Land, Wealth, and Taxation

By Roberto Brunetti, Carl Gaigné, and Fabien Moizeau

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper examines the role of land in wealth dynamics and its consequences on efficiency and inequality. We focus on the interplay among agents’ bidding for location, mortgage market imperfections, and inheritance in a model in which agents leave t...

The Perils of Overreaction

By Konstantin von Beringe and Mark Whitmeyer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

In order to study updating rules, we consider the problem of a malevolent principal screening an imperfectly Bayesian agent. We uncover a fundamental dichotomy between underreaction and overreaction to information. If, for some signal realization, the ...

Beyond Social Death: A Review Essay of Enslavement: Past and Present by Orlando Patterson

By Leonard Wantchekon

Journal of Economic Literature

Enslavement: Past and Present by Orlando Patterson should be required reading for any economist or economic historian interested in long-run development and growth, race, inequality, political economy, or institutional development. Patterson synthe...

The Future of the IMF

By Ricardo J. Caballero

American Economic Review, May 2003

The First 1,000 Days and Beyond: The Process of Child Development

By Orazio P. Attanasio

Journal of Economic Literature

This paper reviews recent research in the economics of human development, focusing on the early years of life as a critical period for shaping long-term outcomes. Early childhood development is inherently multidimensional: cognitive and socioemotional ski...

The Private Provision of Public Services: Evidence from Random Assignment in Medicaid

By Danil Agafiev Macambira, Michael Geruso, Anthony Lollo, Chima D. Ndumele, and Jacob Wallace

American Economic Review

This paper examines the effects of privatizing social health insurance. We exploit a natural experiment in Medicaid, wherein nearly 100,000 enrollees were randomly assigned between a publicly-operated fee-for-service system and private managed care. Man...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Land Concentration and Long-Run Development in the Frontier United States

By Cory Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

I study the long-run economic effects of land concentration on the American frontier. Using quasi-random variation in initial land allocations from a checkerboard formula, I analyze a large database of property assessments and find that historical concent...

The Effects of Racial Segregation on Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from Historical Railroad Placement

By Eric Chyn, Kareem Haggag, and Bryan A. Stuart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

This paper provides new evidence on the causal impacts of citywide racial segregation on intergenerational mobility. We use an instrumental variable approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in segregation due to the arrangement of railroad tr...

The Impact of Dating Apps on Young Adults: Evidence from Tinder

By Berkeren Büyükeren, Alexey Makarin, and Heyu Xiong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Online dating apps have transformed the dating market, yet their broader effects remain unclear. We study Tinder's impact on college students using its initial marketing focus on Greek organizations for identification. We show that the full-scale launch o...

Wealth, Marriage, and Sex Selection

By Girija Borker, Jan Eeckhout, Nancy Luke, Shantidani Minz, Kaivan Munshi, and Soumya Swaminathan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain sex selection in India: son preference, in which parents desire a male heir, and daughter aversion, in which dowry payments make parents worse off with girls. Our model incorporates both mechanisms, providing m...

How Equality Created Poverty in Preindustrial Japan, 1600–1870

By Yuzuru Kumon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Despite well-developed economic institutions, premodern Japan, 1600–1868, had among the lowest real wages according to available estimates, around half those in preindustrial England. However, many Japanese peasants owned land, unlike their mostly landl...

The Long-Term Impacts of Mixing the Rich and Poor: Evidence from Conscript Dorms

By Elias Einiö

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

To what extent is economic success determined by with whom individuals interact socially? We tackle this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment in the Finnish conscription. Our research design is based on the alphabetization of dorms, whi...

Real-World Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine in Young Children

By Michael L. Anderson, Carlos Dobkin, Devon Gorry, and Hung-Fu Tseng

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Influenza causes substantial illness among children. RCTs demonstrate that the influenza vaccine reduces active-surveillance-detected influenza but have insufficient samples to examine outcomes such as health care provider visits. This study documents tha...

The World Bank of the Future

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Ruimin He

American Economic Review, May 2003

Ethnic Diversity, Historical Economic Exchange, and Development: Evidence from Andean Peru

By Miriam Artiles

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Is ethnic diversity good or bad for economic development? Most studies find corrosive effects. This paper shows that historical exposure to economic exchange can mitigate these effects in the long run. I collect data from a natural experiment of Peru's co...

Cassatts in the Attic: Is There a Gender Gap in the Commercialization of Science?

By Marlène Koffi and Matt Marx

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

We analyze nearly 70 million scientific articles to estimate the gender dynamics in the commercialization of science. We report a gender gap of 14 percent, which does not appear to be explained either by the quality of the science or by its commercial pot...

Release, Detain, or Surveil? The Effect of Electronic Monitoring on Defendant Outcomes

By Roman Rivera

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

This paper studies the effect of pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) relative to both pretrial release and pretrial detention (jail). EM often involves a defendant wearing an electronic bracelet, which aims to reduce pretrial misconduct at a low cost. Usi...

Age at School Entry and Human Capital Development: Evidence from Lesotho

By Jan-Walter De Neve, Ramaele Moshoeshoe, and Jacob Bor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Evidence on school-entry age impacts in lower-income countries is limited. We assess how school starting age affects human capital development in Lesotho, exploiting an enrollment age threshold. Children who start primary school at older ages overcome ini...

Information Frictions and Employee Sorting between Start-Ups

By Kevin A. Bryan, Mitchell Hoffman, and Amir Sariri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality? Collaborating with 26 science-based start-ups, we create a custom job board and invite business school alumni to apply. The job board randomizes across applicants to show c...