Working for References

By Samuel Häfner and Curtis R. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We analyze the incentive and welfare consequences of job references in a large economy marked by moral hazard, limited liability, exogenous job separation, and structural unemployment. In the firm-optimal equilibrium, employers provide references whenever...

Decreasing Impatience

By Christopher P. Chambers, Federico Echenique, and Alan D. Miller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We characterize decreasing impatience, a common behavioral phenomenon in intertemporal choice. Discount factors that display decreasing impatience are characterized through a convexity axiom for investments at fixed interest rates. Then we show that they ...

Bounds on a Slope from Size Restrictions on Economic Shocks

By Marco Stenborg Petterson, David Seim, and Jesse M. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We study the problem of learning about the effect of one market-level variable (e.g., price) on another (e.g., quantity) in the presence of shocks to unobservables (e.g., preferences). We show that economic intuitions about the plausible size of the shock...

Influence Campaigns

By Evan Sadler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

Firms and politicians, among others, invest heavily to influence people's opinions. Because peers influence one another, these efforts must account for social networks. Using a model of opinion dynamics with a non-degenerate steady state, I develop a new ...

Equilibrium Screening and Categorical Inequality

By Mogens Fosgerau, Rajiv Sethi, and Jörgen Weibull

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We analyze equilibrium outcomes under costly screening of candidates from distinct categories. Candidates choose how much effort to invest in skill acquisition, and the screener decides how carefully to screen each candidate. Typically, there are multiple...

Bargaining over Treatment Choice under Disagreement

By Nabil I. Al-Najjar and Robert J. Gary-Bobo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

A group of experts with different prior beliefs must choose a treatment. A dataset is made public and leads to revisions of beliefs. We propose a model where the experts' disagreements are resolved through bargaining, using the Nash bargaining solution. E...

Similarity Nash Equilibria in Statistical Games

By Rossella Argenziano and Itzhak Gilboa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

A statistical game is a game in which strategic interaction is mediated via a binary outcome y, coupled with a prediction problem where a characteristic x of the game may be used to predict its outcome y based on past values of (x, y). In Similarity Nash ...

Keeping Up with "The Joneses": Reference-Dependent Choice with Social Comparisons

By Alastair Langtry

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

Keeping up with "The Joneses" matters. This paper examines a model of reference-dependent choice where reference points are determined by social comparisons. An increase in the strength of social comparisons, even by only a few agents, increases consumpti...

Judicial Mechanism Design

By Ron Siegel and Bruno Strulovici

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

This paper proposes a mechanism-design approach to study criminal justice systems. We derive properties of optimal mechanisms for two notions of welfare distinguished by their treatment of deterrence. These properties provide insights into the effects of ...

Bid Caps in Noisy Contests

By Qiang Fu, Zenan Wu, and Yuxuan Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

This paper studies optimal bid caps in a multiplayer noisy contest in which a higher bid does not guarantee a sure win. The bid cap can be either rigid or flexible. The former imposes outright bidding restrictions on players' bids, while the latter taxes ...

2019 AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts of Select Sessions

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View Webcasts of select sessions from the Annual Meeting in Atlanta on January 4-6, 2019

ASSA 2020 Webcasts of Select Sessions

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View webcasts of select sessions from the Annual Meeting in San Diego on January 3-5, 2020.

2018 AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts of Select Sessions

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View webcasts of selected sessions from the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on January 5-7, 2018

2017 AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts of Select Sessions

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View webcasts of selected sessions from the Annual Meeting in Chicago on January 6-8, 2017

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2023

The Reversal Interest Rate

By Joseph Abadi, Markus Brunnermeier, and Yann Koby

American Economic Review, August 2023

The reversal interest rate is the rate at which accommodative monetary policy reverses and becomes contractionary for lending. We theoretically demonstrate its existence in a macroeconomic model featuring imperfectly competitive banks that face financial ...

The Political Economy of International Regulatory Cooperation

By Giovanni Maggi and Ralph Ossa

American Economic Review, August 2023

We examine international regulatory agreements that are negotiated under lobbying pressures from producer groups. The way in which lobbying influences the cooperative setting of regulatory policies, as well as the welfare impacts of international agreemen...

The Micro Anatomy of Macro Consumption Adjustments

By Rafael Guntin, Pablo Ottonello, and Diego J. Perez

American Economic Review, August 2023

We study crises characterized by large adjustments of aggregate consumption through their microlevel patterns. We document the cross-sectional patterns of consumption adjustment across the income distribution and find large adjustments for top-income hous...

Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness

By Michael Carlos Best, Jonas Hjort, and David Szakonyi

American Economic Review, August 2023

Bureaucrats implement policy. How important are they for a state's productivity? And do the trade-offs between policies depend on their effectiveness? Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices ...

The Missing Intercept: A Demand Equivalence Approach

By Christian K. Wolf

American Economic Review, August 2023

I give conditions under which changes in private spending are accommodated in general equilibrium exactly like changes in aggregate fiscal expenditure. Under such demand equivalence, researchers can use time series evidence on fiscal multipliers to recove...