Church Tax Exemption and Structure of Religious Markets: A Dynamic Structural Analysis

By Raphael Corbi and Fabio Miessi Sanches

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We study the effects of church tax exemptions on the structure of religious markets. Using the Brazilian experience as a showcase, we develop and estimate a dynamic entry model of religious organizations based on temple opening and closure in geographical...

Asymmetric Players in a Meritocracy: A Case for Affirmative Action

By Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We model decisions to apply for college admission, attend job auditions, or run for C-suite positions as costly entry into meritocracies, where the entrant with the highest ability wins a reward. Ability is privately known and players generically differ i...

Reputation and Efficiency: Information Design

By Allen Vong

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

A firm trades with a sequence of consumers who are unsure about the firm's competence and its effort to supply quality. I examine rating systems that sustain efficient outcomes in virtually all trades by providing consumers with information to motivate a ...

Information Acquisition and Product Differentiation Perception

By Gary Biglaiser, Jiadong Gu, and Fei Li

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We consider the equilibrium interplay between sellers' price competition and consumers' perception of product differentiation. We analyze a situation where, before trading, consumers acquire information at a cost about their preferences between sellers' d...

Asymptotic Learning with Ambiguous Information

By Pëllumb Reshidi, João Thereze, and Mu Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We study asymptotic learning when the decision-maker faces ambiguity in the precision of her information sources. She aims to estimate a state and evaluates outcomes according to the worst-case scenario. Under prior-by-prior updating, we characterize the ...

Free Riding and Unequal Pay in Symmetric Teams

By Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

This paper studies dynamic incentive pay in teams where agents' efforts are perfect substitutes. It shows that the principal may unequally reward identical agents to mitigate dynamic free riding in the form of procrastination. Unequal pay effectively crea...

Competition and Defaults in Online Search

By Francesco Decarolis, Muxin Li, and Filippo Paternollo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

This paper offers the first systematic quantitative assessment of default-option interventions designed to mitigate Google's search dominance. By analyzing interventions in the European Economic Area (EEA), Russia, and Turkey, we find that across all thre...

Unraveling and Inefficient Matching

By Akhil Vohra

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

Labor markets unravel when workers and firms match inefficiently early under limited information. I argue that a significant determinant of unraveling is the presence of a secondary market, where firms can poach workers, and its transparency: how well fir...

Bargaining and Information Acquisition

By Kalyan Chatterjee, Miaomiao Dong, and Tetsuya Hoshino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We consider an ultimatum game where the value of the object being sold to the buyer is high or low. The seller knows the value, but the buyer does not. The value to the seller is zero. We introduce the option for the buyer to acquire costly information af...

Mergers, Entry, and Consumer Welfare

By Peter Caradonna, Nathan H. Miller, and Gloria Sheu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We model merger-induced entry in the context of differentiated-products price competition. We fully characterize the combinations of merger efficiencies and entrant qualities that can mitigate the adverse equilibrium welfare effects of an otherwise antico...

Monitoring Team Members: Information Waste and the Transparency Trap

By Matteo Camboni and Michael Porcellacchia

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

In a model of moral hazard in teams, we demonstrate that firms' concerns about low trust among teammates can justify two common but otherwise puzzling patterns: information waste and transparency trap. We find firms predominantly employ individual perform...

China’s Nationwide CO2 Emissions Trading System: A General Equilibrium Assessment

By Lawrence H. Goulder, Xianling Long, Chenfei Qu, and Da Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

China’s CO2 emissions trading system, the world’s largest, aims to significantly reduce CO2 emissions. The system is a tradable performance standard (TPS), differing from cap and trade (C&T). We provide a dynamic general equilibrium assessment that un...

Vertical Integration and Cream Skimming of Profitable Referrals: The Case of Hospital-Owned Skilled Nursing Facilities

By David Cutler, Leemore Dafny, David C. Grabowski, Steven Lee, and Christopher Ody

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We examine whether vertical integration of hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) could lessen competition by foreclosing rival SNFs’ access to lucrative referrals. We find that it could: among integrated providers, a one percent increase in SN...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Healthy at Work? Evidence from a Social Experimental Evaluation of a Firm-Based Wellness Program

By Marianne Simonsen and Lars Skipper

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We employ a large social experiment combined with register-based data, allowing for up to 12-year follow-up to evaluate a long-lasting employer-sponsored health and well-being program. We show that employees at treated worksites receive fewer consultation...

Does the "Boost for Mathematics" Boost Mathematics? A Large-Scale Evaluation of the "Lesson Study" Methodology on Student Performance

By Erik Grönqvist, Björn Öckert, and Olof Rosenqvist

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Students in East Asian countries dominate international assessments. One possible explanation for their success is the use of "Lesson study" to enhance teaching practices; a collaborative process where teachers plan, observe, and analyze a lesson together...

Fiscal Rules and the Selection of Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Italy

By Matteo Gamalerio and Federico Trombetta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Fiscal rules, or constraints on the policymaking discretion of elected officials, are widely used to regulate fiscal policies. Using data on Italian municipalities, we employ a difference-in-discontinuity design to provide evidence of the negative effect ...

Routine-Biased Technological Change and Endogenous Skill Investments

By Danyelle Branco, Bladimir Carrillo, and Wilman Iglesias

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We investigate how individuals alter their educational investments in response to routine-biased technology. We find that individuals growing up in robot-impacted areas are more likely to complete a bachelor's degree and experience a relative increase in ...

Should College Be "Free"? Evidence on Free College, Early Commitment, and Merit Aid from an Eight-Year Randomized Trial

By Douglas N. Harris and Jonathan Mills

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We provide evidence on the effects of college financial aid from an eight-year randomized trial offering ninth graders a $12,000 merit-based grant. The program was designed to be free of tuition/fees at community colleges and substantially lower the cost ...

Communication Barriers and Infant Health: The Intergenerational Effect of Randomly Allocating Refugees across Language Regions

By Daniel Auer and Johannes S. Kunz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth. We study refugees in Switzerland who come from French- or Italian-speaking countries and who, upon arrival, are randomly allocated to different canton...