Reputation Effects with Endogenous Records

By Harry Pei

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

I study how the ability to erase records affects patient players’ returns from building reputations. In my model, a patient seller interacts with a sequence of myopic consumers. The seller is either an honest type who always exerts effort and never er...

Mergers, Foreign Competition, and Jobs: Evidence from the U.S. Appliance Industry

By Felix Montag

American Economic Review

Policy choices often create trade-offs between workers and consumers. I examine how foreign competition alters the consumer welfare and domestic employment effects of mergers. I construct a model incorporating consumer demand, endogenous product portfo...

Elite Universities and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human and Social Capital

By Andrés Barrios-Fernández, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman

American Economic Review

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite...

Quality Adjustment at Scale: Hedonic vs. Exact Demand-Based Price Indices

By Gabriel Ehrlich, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, David Johnson, Ed Olivares, Luke Pardue, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Laura Yi Zhao

American Economic Review

Item-level transactions data yield cost-of-living indices that can account for quality change and consumer substitution. Transactions data require confronting the rapid turnover of items because prices of new and existing products are interrelated in eq...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

The Future of the IMF and World Bank: Panel Discussion

By Stanley Fischer, Allan H. Meltzer, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Nicholas Stern

American Economic Review, May 2003

Macro Recruiting Intensity from Micro Data

By Simon Mongey and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We merge QCEW and JOLTS microdata to study firm recruiting intensity across establishments and over time. We show that large heterogeneity in vacancy-filling rates is fully accounted for by differences in gross hiring rates. We develop a theory consistent...

Not a Typical Firm: Capital–Labor Substitution and Firms' Labor Shares

By Joachim Hubmer and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

The US labor share has declined, especially in manufacturing and retail. Yet the labor share of a typical firm in these sectors has risen. We introduce a model where firms incur fixed costs to automate tasks. A decline in the price of capital goods used f...

Cognitive Hubs and Spatial Redistribution

By Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Felipe Schwartzman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

In the United States, cognitive nonroutine (CNR) occupations are disproportionately and increasingly represented in large cities. To study the allocation of workers across cities, we propose a quantitative spatial equilibrium model with multiple industrie...

Partial Specialization and Heterogeneous Task Assignments

By Chen Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

I develop a general equilibrium model featuring multidimensional skills and partial specialization in tasks to quantify the impact of several determinants on within-occupation inequality growth from 1980 to 2000. The model introduces a new mechanism by wh...

Optimism about Graduation and College Financial Aid

By Emily G. Moschini, Gajendran Raveendranathan, and Ming Xu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

In the United States, college dropout risk is sizable. We provide new empirical evidence that beliefs about the likelihood of earning a bachelor's degree predict college enrollment, and that the distribution of these beliefs exhibits widespread optimism. ...

Mis-specified Forecasts and Myopia in an Estimated New Keynesian Model

By Ina Hajdini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

I consider a New Keynesian framework where agents combine mis-specified forecasts and myopia to form expectations. This combination is consistent with inflation forecasts' late overshooting, underreaction to forecast revisions, and overreaction to current...

You're the One That I Want! Understanding the Overrepresentation of Women in the Public Sector

By Pedro Gomes and Zoë Kuehn

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

The public sector hires disproportionally more women than men. Using microdata, we document gender differences in employment, transition probabilities, hours, and wages in the public and private sector. We calibrate a search and matching model where men a...

Large Firms, Consumer Heterogeneity, and the Profit Share

By Robert C. Feenstra, Luca Macedoni, and Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We examine the relationship between large firms and the rising profit share in a model that features oligopolistic competition and consumer heterogeneity. Conditional on the sales distribution, consumer heterogeneity increases firm-level markups and the p...

Inflation Targeting under Fiscal Fragility

By Aloisio Araujo, Vitor Costa, Paulo Lins, Rafael Santos, and Serge de Valk

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We propose a model to study an inflation-targeting regime under a high government debt burden. We assume that an altruistic policymaker chooses debt issuance, inflation, and public expenditure, while private agents dislike inflation and finance the govern...

Banking Networks and Economic Growth: From Idiosyncratic Shocks to Aggregate Fluctuations

By Shohini Kundu and Nishant Vats

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

This paper investigates the role of banking networks in the transmission of shocks across borders. Combining banking deregulation in the United States with state-level idiosyncratic demand shocks, we show that geographically diversified banks reallocate f...

Trade Structure, Industrial Structure, and International Business Cycles

By Marianne Baxter and Michael A. Kouparitsas

American Economic Review, May 2003

Misallocation in Indian Agriculture

By Marijn Bolhuis, Swapnika Rachapalli, and Diego Restuccia

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We exploit substantial variation in land-market institutions across Indian states and detailed household-level panel data to assess the effect of land-market distortions on agricultural productivity. We develop a model of heterogeneous farms and distorted...

Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation: Comment

By Brian Greaney

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

Hsieh and Moretti (2019) find that relaxing land use regulations in three productive US cities would increase GDP by 3.7 percent. In this comment, I revisit their findings. I first attempt to replicate their result and find that their counterfactual would...

Management and Misallocation in Mexico

By Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-López, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

Using comprehensive administrative management surveys from Mexico and the United States, we document large management gaps between the two countries, driven by both lower average management quality among Mexican firms and greater misallocation. Compared w...