Black Lives: The High Cost of Segregation

By Robynn Cox, Jamein P. Cunningham, Alberto Ortega, and Kenneth Whaley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

Exploiting the arrangement of railroad tracks in northern cities, we explore the extent to which segregation impacts homicide victimization by race. Our results reveal a robust positive relationship between segregation and non-White homicide victimization...

Geographic Variation in Mental Health Treatment Utilization: Evidence from Migration

By Hui Ding

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

The older population bears a heavy burden of mental illness. Despite the availability of effective treatments, including services (e.g., psychotherapy) and drugs (e.g., antidepressants, antipsychotics), this paper documents substantial geographic variatio...

Insecurity and Firm Displacement: Evidence from Afghan Corporate Phone Records

By Sylvan Herskowitz, Joshua E. Blumenstock, Tarek Ghani, Ethan B. Kapstein, Thomas L. Scherer, and Ott Toomet

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We provide empirical evidence on how insecurity affects firm behavior by linking data on deadly terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to geolocated data on corporate mobile phone activity. We first develop an approach to estimate the geographic footprint of fi...

Are Complementary Policies Substitutes? Evidence from R&D Subsidies in the United Kingdom

By Jacquelyn Pless

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

This paper studies whether grants and tax incentives for private R&D are complements or substitutes. I use multiple quasi-experimental research designs to examine firms in the United Kingdom and find that increasing tax credit generosity substantially enh...

Monetary and Nonmonetary Punishment in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism

By David Masclet, Charles Noussair, Steven Tucker, and Marie-Claire Villeval

American Economic Review, March 2003

Sweeping up Gangs: The Effects of Tough-on-Crime Policies from a Network Approach

By Magdalena Domínguez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

Globally, gang proliferation is fought primarily through sweeps. This paper uses a difference-in-differences strategy to examine their causal impact on crime for arrested individuals and their peers. Analysis focuses on the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona,...

Cross-State Strategic Voting

By Gordon B. Dahl, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, and William Mullins

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We estimate that 3.1 percent of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zip codes and respond ...

Plata y Plomo: How Higher Wages Expose Politicians to Criminal Violence

By Massimo Pulejo and Pablo Querubín

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

What is the effect of politicians' wages on corruption in the presence of criminal groups that use both bribes and violence? With a regression discontinuity design and three distinct proxies for corruption, we show that better-paid Italian politicians are...

Polling Place Location and the Costs of Voting

By Gaurav Bagwe ⓡ Juan Margitic ⓡ Allison Stashko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study how distance to one's polling place affects the likelihood of voting using a geographic regression discontinuity design with data from Pennsylvania and Georgia. A one-mile increase in distance to the polling place reduces the likelihood of voting...

Hacked to Pieces? The Effects of Ransomware Attacks on Hospitals and Patients

By Hannah Neprash, Claire McGlave, and Sayeh Nikpay

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

As cybercriminals increasingly target health care, hospitals face the growing threat of ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that prevents users from accessing electronic systems and demands a ransom to restore access. We create ...

Invisible Wounds: How Mental Disability Benefits Shape Veteran Well-Being

By David Silver and Jonathan Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study impacts of VA disability compensation on the health and well-being of the large and rapidly growing population of veterans claiming mental disorders. We leverage quasi-random assignment of veterans to medical examiners with varying assessing tend...

Connections during Democratic Transitions: Insights from the Political Purge in Post-WWII France

By Toke S. Aidt, Jean Lacroix, and Pierre-Guillaume Méon

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We examine how connections shaped transitional justice during France's post-WWII democratic transition. Parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime faced a two-stage purge process involving two courts. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, w...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2026

"Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap

By Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue

American Economic Review, February 2026

We show that subjective assessments of employee "potential" contribute to gender gaps in promotion and pay. Using data on 29,809 management-track employees from a large retail chain, we find that women receive substantially lower potential ratings despite...

Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá's TransMilenio

By Nick Tsivanidis

American Economic Review, February 2026

This paper estimates the effects of improving public transit infrastructure on city structure and welfare. It develops a quantitative urban model with multiple worker groups and transit modes, and derives a special case yielding sufficient statistics for ...

Consumer Response to Tax Rebates

By Matthew D. Shapiro and Joel Slemrod

American Economic Review, March 2003

Financial Frictions: Micro versus Macro Volatility

By Renato Faccini, Seungcheol Lee, Ralph Luetticke, Morten O. Ravn, and Tobias Renkin

American Economic Review, February 2026

We argue that consumer credit spreads matter for household choices and that time-varying spreads have important distributional consequences. Studying Danish household data, we show that consumer credit spreads have heterogeneous impact on asset dynamics a...

Raising the Stakes: Physician Facility Investments and Provider Agency

By Elizabeth L. Munnich, Michael R. Richards, Christopher M. Whaley, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Review, February 2026

Principal-agent problems often extend beyond what can be directly addressed through conventional incentive arrangements. We examine a context where physicians are likely under-incentivized to minimize total medical costs until their private financial inte...

Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies

By Rodrigo Carril, Andres Gonzalez-Lira, and Michael S. Walker

American Economic Review, February 2026

We study the effects of intensifying competition for contracts in the context of US Defense procurement. Leveraging a discontinuous regulation that mandates agencies to publicize certain contract opportunities, we document that expanding the set of bidder...

Take the Goods and Run: Contracting Frictions and Market Power in Supply Chains

By Felipe Brugués

American Economic Review, February 2026

This paper studies the efficiency of self-enforced relational agreements, a common solution to contracting frictions, when sellers have market power and contracts cannot be externally enforced. To this end, I develop a dynamic contracting model with limit...