A Measure of Behavioral Heterogeneity

By Jose Apesteguia and Miguel A. Ballester

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

In this paper we propose a novel way to measure behavioral heterogeneity in a population of stochastic individuals. Our measure is choice-based; it evaluates the probability that, over a randomly selected menu, the sampled choices of two sampled indivi...

An Analytical Model of Behavior and Policy in an Epidemic

By Lukasz Rachel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

This paper examines the behavior of individuals susceptible to a deadly disease in a tractable equilibrium setting. We analytically characterize individually optimal mitigation behavior and the resulting equilibrium trajectory. Analysis is facilitated by ...

Quality and Imperfect Competition

By Germain Gaudin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study quality distortions when firms hold market power. We develop a model allowing for flexible functional forms of demand in order to extend Spence (1975)’s monopoly analysis to imperfect competition. We show that quality distortions are determi...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

The Impact of Trade Liberalization in the Presence of Political Distortions

By Sebastian Jävervall and Roza Khoban

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

Political distortions are prevalent in many developing countries, implying substantial productivity losses. This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on political distortions in India. First, using variation in political turnover, we iden...

Tax Incentives for Migrants with Mid-level Earnings: Evidence from the Netherlands

By Lisa Marie Timm, Massimo Giuliodori, and Paul Muller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We examine how income taxes affect international mobility and wages. We study a Dutch preferential tax scheme for migrants, which introduced an income threshold for eligibility in 2012. The threshold is low relative to similar schemes in other countries, ...

Can Development Programs Counter Insurgencies? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

By Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We exploit a randomized controlled trial conducted between 2007 and 2011 to identify the effect of Afghanistan's largest local governance and development program on the strength of the insurgency. We find that the program reduced violence, improved econom...

Not Playing Favorites: Parents and the Value of Equal Opportunity

By James Berry, Rebecca Dizon-Ross, and Maulik Jagnani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We conduct two experiments to identify the value parents place on equality of opportunity when investing in children. The experiments exogenously vary short-run returns to educational investments to identify the weight placed on equalizing "opportunity" (...

Food Transfers and Child Nutrition: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Aditya Shrinivas, Kathy Baylis, and Benjamin Crost

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

India's National Food Security Act of 2013 (NFSA) led to one of the biggest expansions in food transfers in history, affecting over 500 million people. We use plausibly exogenous variation created by the NFSA to estimate the effect of food transfers on ch...

Skill Depreciation during Unemployment: Evidence from Panel Data

By Jonathan Cohen, Andrew C. Johnston, and Attila Lindner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We examine the depreciation of skills among unemployed German workers using a panel of skill measures linked to administrative data. Both the reemployment hazard and reemployment earnings steadily decline with unemployment duration. Indicators of depressi...

New Gig Work or Changes in Reporting? Understanding Self-Employment Trends in Tax Data

By Andrew Garin, Emilie Jackson, and Dmitri Koustas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We show that increases in the share of workers reporting self-employment to the IRS are not associated with changes in firm-reported payments to "gig" and other contract workers after 2005 but are driven primarily by self-reported earnings of individuals ...

Voice at Work

By Jarkko Harju, Simon Jäger, and Benjamin Schoefer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We estimate the effects of worker voice on productivity, job quality, and separations. We study the 1991 introduction of a right to worker representation on boards or advisory councils in Finnish firms with at least 150 employees, designed to facilitate w...

Preferences, Selection, and the Structure of Teacher Pay

By Andrew C. Johnston

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

I examine teacher preferences using a discrete-choice experiment linked to data on teacher effectiveness. I estimate willingness to pay for a rich set of compensation elements and working conditions. Highly effective teachers usually have the same prefere...

Background Matters, but Not Whether Parents Are Immigrants: Outcomes of Children Born in Denmark

By Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen and Alan Manning

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less educa...

Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

By Amanda Y. Agan, Bo Cowgill, and Laura K. Gee

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates' disclosures for male and female appl...

Information Systems, Service Delivery, and Corruption: Evidence from the Bangladesh Civil Service

By Martin Mattsson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

Slow public service delivery and corruption are common problems in low- and middle-income countries. Can better management information systems improve delivery speed? Does improving the delivery speed reduce corruption? In a large-scale experiment with th...

Difference-in-Differences Designs: A Practitioner’s Guide

By Andrew Baker, Brantly Callaway, Scott Cunningham, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, and Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

Journal of Economic Literature

Difference-in-differences (DiD) is arguably the most popular quasi-experimental research design. Its canonical form, with two groups and two periods, is well-understood. However, empirical practices can be ad hoc when researchers go beyond that simple cas...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

What Caused the US Pandemic-Era Inflation?

By Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

We estimate a simple dynamic model of prices, wages, and short-run and long-run inflation expectations that allows us to analyze and quantify the sources of recent US inflation. We find that, contrary to early concerns that inflation would be spurred by o...

Uncertainty Shocks, Adjustment Costs, and Firm Beliefs: Evidence from a Representative Survey

By Andreas Dibiasi, Heiner Mikosch, and Samad Sarferaz

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

This paper studies the dynamic effects of an uncertainty shock on firm expectations. We conduct a survey that confronts managers from a representative firm sample with a model-consistent uncertainty shock scenario. An exogenous increase in uncertainty sig...