Can You Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation

By Amanda Agan, Andrew Garin, Dmitri Koustas, Alexandre Mas, and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We investigate whether removing a previously-obtained criminal record improves employment outcomes. We estimate the causal impact of criminal record remediation laws that have been widely enacted with the goal of improving employment opportunities for ...

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Transition to Clean Technology

By Sjak Smulders and Sophie Zhou

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Technological lock-in has been a standard explanation for the slow take-off of clean innovation, but is hard to reconcile with forwardlooking investors who anticipate the eventual switch to clean technologies. We provide an alternative explanation: str...

Exchange-Rate Regimes and International Trade: Evidence from the Classical Gold Standard Era

By J. Ernesto López-Córdova and Christopher M. Meissner

American Economic Review, March 2003

Selection, Structural Transformation, and the Cost Disease of Services

By Martin Shu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Labor productivity growth in the service sector may be mismeasured if workers with heterogeneous skills self-select into sectors. I document with U.S. data that workers reallocated from manufacturing earn more than incumbent workers in professional ser...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Sources of Limited Consideration and Market Power in E-Commerce

By Michael Rolland Sullivan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This article develops techniques for the empirical analysis of repeated sequential search over unordered alternatives using data on consumer search processes. I use these techniques to assess why consumers conduct little search in e-commerce and often pay...

Backward Induction Reasoning beyond Backward Induction

By Emiliano Catonini and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Backward induction (BI) is only defined for perfect information games, but its logic is also invoked in many concepts for imperfect or incomplete information games. Yet, the meaning of BI reasoning is not clear in these settings, and we lack a way to capt...

Power, Property Rights, and the Dynamics of Local Wealth Appropriation

By Dan Cao, Roger Lagunoff, and Yingqi Xu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We examine the dynamic connections between local wealth inequality and the local politics of property rights. A jurisdiction comprises a politically dominant in-group and a marginalized out-group. At each date, the jurisdiction exploits weaknesses in due ...

Attitudes toward Success and Failure

By Larbi Alaoui and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Individuals often attach a special meaning to attaining a certain goal, and getting past a threshold marks the difference between success and failure. In this paper, we take a standard expected utility (EU) setting with an exogenous reference point that s...

Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks

By Matthew O. Jackson and Evan C. Storms

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

When people coordinate their behaviors with their friends—e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, protest against a government, attend university—divisions within a social network can lead to contrasting norms of behavior in different parts ...

On Dynamic Pricing

By Ilia Krasikov and Rohit Lamba

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This paper builds a theory of dynamic pricing for the sale of timed goods. The main friction is private and evolving valuation of the buyer prior to the date of consumption, which follows a Poisson process. A combination of membership fees and continuousl...

Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions

By Shiri Alon and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We provide axioms that relate the preferences of each group in a society to the preferences of the subgroups contained in them. These axioms yield cardinal utility indices for each individual and a representation of group preferences as the group-dependen...

The Limits of Limited Commitment

By Jacopo Bizzotto, Toomas Hinnosaar, and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We study limited strategic leadership. A collection of subsets covering the leader's action space determines her commitment opportunities. We characterize the outcomes resulting from all possible commitment structures of this kind. If the commitment struc...

The Mismatch Between Life Insurance Holdings and Financial Vulnerabilities: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

By B. Douglas Bernheim, Lorenzo Forni, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff

American Economic Review, March 2003

Asymmetric Models of Sales

By David P. Myatt and David Ronayne

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We generalize the captive-and-shopper model of sales to allow asymmetries in production costs and captive audiences, in oligopoly. Both kinds of asymmetry determine the firms that compete (via randomized sales) to serve the price-comparing shoppers, while...

How to Allocate Money?

By Piotr Dworczak

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

I study a simple equity-efficiency problem: A designer allocates a fixed amount of money to a population of agents differing in privately observed marginal values for money. She can only screen by imposing an "ordeal"—that is, by allocating more money t...

Product Liability Litigation and Innovation: Evidence from Medical Devices

By Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study the impact of product liability litigation on new product introductions by leading medical device firms. We find that the defendant firms, and other firms to a lesser extent, reduce their propensity to introduce new products in the litigated prod...

Women's Power in the Household

By Seema Jayachandran and Alessandra Voena

Journal of Economic Literature

We examine women’s household power in low- and middle-income countries, synthesizing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence on its measurement, determinants, and consequences. We define women’s household power as their influence over household ...

Demand, Competition, and Public Policy in the Automobile Industry

By Johannes Van Biesebroeck and Frank Verboven

Journal of Economic Literature

We review the flourishing literature on the automobile industry since the seminal work of Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995), or briefly BLP. Their work provides a structural equilibrium framework that forms a basis for conducting policy counterfactuals i...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026