The Role of Race in the Legal Representation of Low-Income Defendants

By Maya Mikdash and Suhyeon Oh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Little is known about the role of race in the defense of low income defendants by court-appointed attorneys. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of court-appointed attorneys to cases, we test whether attorneys secure better deals for same-race defen...

One, Two, (Three), Infinity, ...: Newspaper and Lab Beauty-Contest Experiments

By Antoni Bosch-Domènech, José G. Montalvo, Rosemarie Nagel, and Albert Satorra

American Economic Review, December 2002

A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families

By Chloe R. Gibbs, Jocelyn Wikle, and Riley Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children— through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day k...

State Recreational Cannabis Laws and Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System

By Angélica Meinhofer, Adrian Rubli, and Jamein P. Cunningham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We estimate the direct and spillover effects of cannabis legalization on longstanding racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. We find that legalization reduces cannabis possession and sales arrests forWhite and Black populations, narrowing but...

The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency

By A. Brooks Bowden, Viviana Rodriguez, and Zach Weingarten

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Education is widely recognized as the primary driver of human capital accumulation. However, policies designed to promote educational attainment often overlook students’ endogenous responses. This paper provides empirical evidence of the causal impact...

The Segregative Effects of Charter Schools

By Angela Crema

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

I study the effects of charters on student racial segregation, identifying a novel mechanism: the assignment of white and nonwhite students to regular classrooms within their school-grade. Exploiting almost 100 entries of elementary charters in North Ca...

Tax Compliance in the Rental Housing Market: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Essi Eerola, Tuomas Kosonen, Kaisa Kotakorpi, and Teemu Lyytikäinen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We study rental income tax compliance using novel third-party information and a large-scale randomized field experiment. The third-party information combines register data on the ownership and occupancy of apartments. The RCT used this new thirdparty ...

Punishing Financial Crimes: The Impact of Prison Sentences on Defendants and Their Colleagues

By Kristiina Huttunen, Martti Kaila, David C. Macdonald, and Emily Nix

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Financial crimes are costly to society but less severely punished than other nonviolent crimes. We investigate whether prison sentences reduce financial crimes. Using random assignment of judges in Finland to identify causal impacts, we find a prison se...

Fostering Cooperation: The Conflict-Reducing Effects of Inter-Village Competition for Government Transfers

By Teevrat Garg, Caterina Gennaioli, Stefania Lovo, and Gregor Singer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We examine the effect of inter-group competition on within-group violent conflict in Indonesia. Using a triple-differences design, we find that higher competition for national government transfers between villages reduces within-village conflict. These ...

Turbocharging Profits? Contract Gaming and Revenue Allocation in Healthcare

By Atul Gupta, Ambar La Forgia, and Adam Sacarny

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Firms often exploit weaknesses in government contracts to boost revenues, yet little is known about how they allocate these funds. We study how hospitals allocated $3 billion obtained from gaming a Medicare loophole. The average gaming hospital increase...

Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing: A Reassessment

By Berthold Herrendorf, Richard Rogerson, and Ákos Valentinyi

American Economic Review: Insights

The movement of labor out of the agricultural sector is a central feature of the development process. A long-held belief is that successful development requires that much of the labor released from agriculture be allocated to manufacturing rather than ...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation: Comment

By Theo Eicher and Thomas Osang

American Economic Review, December 2002

Heterogeneous Noise and Stable Miscoordination

By Srinivas Arigapudi, Yuval Heller, and Amnon Schreiber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Coordination games feature two types of equilibria: pure equilibria, where players successfully coordinate their actions, and mixed equilibria, where players frequently experience miscoordination. We investigate learning dynamics where agents observe the ...

Optimal Trade Mechanisms with Adverse Selection and Inferential Naïvety

By Takeshi Murooka and Takuro Yamashita

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study an adverse selection environment in which a buyer's inferential ability is heterogeneous: A rational type correctly infers the value of the good from a seller's offer, whereas a naïve type is inattentive to the correlation between the seller's p...

Holding Platforms Liable

By Xinyu Hua and Kathryn E. Spier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Should platforms be liable for harms suffered by users? A platform enables interactions between firms and users. Harmful firms impose larger costs on users than safe firms. If firms have deep pockets and are fully liable for harms, platform liability is u...

(Pro-)Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

By Roland Bénabou and Nikhil Vellodi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback. Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards. When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic). However, agents can disclos...

Market Segmentation and Product Steering

By Stefan Terstiege and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

A monopolistic seller possesses an inventory containing distinct products, each consumer wishes to buy a single product, and the seller can steer consumers' choices. We fully characterize the producer-consumer surplus pairs induced by market segmentation ...

Social Learning and Strategic Pricing with Rating Systems

By Chia-Hui Chen, Kong-Pin Chen, and Junichiro Ishida

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Rating systems, widely used in online transactions, often reduce buyers' diverse opinions to summary statistics. To explore the consequences of this coarse aggregation, we analyze a dynamic adverse selection model where buyers share anonymous evaluations ...

Optimal Voting Mechanisms on Generalized Single-Peaked Domains

By Tobias Rachidi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

This paper studies the design of voting mechanisms. There are multiple alternatives, and the voters have generalized single-peaked preferences derived from median spaces as introduced in Nehring and Puppe (2007b). This class of preferences covers a wide r...