Do Workfare Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

By Marianne Bertrand, Bruno Crépon, Alicia Marguerie, and Patrick Premand

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We study contemporaneous and post-program impacts of a public works program, which provides urban youth seven months of employment at the formal minimum wage with complementary training on entrepreneurship or job search. During the program, we find limi...

Racial and Ethnic Inequality and the China Shock

By Lisa B. Kahn, Lindsay Oldenski, and Geunyong Park

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Minority workers tend to be disproportionately harmed by negative economic shocks. Indeed, we show that Hispanic populations experienced worse employment losses due to import competition from China, relative to whites, largely due to lower education le...

The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts

By Renato Molina and Ivan Rudik

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using the universe of landfalling US hurricanes between 2005–2022. We find that forecasts drive adaptive protective expenditures, and that erroneous underforecasts result in ...

The Dynamics of Evasion: The Price Cap on Russian Oil Exports and the Amassing of the Shadow Fleet

By Diego S. Cardoso, Stephen W. Salant, and Julien Daubanes

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

To reduce Russia’s funding for its Ukraine invasion, Western governments imposed, after a delay, a price ceiling on Russian seaborne oil exports utilizing Western services. To evade that ceiling, Russia developed a “shadow fleet” using no such ser...

Annotated Listing of New Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2026

JEL Classification System for Books

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2026

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2026

The Price of War

By Jonathan Federle, André Meier, Gernot J. Müller, Willi Mutschler, and Moritz Schularick

American Economic Review, March 2026

We assemble a new dataset spanning 150 years and 60 countries to study the economic toll of war. A war of average intensity is associated with an output drop of close to 10 percent in the war-site economy, while consumer prices rise by approximately 20 pe...

Immigration, Innovation, and Growth

By Stephen J. Terry ⓡ Thomas Chaney ⓡ Konrad B. Burchardi ⓡ Lisa Tarquinio ⓡ Tarek A. Hassan

American Economic Review, March 2026

We propose a novel identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks across US counties, by interacting quasi-random variations in the composition of ancestry across counties with the contemporaneous inflow of migrants from different countri...

Temporary Layoffs, Loss-of-Recall, and Cyclical Unemployment Dynamics

By Mark Gertler, Christopher Huckfeldt, and Antonella Trigari

American Economic Review, March 2026

We revisit the role of temporary layoffs in the business cycle. While some have emphasized a stabilizing effect due to recall hiring, we quantify from the data an important countercyclical destabilizing effect due to "loss-of-recall," whereby workers in t...

Editors' Introduction

By J. David Baldwin and Ronald L. Oaxaca

American Economic Review, May 2003

Why Is Workplace Sexual Harassment Underreported? The Value of Outside Options amid the Threat of Retaliation

By Gordon B. Dahl and Matthew Knepper

American Economic Review, March 2026

Why is workplace sexual harassment chronically underreported? We hypothesize that employers coerce victims into silence through the threat of a retaliatory firing. To test this, we estimate how two external shocks that reduce workers' outside options—un...

Sequential Cursed Equilibrium

By Shani Cohen and Shengwu Li

American Economic Review, March 2026

We propose an extensive-form solution concept, with players who neglect information from hypothetical events but make inferences from observed events. Our concept modifies cursed equilibrium (Eyster and Rabin 2005) and allows that players can be cursed ab...

Equal Pay for Similar Work

By Diego Gentile Passaro, Fuhito Kojima, and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

American Economic Review, March 2026

Equal pay laws increasingly require that workers with different group identities doing "similar" work are paid equal wages within firm. We study such "equal pay for similar work" (EPSW) policies theoretically and test our models' predictions empirically u...

Dynamics of the Long-Term Housing Yield: Evidence from Natural Experiments

By Verónica Bäcker-Peral, Jonathon Hazell, and Atif Mian

American Economic Review, March 2026

Each month, a fraction of UK property leases are extended by 90 years or more. We construct a new dataset using thousands of these natural experiments since 2000 and estimate the expected long-term housing yield, y*. After remaining steady at around 5 per...

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences

By Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, March 2026

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy ...

What You Don't Know May Be Good for You

By Johannes Hörner and Larry Samuelson

American Economic Review, March 2026

We consider an economy in which long-lived experts are matched with short-lived clients. Experts choose the type of client with whom they match, unobserved by the market. The interaction outcome depends on both the expert's and the client's type. We study...

The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence from Rural India

By Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan

American Economic Review, March 2026

Over 2 billion people lack clean drinking water. Existing solutions face high costs (piped water) or low demand (point-of-use chlorine). Using a 60,000 household cluster-randomized experiment, we test an alternative approach: decentralized treatment and h...

Why Is Fertility So Low in High-Income Countries?

By Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine

Journal of Economic Literature

We consider why fertility has fallen in recent decades in almost all high-income countries. We begin by documenting declining total fertility and rising childlessness across cohorts, highlighting the need to focus on cohort versus period-specific fertilit...

Household-Level Responses to the European Energy Crisis

By Lassi Ahlvik, Tuomas Kaariaho, Matti Liski, and Iivo Vehviläinen

American Economic Review: Insights

Cost-of-living shocks can have large and unequal effects, but causal evidence on households’ adaptive responses is scarce. Using Finnish administrative microdata from the 2022 energy crisis, we exploit variation in electricity contract expirations to ...