The Management of Aid and Conflict in Africa

By Jacob Moscona

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This study investigates the relationship between the management of development aid and violent conflict in Africa. I exploit variation in World Bank project management quality driven by the assignment of project leaders of varying ability, combined with g...

Place Effects and Geographic Inequality in Health at Birth

By Eric Chyn and Na'ama Shenhav

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper uses birth records and mothers who move to quantify the absolute and relative importance of birth location for early-life health. Using a model that includes mother and location fixed effects, we find that moving from a below- to an above-media...

Local Labor Market Effects of the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs

By James Lake and Ding Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

President George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs on steel in early 2002. Using US input-output tables and a generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we analyze the local labor market employment effects of these tariffs depending on the local la...

Public Financing and Racial Disparities: Does a Rising Tide Always Lift All Boats?

By Tian Qiu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of local government spending across racial groups. An exogenous increase in spending results in significant improvement in White, but not Black or Hispanic, labor market outcomes such as employment rate, weekly ...

Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?

By Daniel Firoozi and Igor Geyn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Civic externalities motivate education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how a tuition-free c...

Why Don't Prices Rise During Periods of Peak Demand? Evidence from Scanner Data

By Judith A. Chevalier, Anil K. Kashyap, and Peter E. Rossi

American Economic Review, March 2003

We examine retail and wholesale prices for a large supermarket chain over seven and one-half years. We find that prices fall on average during seasonal demand peaks for a product, largely due to changes in retail margins. Retail margins for specific goods...

Do Medical Treatments Work for Work? Evidence from Breast Cancer Patients

By N. Meltem Daysal, William N. Evans, Mikkel Hasse Pedersen, and Mircea Trandafir

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We investigate the effects of radiation therapy on the mortality and economic outcomes of breast cancer patients. We implement a 2SLS strategy within a difference-in-difference framework exploiting variation in treatment stemming from a medical guideline ...

Optimal Design of Market Access

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study a data provider’s problem of optimally designing and selling marketing lists that enable a retailer with private types to access consumers with heterogeneous characteristics. When virtual values satisfy a particular form of convexity (named bo...

Dynamic Preference “Reversals” and Time Inconsistency

By Philipp Strack and Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study whether it’s possible to identify time-inconsistent preferences in empirical designs where preferences are elicited in advance at time 0, and then again at time 1, after the agent receives additional information. For single-peaked preferences...

Screening Adaptive Cartels

By Juan Ortner, Sylvain Chassang, and Kei Kawai

American Economic Review: Insights

We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regu- lators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. Our main result establishes ...

Health Sector Structural Change

By Nick Pretnar and Maria Feldman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

The U.S. health-services sector has grown both in terms of its expenditure share and relative price. Using a two-sector general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and endogenous population, we find that relative price growth is almost enti...

Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange

By Torben G. Andersen, Tim Bollerslev, Francis X. Diebold, and Clara Vega

American Economic Review, March 2003

Using a new data set consisting of six years of real-time exchange-rate quotations, macroeconomic expectations, and macroeconomic realizations, we characterize the conditional means of U.S. dollar spot exchange rates. In particular, we find that announcem...

The Effects of Sin Taxes and Advertising Restrictions in a Dynamic Equilibrium

By Rossi Abi-Rafeh, Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Martin O’Connell

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of firm competition to analyze the effects of counterfactual policies, such as taxes and advertising restrictions, on pricing, advertising, consumption, and welfare. Using micro-level data, we estimate how consume...

Exploiting Rivals’ Strengths

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We analyze oligopolistic competition in which firms use contracts contingent on what buyers purchase from their rivals. We present a new mechanism through which a dominant firm, by using these contracts, can gain more from exploiting its rivals than fr...

Higher-Order Beliefs and (Mis)learning from Prices

By Kevin He and Jonathan Libgober

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study misperceptions of private-signal correlation in an incomplete-information Cournot duopoly game. Exaggerating the correlation between players’ demand signals is beneficial when agents hold flexible beliefs about price elasticity, but harmful w...

Intimate Partner Violence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Insights from Economic Research

By Manisha Shah and Lydia Barski

Journal of Economic Literature

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive global issue, with approximately one in three women experiencing IPV over their lifetime. IPV prevalence is higher in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and costs of IPV are also considerably larger as...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, November 2025

International Trade Responses to Labor Market Regulations

By Mathilde Muñoz

American Economic Review, November 2025

This paper demonstrates that labor market regulations, such as minimum wages or payroll taxes, shape trade competition in labor-intensive activities. I exploit data from a large European trade program where firms from different countries supply labor serv...

Just a Few Seeds More: The Value of Network Data for Diffusion

By Mohammad Akbarpour, Suraj Malladi, and Amin Saberi

American Economic Review, November 2025

Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information ("seeds") in a social network to maximize expected diffusion is a widely studied question in many settings. Several studies propose network-centrality-based heuristics to select seeds...

Default Options and Retirement Saving Dynamics

By Taha Choukhmane

American Economic Review, November 2025

Using data from over 100 US retirement plans and a representative UK panel, I document the impact of auto-enrollment (AE) on retirement savings at different horizons. I replicate the impact of AE on participation and contributions in the short run (at 12 ...