Cultural Distance and Ethnic Civil Conflict

By Eleonora Guarnieri

American Economic Review, April 2025

Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict, while others do not? I show that civil conflict in Africa is explained by ethnic groups' cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultur...

The George Floyd Effect

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What happens to a community’s trust in law enforcement after high-profile acts of police violence?

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

Influenza causes substantial illness among children. RCTs demonstrate that the influenza vaccine reduces active-surveillance-detected influenza but have insufficient samples to examine healthcare provider visits. This study documents that two-to-five-year...

Register Now for the Live Workshop Hosted by the Ombuds Team on Tuesday, May 20

[News]

May 15, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from May 16, 2025.

Policy on Revisions of Data and Code Deposits in the AEA Data and Code Repository

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Market entry as antidote to collusion

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How do cartels respond to new competition?

Timothy Taylor, Distinguished Fellow 2025

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Rebuilding careers

[Research Highlight]

May 27, 2025

Higher education can help injured workers transition to higher-paying occupations.

Changing Tracks: Human Capital Investment after Loss of Ability

By Anders Humlum, Jakob R. Munch, and Pernille Plato

American Economic Review, May 2025

We provide the first evidence on how workers invest in human capital after losing ability. Using quasi-random work accidents in Danish administrative data, we find that workers enroll in bachelor's programs after physical injuries, pursuing degrees that b...

W. E. B. Du Bois and Economics: A Reappraisal

By Guy Numa and Sammy Zahran

Journal of Economic Literature

W. E. B. Du Bois is widely considered one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the twentieth century. While Du Bois has been praised for his contributions to sister disciplines, his contributions to economics have been underappreciated. Drawing...

How Do Entrants Build Market Share? The Role of Demand Frictions

By David Argente, Doireann Fitzgerald, Sara Moreira, and Anthony Priolo

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

We construct a new dataset to show that successful entrants in the consumer food sector build market share by adding new customers. Entrants reach new customers by entering more geographical markets, placing their product in more stores in these markets, ...

The Broad Decline in Health and Human Capital of Americans Born after 1947

By Nicholas Reynolds

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

I present evidence of across-cohort decline in the health and human capital of Americans, beginning with those born after 1947 and continuing until those born in the mid-1960s. Education, men's wages, women's maternal health (proxied by their infants' bir...

Sustainability in a Risky World

By John Y. Campbell and Ian W. R. Martin

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

How much consumption is sustainable, if "sustainability" requires that welfare should not be expected to decline over time? We impose a sustainability constraint on a standard consumption/portfolio choice problem. The constraint does not distort portfolio...

Regional Dissent: Do Local Economic Conditions Influence FOMC Votes?

By Anton Bobrov, Rupal Kamdar, and Mauricio Ulate

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

US monetary policy decisions are made by the 12 voting members of the FOMC, seven of which inherently represent national-level interests. The remaining members, a rotating group of presidents from the 12 Federal Reserve districts, come instead from subnat...

Information Acquisition and Time-Risk Preference

By Daniel Chen and Weijie Zhong

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time risk"—the di...

Building Nondiscriminatory Algorithms in Selected Data

By David Arnold, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to understand algorithmic discrimination and build nondiscriminatory algorithms when the outcome of interest is only selectively observed. We first show that algorithmic discrimination arises when the available algo...

Growth and Redistribution: The Hedging Perspective

By Larry Samuelson and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

We investigate the impact of wealth redistribution on economic growth, building on Kelly's (1956) optimal investment portfolio theory. A growth-optimal policy redistributes wealth from "lucky" overperforming individuals to underperforming ones, minimizing...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

Relative Income in Households

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What drives earnings differences between husbands and wives?

Nobel Lecture: Institutions, Technology, and Prosperity

By Daron Acemoglu

American Economic Review, June 2025

This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize th...