Shenhav

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper uses birth records and mothers who move to quantify the absolute and relative importance of birth location for early-life health. Using a model that includes mother and location fixed effects, we find that moving from a below- to an above-media...

Does Getting Forecasts Earlier Matter? Evidence from Winter Advisories and Vehicle Crashes

By Vaibhav Anand

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Significant investments are directed toward improving the accuracy and early availability of forecasts. However, the value of longer lead times on forecasts is unclear. Using data on winter weather advisories and vehicle crashes in the United States, I sh...

The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt

By Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Paul Adams, Stefan Hunt, David Laibson, Neil Stewart, and Jesse Leary

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We test a nudge in a field experiment on credit cards. The nudge shrouds the autopay enrollment option for cardholders to automatically pay exactly the credit card minimum payment each month. After six months, the nudge decreases the fraction of cardholde...

Do Medical Treatments Work for Work? Evidence from Breast Cancer Patients

By N. Meltem Daysal, William N. Evans, Mikkel Hasse Pedersen, and Mircea Trandafir

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We investigate the effects of radiation therapy on the mortality and economic outcomes of breast cancer patients. We implement a 2SLS strategy within a difference-in-difference framework exploiting variation in treatment stemming from a medical guideline ...

Social Welfare Portability and Migration: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Travis Baseler, Ambar Narayan, Odyssia Ng, and Sutirtha Sinha Roy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies a new program designed to make food entitlements portable throughout India. We first characterize the state of food entitlement portability using mystery shoppers and surveys of migrants and distributors. We then inform households about...

Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?

By Daniel Firoozi and Igor Geyn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Civic externalities motivate education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how a tuition-free c...

The stalled progress of gender equality in the US labor market

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Life cycle profiles of wages help shed light on the economic progress of women relative to men.

Integrating Out Natural Disaster Shocks

By Franziska Bremus and Malte Rieth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We study the role of international financial integration in buffering natural disaster shocks, using a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. Natural disasters are largely unpredictable and unrelated to the state of financial integration. We doc...