Front Matter

American Economic Review, December 2024

Curbing Leakage in Public Programs: Evidence from India's Direct Benefit Transfer Policy

By Prabhat Barnwal

American Economic Review, December 2024

Targeted price subsidies create a gap between subsidized and unsubsidized prices. The resulting dual pricing can lead to arbitrage opportunities where intermediaries divert subsidized goods to unintended beneficiaries via the black market. I study India's...

Aiming for the Goal: Contribution Dynamics of Crowdfunding

By Joyee Deb, Aniko Öry, and Kevin R. Williams

American Economic Review, December 2024

We study a dynamic contribution game where investors seek private benefits offered in exchange for contributions, and a single, publicly minded donor values project success. We show that donor contributions serve as costly signals that encourage socially ...

Beliefs in Repeated Games: An Experiment

By Masaki Aoyagi, Guillaume R. Fréchette, and Sevgi Yuksel

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study beliefs and their relationship to action and strategy choices in finitely and indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games. We find subjects' elicited beliefs about the other player's action are generally...

Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions

By Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, and Michal Kolesár

American Economic Review, December 2024

We study regressions with multiple treatments and a set of controls that is flexible enough to purge omitted variable bias. We show these regressions generally fail to estimate convex averages of heterogeneous treatment effects—instead, estimates of eac...

Decisions under Risk Are Decisions under Complexity

By Ryan Oprea

American Economic Review, December 2024

We provide evidence that classic lottery anomalies like probability weighting and loss aversion are not special phenomena of risk. They also arise (and often with equal strength) when subjects evaluate deterministic, positive monetary payments that have b...

Measuring Science: Performance Metrics and the Allocation of Talent

By Sebastian Hager, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger

American Economic Review, December 2024

We study how performance metrics affect the allocation of talent by exploiting the introduction of the first citation database in science. For technical reasons, it only covered citations from certain journals and years, creating quasi-random variation: s...

Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

By Luca Braghieri

American Economic Review, December 2024

A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This pa...

Loans for the "Little Fellow": Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression

By Sarah Quincy

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market that diversified...

Bias and Sensitivity under Ambiguity

By Zhen Huo, Marcelo Pedroni, and Guangyu Pei

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper characterizes the effects of ambiguity aversion under dispersed information. The equilibrium outcome is observationally equivalent to a Bayesian forecast of the fundamental with increased sensitivity to signals and a pessimistic bias. This equi...

Annual Meeting Registration, Ongoing SF Labor Strike, and Other Announcements

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December 02, 2024

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ASSA 2025 General Information

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Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues

By Ebonya L. Washington

American Economic Review, March 2008

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter i...

The Changing Identities of American Wives and Mothers

By Jeanne Lafortune, Laura Salisbury, and Aloysius Siow

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

Over the last century, resource allocations within families changed significantly, as did marriage matching patterns. College-educated women became more likely to marry (and, to a lesser extent, have children) than less educated women. A large literature ...

Social Protection in the Developing World

By Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, and Diana Sverdlin Lisker

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

Social protection programs have become increasingly widespread in low- and middle-income countries, with their own distinct characteristics to match the environments in which they are operating. This paper reviews the growing literature on the design and ...

Should They Compete or Should They Cooperate? The View of Agency Theory

By Pierre Fleckinger, David Martimort, and Nicolas Roux

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

What is the most efficient way of designing incentives in an organization? Over the past five decades, agency theory has provided various answers to this crucial question. This line of research suggests that, depending on the organizational context, the o...

Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal

By Ivan Boldyrev

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and...

The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality

By Samuel Bowles and Mattia Fochesato

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

We survey archaeological evidence suggesting that among hunter-gatherers and farmers in Neolithic western Eurasia (11,700 to 5,300 years ago) elevated levels of wealth inequality occurred but were ephemeral and rare compared to the substantial enduring in...

The Economics of Social Media

By Guy Aridor, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Ro'ee Levy, and Lena Song

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

We provide a guide to the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media. We first define social media platforms and highlight their unique features. We then synthesize the main lessons from the empirical economics literature and organize them aro...

Can Massive Technological Progress Hurt Workers? A Review of Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson

By Fiona Scott Morton

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

This book offers a radical thesis: Technological innovation often benefits elites while worsening conditions for workers, challenging the common view that technology always improves living standards. Through historical transitions like the Industrial Revo...