Identifying Tax Compliance from Variation in Tax Policy: Theory and Empirics

By Andrew Bibler, Laura Grigolon, Keith F. Teltser, and Mark J. Tremblay

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Governments increasingly use changes in tax rules to combat evasion. We develop a general approach to point-identify tax compliance along with supply and demand elasticities. Identification requires data on prices and quantities, variation in tax polic...

The Effect of Public Insurance Design on Pharmaceutical Prices: Evidence from Medicare Part D

By Katja Hofmann and Zong Huang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Public programs that provide benefits through private markets contend with strategic firm behavior. We study this dynamic in Medicare Part D. The Affordable Care Act closed a coverage gap in Part D by mandating drug manufacturers cover 50% of branded dr...

Prime Locations

By Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Thilo N. H. Albers, and Kristian Behrens

American Economic Review: Insights

We develop a method for delineating prime locations—ultra-dense clusters of economic activity—within cities and apply it to comprehensive establishment data covering all US metropolitan areas. We further use big data to extend the analysis to a glo...

How Test Optional Policies in College Admissions Disproportionately Harm High Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds

By Bruce Sacerdote, Douglas O. Staiger, and Michele Tine

American Economic Review: Insights

We analyze data from one elite institution and find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under test optional policies, these applicants submit test scores at to...

Recurring Auctions with Costly Entry: Theory and Evidence

By Shanglyu Deng and Qiyao Zhou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Recurring auctions are ubiquitous for selling durable assets such as artwork and homes, with follow-up auctions held for unsold items. We investigate such auctions theoretically and empirically. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that recurring auctions ...

AEA Poster Session Videos

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Communication with Policymakers

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AEACGR: Reports and Communications with Policymakers

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Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

On Dynamic Pricing

By Ilia Krasikov and Rohit Lamba

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This paper builds a theory of dynamic pricing for the sale of timed goods. The main friction is private and evolving valuation of the buyer prior to the date of consumption, which follows a Poisson process. A combination of membership fees and continuousl...

Sources of Limited Consideration and Market Power in E-Commerce

By Michael Rolland Sullivan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This article develops techniques for the empirical analysis of repeated sequential search over unordered alternatives using data on consumer search processes. I use these techniques to assess why consumers conduct little search in e-commerce and often pay...

How to Allocate Money?

By Piotr Dworczak

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

I study a simple equity-efficiency problem: A designer allocates a fixed amount of money to a population of agents differing in privately observed marginal values for money. She can only screen by imposing an "ordeal"—that is, by allocating more money t...

Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks

By Matthew O. Jackson and Evan C. Storms

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

When people coordinate their behaviors with their friends—e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, protest against a government, attend university—divisions within a social network can lead to contrasting norms of behavior in different parts ...

Power, Property Rights, and the Dynamics of Local Wealth Appropriation

By Dan Cao, Roger Lagunoff, and Yingqi Xu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We examine the dynamic connections between local wealth inequality and the local politics of property rights. A jurisdiction comprises a politically dominant in-group and a marginalized out-group. At each date, the jurisdiction exploits weaknesses in due ...

Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions

By Shiri Alon and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We provide axioms that relate the preferences of each group in a society to the preferences of the subgroups contained in them. These axioms yield cardinal utility indices for each individual and a representation of group preferences as the group-dependen...

The Limits of Limited Commitment

By Jacopo Bizzotto, Toomas Hinnosaar, and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We study limited strategic leadership. A collection of subsets covering the leader's action space determines her commitment opportunities. We characterize the outcomes resulting from all possible commitment structures of this kind. If the commitment struc...

Backward Induction Reasoning beyond Backward Induction

By Emiliano Catonini and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Backward induction (BI) is only defined for perfect information games, but its logic is also invoked in many concepts for imperfect or incomplete information games. Yet, the meaning of BI reasoning is not clear in these settings, and we lack a way to capt...

Attitudes toward Success and Failure

By Larbi Alaoui and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Individuals often attach a special meaning to attaining a certain goal, and getting past a threshold marks the difference between success and failure. In this paper, we take a standard expected utility (EU) setting with an exogenous reference point that s...

Asymmetric Models of Sales

By David P. Myatt and David Ronayne

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We generalize the captive-and-shopper model of sales to allow asymmetries in production costs and captive audiences, in oligopoly. Both kinds of asymmetry determine the firms that compete (via randomized sales) to serve the price-comparing shoppers, while...

ASSA 2026 Annual Meeting

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