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...

Insecurity and Firm Displacement: Evidence from Afghan Corporate Phone Records

By Sylvan Herskowitz, Joshua E. Blumenstock, Tarek Ghani, Ethan B. Kapstein, Thomas L. Scherer, and Ott Toomet

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We provide empirical evidence on how insecurity affects firm behavior by linking data on deadly terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to geolocated data on corporate mobile phone activity. We first develop an approach to estimate the geographic footprint of ...

AEA-CEE Members

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Current Members of the Education Committee

Are Complementary Policies Substitutes? Evidence from R&D Subsidies in the UK

By Jacquelyn Pless

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper studies whether grants and tax incentives for private R&D are complements or substitutes. I use multiple quasi-experimental research designs to examine firms in the United Kingdom and find that increasing tax credit generosity substantially ...

Accounting for Wealth Concentration in the United States

By Bariş Kaymak, David Leung, and Markus Poschke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We assess the empirical relevance of different macroeconomic modeling approaches to wealth concentration, using the joint distribution of earnings, capital income and net worth in combination with an OLG model of household heterogeneity. We find large ...

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...

Nobel Lecture: The Institutional Origins of Shared Prosperity

By Simon Johnson

American Economic Review, June 2025

Nobel Lecture: Paths to the Periphery

By James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, June 2025

My research suggests that world inequality is explained by the incidence of extractive and inclusive institutions. But why do some countries have extractive institutions? I distinguish between two main reasons; first, power relations; second, the "normati...

Report of Independent Auditor

American Economic Review, June 2025

Front Matter

American Economic Review, June 2025

The Geographic Flow of Bank Funding and Access to Credit: Branch Networks, Synergies, and Local Competition

By Victor Aguirregabiria, Robert Clark, and Hui Wang

American Economic Review, June 2025

Geographic dispersion of depositors, borrowers, and banks may prevent funding from flowing to high-loan-demand areas, limiting credit access. Using bank-county-year-level data, we provide evidence of geographic imbalance of deposits and loans and develop ...