Home Sweet Home: Returns to Returning in the Age of Mass Migration

By Olof Ejermo, Kerstin Enflo, Björn Eriksson, and Erik Prawitz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

Despite significant circular migration flows historically and today, their economic impacts remain understudied. Using data on predominantly rural Swedish migrants who returned from the United States during the Age of Mass Migration, we estimate returns t...

Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling

By Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt

American Economic Review, December 2002

Down to the Wire: Leveraging Technology to Improve Electric Utility Cost Recovery

By Husnain F. Ahmad, Ayesha Ali, Robyn C. Meeks, Zhenxuan Wang, and Javed Younas

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

We study the effects of a technical intervention in Karachi, Pakistan—converting bare distribution wires to aerial bundled cables (ABCs)—that was intended to prevent illegal grid connections and improve utility cost recovery. Theft-resistant cables re...

Labor Market Inequality and the Changing Life Cycle Profile of Male and Female Wages

By Richard Blundell, Hugo Lopez, and James P. Ziliak

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

We estimate the full distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of men and women in the United States using a quantile selection model to account for systematic differences in employment by gender and education group. Although common within-group time e...

The Franchise, Policing, and Race: Evidence from Arrests Data and the Voting Rights Act

By Giovanni Facchini, Brian Knight, and Cecilia Testa

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

This paper investigates the relationship between the franchise and policing. We find that, following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black arrest rates in counties that both had more newly enfranchised Blacks and were covered by the legislation fell, compa...

Taxes Today, Benefits Tomorrow

By Thomas Le Barbanchon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

This paper tests whether partially unemployed workers value future preserved benefits when they bunch at the kink of the unemployment insurance benefit-withdrawal schedule. I extend the bunching formula of Saez (2010) to a dynamic setting that accounts fo...

Pulled In and Crowded Out: Heterogeneous Outcomes of Merit-Based School Choice

By Antonio Dalla-Zuanna, Kai Liu, and Kjell G. Salvanes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

We analyze the effects of reforming the high school admission system from a residence based allocation to a merit-based allocation. The merit-based system generates oversubscribed schools, which favor high-GPA students at the expense of displacing low-GPA...

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending

By Matias Giaccobasso, Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

Do perceptions about government spending affect willingness to pay taxes? We test this hypothesis with a natural field experiment that focuses on the allocation of property taxes to public schools. Our results show that taxpayers often misperceive the des...

Prediction Errors, Incarceration, & Violent Crime: Evidence from Linking Prosecutor Surveys to Court Records

By Emma Harrington, William Murdock III, and Hannah Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Incarceration is often justified by a defendant’s risk of future crime. To what extent do biased beliefs about predictors of crime distort incarceration decisions? We survey prosecutors about how violent re-arrest rates vary by defendant age and crim...

Concentration in Product Markets

By C. Lanier Benkard, Ali Yurukoglu, and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper measures concentration in narrowly defined product markets for a broad range of consumer goods and services in the U.S. from 1994 to 2019. We document two main empirical facts. First, concentration levels are high. 44.4% of the markets in ou...

Sharing Model Uncertainty

By Chiaki Hara, Sujoy Mukerji, Frank Riedel, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper examines efficient allocations in economies where consumers exhibit heterogeneous smooth ambiguity preferences and face model uncertainty with a common set of identifiable models. Aggregate endowment is ambiguous. We characterize economies ...

Voter Information and Distributive Politics

By Benjamin Blumenthal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously-informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screenin...

Estimating Individual Discount Rates in Denmark: A Field Experiment

By Glenn W. Harrison, Morten I. Lau, and Melonie B. Williams

American Economic Review, December 2002

Medical Technology and Life Expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria

By Philipp Ager, Casper W. Hansen, and Peter Z. Lin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We examine the impact of the free supply of diphtheria antitoxin, the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease, on the historical health transition in Massachusetts. Using newly collected municipality-level data on the distribution of...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

The Halloween Indicator, "Sell in May and Go Away": Another Puzzle

By Sven Bouman and Ben Jacobsen

American Economic Review, December 2002

Temporary Layoffs, Firm Entry and Exit Dynamics, and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Sanjay K. Chugh and Alan Finkelstein Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We build a model to study how the countercyclicality of temporary layoffs affects unemployment, firm entry and exit, and macroeconomic fluctuations. The model can quantitatively generate the rich cyclical dynamics of temporary layoffs, unemployment, and f...

The Dynamics of Development: Innovation and Reallocation

By Francisco J. Buera and Roberto N. Fattal-Jaef

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

This paper proposes a quantitative model of endogenous firm dynamics to study growth-acceleration episodes triggered by reforms. We find that reversals of entry distortions lead to persistent growth in TFP and declining average firm size, as in the experi...

The Consumption Origins of Business Cycles: Lessons from Sectoral Dynamics

By Christian Matthes and Felipe Schwartzman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We measure the impact of household consumption shocks on aggregate fluctuations. These shocks affect household consumption directly, and production and prices indirectly through their impact on aggregate consumption. We show how to identify such shocks us...

Cyclical Attention to Saving

By Alistair Macaulay

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

I explore the business-cycle implications of household inattention to savings product choices. In a model with heterogeneous banks, savers pay more attention to their bank choice when the marginal utility of income is high. Consistent with this, in data f...