The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income

By Amelia Hawkins, Christopher Hollrah, Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, Gloria Aldana, and Mitchell Wong

American Economic Review, September 2025

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthl...

Test-Optional Admissions

By Wouter Dessein, Alex Frankel, and Navin Kartik

American Economic Review, September 2025

Many US colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say, with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve decisions? This pap...

Market-Wide Predictable Price Pressure

By Samuel M. Hartzmark and David H. Solomon

American Economic Review, September 2025

We demonstrate that predictable uninformed cash flows forecast aggregate market stock returns. Buying pressure from dividend payments (announced weeks prior) predicts higher value-weighted market returns, with returns for the top quintile of payment days ...

A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory

By Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs

American Economic Review, September 2025

We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discredit...

Drivers of Change: Employment Responses to the Lifting of the Saudi Female Driving Ban

By Chaza Abou Daher, Erica Field, Kendal Swanson, and Kate Vyborny

American Economic Review, September 2025

We conduct a field experiment to quantify the impact of the lifting of the Saudi women's driving ban on women's employment by randomizing rationed spaces in driver's training. Treated women are 41 percent more likely to be employed yet are 19 percent less...

Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

By Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King, and Michael Kremer

American Economic Review, December 2002

Colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress. Three years after the lotteries, winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to...

Self-Enforced Job Matching

By Ce Liu, Ziwei Wang, and Hanzhe Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Complementarities and peer effects are common in matching markets, yet incorporating them often leads to the nonexistence of stable matchings. We observe that matching is often an ongoing process rather than a static allocation, where long-lived firms i...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Income Equality in the Nordic Countries: Myths, Facts, and Lessons

By Magne Mogstad, Kjell G. Salvanes, and Gaute Torsvik

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a socioeconomic model that combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article critically assesses that claim by integrating theoretical ...

The Economics of Inequality and the Environment

By Moritz A. Drupp, Ulrike Kornek, Jasper N. Meya, and Lutz Sager

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Environmental degradation and economic inequality are two of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. We synthesize conceptual mechanisms that underpin inequality–environment linkages and take stock of the relevant empirical evidence. We pro...

Declining Wage Inequality in Developing Countries: The Case of Brazil

By Sergio Firpo and Alysson Portella

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Despite rising inequality in rich countries, many developing economies have experienced a decline in inequality in recent decades. Brazil is a notable example. From 1995 to 2015, its Gini index decreased from 58 to 48 points. An extensive body of research...

Housing and Inequality

By Yannis M. Ioannides and L. Rachel Ngai

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

We approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the "memberships" inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households' location in a geographic and social con...

Racial Residential Segregation in the United States

By Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the United States. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and health care. There is an ever-evolving literature across the soci...

A Review Essay of The Economics of Structural Racism by Patrick Mason

By Stephan Lefebvre

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

This essay provides a streamlined presentation of stratification economics (SE) in three pillars and comments on Patrick L. Mason's (2023) book The Economics of Structural Racism: Stratification Economics and US Labor Markets. SE, a field that se...

Information Technology and the U.S. Productivity Revival: What Do the Industry Data Say?

By Kevin J. Stiroh

American Economic Review, December 2002

The Economics of Attention

By George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Attention is an important resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics with a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain documented ...

Downey, Leah. Our Money: Monetary Policy as if Democracy Matters

By Sarah Bloom Raskin

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Edmans, Alex. May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It

By Russell Golman and Silvia Saccardo

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Epstein, Gerald. Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us

By Robert F. Bruner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Geisst, Charles R. Just Price in the Markets: A History

By Ross B. Emmett

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025