Slava Mikhed on entrepreneurship and age

[Page]

How do younger and older entrepreneurs respond to extra wealth?

Lovepreet Singh on public spending and long-run growth

[Page]

How do public spending and investment impact the development of regional economies?

Juliet-Nil Uraz on public legal assistance

[Page]

How does losing access to legal aid affect welfare?

Andrew Kao on party bans

[Page]

How effective are political party bans?

Hui (Grace) Wang on student loans and labor supply

[Page]

How do US student loans affect household decisions to work?

Kathrin Durizzo on corruption and health care

[Page]

Does improving patients’ knowledge reduce petty corruption by healthcare providers in developing countries?

Enel Shirinli on colonialism and trust

[Page]

How did colonial policies affect institutional trust and out-group bias among ethnic groups?

Naixin Zhang on the politics of industrial policy

[Page]

How does the political power of congressional representatives affect the allocation of industrial policies?

Lucy Wang on health IT diffusion

[Page]

How does health information technology adoption affect healthcare access?

Matthew McKetty on tourism in developing economies

[Page]

Do expansions in a nation’s tourism industry improve the welfare of its citizens?

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2026

Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá's TransMilenio

By Nick Tsivanidis

American Economic Review, February 2026

This paper estimates the effects of improving public transit infrastructure on city structure and welfare. It develops a quantitative urban model with multiple worker groups and transit modes, and derives a special case yielding sufficient statistics for ...

Financial Frictions: Micro versus Macro Volatility

By Renato Faccini, Seungcheol Lee, Ralph Luetticke, Morten O. Ravn, and Tobias Renkin

American Economic Review, February 2026

We argue that consumer credit spreads matter for household choices and that time-varying spreads have important distributional consequences. Studying Danish household data, we show that consumer credit spreads have heterogeneous impact on asset dynamics a...

Raising the Stakes: Physician Facility Investments and Provider Agency

By Elizabeth L. Munnich, Michael R. Richards, Christopher M. Whaley, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Review, February 2026

Principal-agent problems often extend beyond what can be directly addressed through conventional incentive arrangements. We examine a context where physicians are likely under-incentivized to minimize total medical costs until their private financial inte...

"Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap

By Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue

American Economic Review, February 2026

We show that subjective assessments of employee "potential" contribute to gender gaps in promotion and pay. Using data on 29,809 management-track employees from a large retail chain, we find that women receive substantially lower potential ratings despite...

Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies

By Rodrigo Carril, Andres Gonzalez-Lira, and Michael S. Walker

American Economic Review, February 2026

We study the effects of intensifying competition for contracts in the context of US Defense procurement. Leveraging a discontinuous regulation that mandates agencies to publicize certain contract opportunities, we document that expanding the set of bidder...

Take the Goods and Run: Contracting Frictions and Market Power in Supply Chains

By Felipe Brugués

American Economic Review, February 2026

This paper studies the efficiency of self-enforced relational agreements, a common solution to contracting frictions, when sellers have market power and contracts cannot be externally enforced. To this end, I develop a dynamic contracting model with limit...

Consumer Credit and the Incidence of Tariffs: Evidence from the Auto Industry

By Kristine W. Hankins, Morteza Momeni, and David Sovich

American Economic Review, February 2026

Captive finance subsidiaries create a channel for trade policy to affect consumer credit. Examining the impact of the Trump administration's metal tariffs on captive automobile lenders, we find that consumers received higher interest rates from captive le...

Work from Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse

By Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

American Economic Review, February 2026

We show remote work led to large drops in lease revenues, occupancy, and market rents in the commercial office sector. We revalue New York City office buildings, taking into account both the cash flow and discount rate implications of these shocks, and fi...

A Theory of Supply Function Choice and Aggregate Supply

By Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, and Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Review, February 2026

Modern theories of aggregate supply are built on the foundation that firms set prices and commit to producing whatever the market demands. We remove this strategic restriction and allow firms to choose supply functions, mappings that describe the prices c...