Credit, Debt-Deflation, and the Great Depression Revisited

By Ben S. Bernanke

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

This article revisits the thesis of Bernanke (1983) that the disruption of private credit markets induced by deflation and falling nominal incomes helps to explain the depth and persistence of the Great Depression. This new look is motivated by economists...

Comparing Experimental and Nonexperimental Methods: What Lessons Have We Learned Four Decades after LaLonde (1986)?

By Guido W. Imbens and Yiqing Xu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

In 1986, Robert LaLonde published an article comparing nonexperimental estimates to experimental benchmarks (LaLonde 1986). He concluded that the nonexperimental methods at the time could not systematically replicate experimental benchmarks, casting doubt...

The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country

By Alberto Abadie and Javier Gardeazabal

American Economic Review, March 2003

This article investigates the economic effects of conflict, using the terrorist conflict in the Basque Country as a case study. We find that, after the outbreak of terrorism in the late 1960's, per capita GDP in the Basque Country declined about 10 percen...

Why Regulate Junk Fees?

By Neale Mahoney

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

This essay examines the growing prevalence of junk fees, including mandatory back-end fees and hidden add-on charges, which obscure the true cost of goods and services. Drawing on examples from event tickets, hotels, cable bills, restaurants, and financia...

Retrospectives: W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard Economics, and Marginalist Wage Theory

By Daniel Kuehn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) is best known as a sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader, but he is also increasingly appreciated as an economist. Du Bois's work in economics was primarily empirical, drawing heavily on the German Historical Schoo...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

Pricing with Algorithms

By Rohit Lamba and Sergey Zhuk

American Economic Review: Insights

This paper studies Markov perfect equilibria in a repeated duopoly model where sellers choose algorithms. An algorithm is a mapping from the competitor’s price to own price. Once set, the algorithms respond quickly. Customers arrive randomly and sell...

Lying for Strategic Advantage: Rational and Boundedly Rational Misrepresentation of Intentions

By Vincent P. Crawford

American Economic Review, March 2003

Starting from an example of the Allies' decision to feint at Calais and attack Normandy on D-Day, this paper models misrepresentation of intentions to competitors or enemies. Allowing for the possibility of bounded strategic rationality and rational playe...

Survivors’ Mental Health and the Protective Role of Income Stability

By Itzik Fadlon, Astrid S. Fugleholm, and Torben H. Nielsen

American Economic Review: Insights

We use administrative records on the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors’ mental health following their spouse’s death. We provide visually clear evidence for the immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts and focus on study...

Collusion by Exclusion in Public Procurement

By Regina Seibel and Samuel Škoda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper studies bid-rigging in auctions with bidder preselection. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the optimal behavior of partial bid-rigging cartels and show how commonly used two-stage auction formats, in which the first stage is used to...

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction

By Bernhard Kasberger and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction (CMRA) is a new auction format used in recent European spectrum auctions. We show that an auction-specific version of truthful bidding leads to an efficient allocation. We then characterize different ex-p...

Welfare of Competitive Price Discrimination with Captive Consumers

By Yanlin Chen, Xianwen Shi, and Jun Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study the welfare effects of price discrimination in a duopoly with both captive and contested consumers. Using a unified information design approach, we characterize the best and worst market segmentations for producer surplus, consumer surplus, an...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

Race and Economic Well-Being in the United States

By Jean-Félix Brouillette, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans, which incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on these factors, welfare for Black Americans was 40 percent of that for White American...

The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a Nine-Year Experiment

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, Daniel Deisenroth, Haritz Garro, Daley Kutzman, Asad Liaqat, and Nils Wernerfelt

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in their news...

The Evolution of Human Life Expectancy and Intelligence in Hunter-Gatherer Economies

By Arthur J. Robson and Hillard S. Kaplan

American Economic Review, March 2003

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows,...

Long-Term and Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training on Entrepreneurial Success

By Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. We revisit these entrepreneurs after seven years and find long-lasting average i...

Sequential Sampling by Individuals and Groups: An Experimental Study

By Pëllumb Reshidi, Alessandro Lizzeri, Leeat Yariv, Jimmy Chan, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such dynamic information-collection processes, as in sequential hypothesis testin...

Optimal Mortgage Refinancing with Inattention

By David Berger, Konstantin Milbradt, Fabrice Tourre, and Joseph Vavra

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

We build a model of optimal fixed-rate mortgage refinancing with fixed costs and inattention and derive a new sufficient statistic that can be used to measure inattention frictions from simple moments of the rate gap distribution. In the model, borrowers ...

Web Search Personalization during the US 2020 Election

By Ulrich Matter and Roland Hodler

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

We study the impact of web search personalization on ideological segregation in search results. We deploy 150 synthetic internet users with randomized partisan browsing preferences across 25 US cities. These users are active during the US 2020 election an...