Promotions and Productivity: The Role of Meritocracy and Pay Progression in the Public Sector

By Erika Deserranno, Philipp Kastrau, and Gianmarco León-Ciliotta

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

We study promotion incentives in the public sector. In collaboration with Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health, we introduce exogenous variation in the meritocratic nature of promotions from health worker to supervisor positions and in health workers' percep...

Does Turnover Inhibit Specialization? Evidence from a Skill Survey in Peru

By Andrea Atencio-De-Leon, Munseob Lee, and Claudia Macaluso

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

We design, pilot, and field a new survey of job skills in Peru to investigate human capital differences between poor and rich countries. Peruvian jobs have markedly more uniform skill profiles than jobs in the United States. On the other hand, matching fr...

The High-Frequency Effects of Dollar Swap Lines

By Rohan Kekre and Moritz Lenel

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

We study the effects of dollar swap lines using high-frequency responses in asset prices around policy announcements. News about expanded dollar swap lines causes a reduction in liquidity premia, compression of deviations from covered interest parity, and...

Surviving Bad News: Health Information without Treatment Options

By Alberto Ciancio, Fabrice Kämpfen, Hans-Peter Kohler, and Rebecca Thornton

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

When there is no treatment available for a life-threatening disease, providing personal health information could lead to despair or fatalistic behaviors resulting in negative health outcomes. We document this possibility utilizing an experiment in Malawi ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2025

Expecting Floods: Firm Entry, Employment, and Aggregate Implications

By Ruixue Jia, Xiao Ma, and Victoria Wenxin Xie

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Using county-level and ZIP-code-level data from the United States during 1998–2018, we document: (1) increased flood risk has a large negative impact on firm entry, employment, and output in the long run; and (2) flood events reduce output in the shor...

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

By Joachim Hubmer and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

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 us...

AEA Submission Portal Opens Tomorrow – March 1

[News]

February 28, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from February 28, 2025.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2025

Ownership Concentration and Strategic Supply Reduction

By Ulrich Doraszelski, Katja Seim, Michael Sinkinson, and Peichun Wang

American Economic Review, March 2025

We explore the implications of ownership concentration for the recently concluded incentive auction that repurposed spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband usage in the United States. We document significant multilicense ownership of TV stations. W...

Mortgage Pricing and Monetary Policy

By Matteo Benetton, Alessandro Gavazza, and Paolo Surico

American Economic Review, March 2025

This paper examines how central bank policies influence mortgage pricing in the United Kingdom. It shows that lenders price discriminate by offering two-part tariffs of interest rates and origination fees, and during unconventional monetary policies like ...

Corruption as a Local Advantage: Evidence from the Indigenization of Nigerian Oil

By Jonah M. Rexer

American Economic Review, March 2025

Multinationals in the extractive sectors of weak states face resource theft by armed groups. Criminality is often abetted by state corruption, even though firms are willing to pay for protection. I study indigenization in Nigeria's oil sector, which incre...

The Decline of Too Big to Fail

By Antje Berndt, Darrell Duffie, and Yichao Zhu

American Economic Review, March 2025

For globally systemically important banks (GSIBs) with US headquarters, we find significant reductions in market-implied probabilities of government bailout after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), along with roughly 170 percent higher wholesale debt fina...

Land Rental Markets: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

By Michelle Acampora, Lorenzo Casaburi, and Jack Willis

American Economic Review, March 2025

Do land market frictions cause misallocation in agriculture? In a field experiment in western Kenya, we randomly subsidize owners to rent out land. Induced rentals mostly persist after the subsidy ends and increase output and value added, consistent with ...

Internationalizing Like China

By Christopher Clayton, Amanda Dos Santos, Matteo Maggiori, and Jesse Schreger

American Economic Review, March 2025

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing its bond market by staggering the entry of different types of foreign investors into its domestic market and propose a dynamic reputation model to explain this strategy. Our framework rationalize...

How Competitive Is the Stock Market? Theory, Evidence from Portfolios, and Implications for the Rise of Passive Investing

By Valentin Haddad, Paul Huebner, and Erik Loualiche

American Economic Review, March 2025

The conventional wisdom in finance is that competition is fierce among investors: if a group changes its behavior, others adjust their strategies such that nothing happens to prices. We estimate a demand system with flexible strategic responses for instit...

ASSA Annual Meeting

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Guidelines for Proposals

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Considerations for those proposing topics and papers for JEP.

Structural Reforms and Economic Performance: The Experience of Advanced Economies

By Nauro F. Campos, Paul De Grauwe, and Yuemei Ji

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2025

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the theoretical and empirical literature on structural reforms in advanced economies. Structural reforms matter because they entail profound and systematic changes that affect economic welfare, productiv...

How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong: A Review Essay

By Steven N. Durlauf

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2025

This essay reviews two recent books on economic growth: Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin's How the World Became Rich and J. Bradford DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia. Both books offer rich and nuanced treatments of the long-run and proximate mechanisms underl...