How US Treasuries Can Remain the World's Safe Haven

[Symposium: Bond Markets]

By Darrell Duffie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

Weaknesses in the design of the market for US Treasuries have reduced the effectiveness of world's favored safe-haven asset. Since the Global Financial Crisis, the market's intermediation capacity is far more constrained by the balance sheets of dealer ba...

US Corporate Bond Markets: Bigger and (Maybe) Better?

[Symposium: Bond Markets]

By Maureen O'Hara and Xing (Alex) Zhou

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

The US corporate bond market has expanded significantly, fueled by electronic trading, institutional innovation, and growing retail participation via mutual and exchange-traded funds. These developments have improved efficiency by reducing costs and enhan...

Why Is the Fragmented Municipal Bond Market So Costly to Investors and Issuers?

[Symposium: Bond Markets]

By John M. Griffin, Nicholas Hirschey, and Samuel Kruger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

The municipal bond market plays a crucial role in providing capital to US municipalities and functions through a network of underwriters, municipal advisors, credit rating agencies, insurers, individual and institutional investors, and multiple regulators...

Retrospectives: Yair Mundlak and the Fixed Effects Estimator

By Marc F. Bellemare and Daniel L. Millimet

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

We discuss Yair Mundlak's (1927–2015) contribution to econometrics through the lens of the fixed effects estimator. We set the stage by discussing Mundlak's life and his seminal 1961 article in the Journal of Farm Economics, showing how it was ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025

Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Comment

By Justin McCrary

American Economic Review, September 2002

Fiscal Procyclicality in Commodity Exporting Countries: How Much Does It Pour and Why?

By Francisco Arroyo Marioli and Carlos A. Vegh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

A large literature has documented that fiscal policy is procyclical in emerging markets/developing countries and acyclical/countercyclical in advanced economies. This paper analyzes fiscal procyclicality in commodity-exporting countries. The paper makes...

Central Banks as Dollar Lenders of Last Resort: Implications for Regulation and Reserve Holdings

By Mitali Das, Gita Gopinath, Helene Hall, Taehoon Kim, and Jeremy C. Stein

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We explore how foreign central banks behave when firms engage in currency mismatch, borrowing heavily in dollars. A central bank can deal with risky private-sector mismatch two ways: (i) with financial regulation; or (ii) by accumulating reserves to be...

Did the US Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?

By Julien Acalin and Laurence Ball

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

This paper examines the effects of primary budget surpluses, surprise inflation, and pegged interest rates before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951 on the U.S. public debt/GDP ratio. We find that with primary budget balance and without the distortions in...

Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply

By Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, September 2002

Information and the Formation of Inflation Expectations by Firms: Evidence from a Survey of Israeli Firms

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Ari Kutai, and Rafi Melnick

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We analyze how firms form their inflation expectations after a regime change in monetary policy and a transition to a low-inflation environment. Utilizing the Bank of Israel’s survey of firms, we document the basic properties of firms’ inflation expec...

Front Matter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Foreword

By Lawrence F. Katz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Editors' Introduction

By William R. Johnson and Tina Lippert

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Economics in the Age of Algorithms

By Sendhil Mullainathan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

The rise of algorithms, particularly machine learning, does more than impact the economy. These tools offer new empirical methods. They enable new kinds of interventions. And foundational theories must be changed to account for them. Economics is, at its ...

Robot Hubs and the Use of Robotics in US Manufacturing Establishments

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Catherine Buffington, Nathan Goldschlag, J. Frank Li, Javier Miranda, and Robert Seamans

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We use data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geographic distribution of investments in robots across US manufacturing establishments. Robotics adoption and robot intensity (the number of robots per employee) cluster ...

Local Heterogeneity in Artificial Intelligence Jobs over Time and Space

By Lefteris Andreadis, Eleni Kalotychou, Manolis Chatzikonstantinou, Christodoulos Louca, and Christos A. Makridis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We examine the spatial dynamics of AI adoption in the United States, leveraging county-level job postings data from 2014 to 2023. We document significant variation in AI intensity across counties and rapid growth occurring in unexpected suburban and remot...

Artificial Intelligence Makes Firm Operating Performance Less Volatile

By Tania Babina, Anastassia Fedyk, Alex He, and James Hodson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

How does artificial intelligence (AI) affect the volatility of firms' operational performance? We leverage detailed employer-employee data to link firm-level AI investments to the volatility of firm sales, earnings, and cash flows. Our results indicate th...

Patterns of Artificial Intelligence Adoption by Hospitals

By Avi Goldfarb, Xianda (Henry) He, and Florenta Teodoridis

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This study examines artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in US hospitals using three distinct datasets: survey data from the American Hospital Association on AI for operations-related uses (27 percent adopt), employment data from Revelio Labs on workers ...

Losing Sleep at the Market: Comment

By J. Michael Pinegar

American Economic Review, September 2002