Negative Control Falsification Tests for Instrumental Variable Designs

By Oren Danieli, Daniel Nevo, Itai Walk, Bar Weinstein, and Dan Zeltzer

American Economic Review, April 2026

The validity of instrumental variable (IV) designs is typically tested using two types of falsification tests. We characterize these tests as conditional independence tests between negative control variables—proxies for unobserved variables posing a thr...

Games on Multiplex Networks

By Yves Zenou and Junjie Zhou

American Economic Review, April 2026

We develop a simple multilayer network model in which agents allocate effort across layers with heterogeneous structures, subject to an aggregate effort constraint. Incentives are shaped by agents' network positions within each layer, and equilibrium beha...

Spillovers in State Capacity Building: Evidence from the Digitization of Land Records in Pakistan

By Shan Aman-Rana and Clement Minaudier

American Economic Review, April 2026

Digitization reforms have been hailed as an effective way of strengthening state capacity. However, digitization can also fundamentally reshape the organization of bureaucracies. Using a unique administrative dataset on agricultural taxation and surveys o...

Similarity of Information and Collective Action

By Deepal Basak, Joyee Deb, and Aditya Kuvalekar

American Economic Review, April 2026

We study a canonical collective action game with incomplete information. Individuals attempt to coordinate to achieve a shared goal, while also facing a temptation to free-ride. More similar information can help them coordinate, but it can also exacerbate...

Abundance from Abroad: Migrant Income and Long-Run Economic Development

By Gaurav Khanna, Emir Murathanoglu, Caroline Theoharides, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, April 2026

We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income ...

Making Bricks from Straw: Resources and Productivity in Health Care

By Edward N. Okeke

American Economic Review, April 2026

Why do health facilities in developing countries do so poorly? This paper examines the role of financial constraints. I describe an experiment in which we surprised health workers in randomly selected public health clinics in Nigeria with a ₦600,000 gra...

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Optimal Procurement Design: A Reduced-Form Approach

By Kun Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the buyer’s valuatio...

Public Debt Levels and Real Interest Rates: Causal Evidence from Parliamentary Elections

By Gabriel Ehrlich, Owen Kay, and Aditi Thapar

American Economic Review: Insights

We use close parliamentary elections as natural experiments to estimate the debt sensitivity of interest rates. Relative to an election in which one party barely secures a majority, an election in which no party achieves a majority causes the debt-to-GD...

Rules versus Discretion without Common Knowledge

By Zhen Huo and Fei Zhou

American Economic Review: Insights

The Missing Poor

By Torsten Figueiredo Walter, Niclas Moneke, and Ana Radu

American Economic Review: Insights

Population censuses constitute the basis of public resource allocation and political representation globally. This paper shows that census forms commonly generate incentives for enumerators to disproportionately omit members of larger households. Using...

Friendship Networks and Political Opinions

By Yann Algan, Nicolò Dalvit, Quoc-Anh Do, Alexis Le Chapelain, and Yves Zenou

American Economic Review

We examine how social interactions and friendships shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, a leading French university specializing in social and political sciences. The quasi-random assignment of students into short-ter...

Procyclical Fiscal Policy and Asset Market Incompleteness

By Andrés Fernández, Daniel Guzman, Ruy Lama, and Carlos Vegh

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We develop a model of the joint behavior of optimal tax rates and government spending to explain the procyclicality of fiscal policy in emerging/developing countries. We rely on financial frictions captured by asset market incompleteness and debt-elastic ...

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