Simple Manipulations in School Choice Mechanisms

By Ryo Shirakawa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Market design mechanisms are often required to be strategy proof, ensuring that no misreporting is profitable. This, however, may be overly restrictive: Real-world participants may be unable to engage in complex misreporting. In the context of school choi...

On the Alignment of Consumer Surplus and Total Surplus under Competitive Price Discrimination

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study the role of information in Bertrand competition with differentiated goods and heterogeneous production costs. When producers know their costs and consumers know their values, consumer surplus and total surplus are aligned, in the sense that the i...

Common Ownership and Market Entry: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

By Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts, and Albert Banal-Estañol

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Common ownership—where several firms are (partially) owned by the same investors—and its impact on product market competition has recently drawn much attention. This paper focuses on its implications for market entry. We consider the entry decisions o...

Optimal Incentives for Teams: Comment

By Shingo Ishiguro

American Economic Review, December 2002

Underestimating Learning by Doing

By Samantha Horn and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Many economic decisions, such as whether to invest in developing new skills, change professions, or purchase a technology, benefit from accurate estimation of skill acquisition. We examine the accuracy of such predictions by having study participants pred...

Dynamic Screening and the Dual Roles of Monitoring

By Dhruva Bhaskar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

This paper studies monitoring in long-term, self-enforcing relationships with adverse selection and moral hazard. Monitoring is used to screen low types by incentivizing them to shirk. Once high types have been identified, monitoring is used both to incen...

Does Public Competition Crowd Out Private Investment? Evidence from Municipal Provision of Internet Access

By Kyle Wilson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Government infrastructure investment may crowd out investment from private firms or induce them to invest preemptively. The tension between these effects underlies the policy debate over municipal provision of internet access. I estimate demand for broadb...

Taxing the Wealth of the Poor: Evidence from the Danish Old-Age Support Asset Test

By Niels Johannesen, Johan Sæverud, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review: Insights

We document strong behavioral responses to an asset test for an old-age support program in Denmark using comprehensive administrative data. We show that the density distribution of the liquid assets targeted by the test exhibits large but diffuse excess...

Monopsony in Labor Markets: Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy by Brianna L. Alderman and Roger D. Blair

By Marshall Steinbaum

Journal of Economic Literature

Polluted IPOs

By Meng Miao, Wei Wang, and Zhengyu Zuo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Chinese companies must undergo a review by a regulator-appointed committee before proceeding with initial public offerings (IPOs). We find that firms, particularly politically unconnected ones, are more likely to pass this review on polluted days (i.e.,...

On Taking a Skewed Risk More Than Once

By Sebastian Ebert and Mats Köster

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Penny-picking refers to the often-observed phenomenon of repeatedly taking negatively skewed risks and seems directly at odds with evidence on (positive-)skewness-seeking as observed in static settings. We show that penny-picking may not only occur desp...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Take-up of Social Benefits: Experimental Evidence from France

By Laura Castell, Marc Gurgand, Clément Imbert, and Todor Tochev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We report on two nationwide experiments with job seekers in France. We first show that a meeting with social services to assess eligibility and help with applications to social benefits increased new benefit take-up by 29 percent. By contrast, an online s...

Labor Supply Responses and Adjustment Frictions: A Tax-Free Year in Iceland

By Jósef Sigurdsson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Labor income earned in Iceland in 1987 went untaxed. I use this episode to study labor supply responses to temporary wage changes. Using a population-wide dataset of earnings and working time and two identification strategies, I estimate intensive and ext...

Macroeconomic Priorities

By Robert E. Lucas Jr.

American Economic Review, March 2003

The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt

By Benedict Guttman-Kenney, Paul Adams, Stefan Hunt, David Laibson, Neil Stewart, and Jesse Leary

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We test a nudge in a field experiment on credit cards. The nudge shrouds the autopay enrollment option for cardholders to automatically pay exactly the credit card minimum payment each month. After six months, the nudge decreases the fraction of cardholde...

Does Getting Forecasts Earlier Matter? Evidence from Winter Advisories and Vehicle Crashes

By Vaibhav Anand

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Significant investments are directed toward improving the accuracy and early availability of forecasts. However, the value of longer lead times on forecasts is unclear. Using data on winter weather advisories and vehicle crashes in the United States, I sh...

Social Welfare Portability and Migration: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Travis Baseler, Ambar Narayan, Odyssia Ng, and Sutirtha Sinha Roy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies a new program designed to make food entitlements portable throughout India. We first characterize the state of food entitlement portability using mystery shoppers and surveys of migrants and distributors. We then inform households about...

Disrupting Drug Markets: The Effects of Crackdowns on Rogue Opioid Suppliers

By Adam Soliman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper estimates the impact of doctor crackdowns on the quantity demanded of prescription opioids, across-market substitution, and across-product substitution. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the timing and location of administrative actio...

The Not-So-Uniform Effects of Trade Secret Protection on Business Entry

By Asli Leblebicioğlu and Tanseli Savaşer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We explore the consequences of trade secret protection for new business formation in the United States. We find the states that adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), which enhances intellectual property rights, experience an overall decline in firm ...