The Long-Run Effects of Peer Gender on Occupational Sorting and the Wage Gap

By Demid Getik and Armando N. Meier

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We study the impact of the early gender environment on inequality in the labor market. To this end, we link primary school data to occupations and earnings. We find that women exposed to more girls at critical ages earn more later on: A 10 percent increas...

Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO

By Nicholas A. Pairolero, Andrew A. Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles A. W. de Grazia, and Mike H. M. Teodorescu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across inventor gender, driven prim...

HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes

By Ashley Edwards, Justin Ortagus, Jonathan Smith, and Andria Smythe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Using data from nearly 1.2 million Black SAT takers, we find that students initially enrolling in a historically Black college and university (HBCU) are 14.6 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor's degree and, around age 30, have 5 percent high...

Eliminating Fares to Expand Opportunities: Experimental Evidence on the Impacts of Free Public Transportation on Economic and Social Disparities

By Rebecca Brough, Matthew Freedman, and David C. Phillips

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the employment effects of providing free public transportation to individuals with low incomes. A temporary subsidy that reduces the price of transit to zero has no significant effects on individuals' paid...

International Transmission of Inequality through Trade

By Sergey Nigai

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

I examine the international transmission of income inequality through trade. Using firm-level and aggregate data, I find that exporting to more unequal countries increases domestic inequality. I rationalize this finding by developing a model of internatio...

The Making of Civic Virtues: A School-Based Experiment in Three Countries

By Simon Briole, Marc Gurgand, Éric Maurin, Sandra McNally, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela, and Daniel Santín

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on an RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three countries. The program leads stude...

Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany

By Navid Sabet, Marius Liebald, and Guido Friebel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We document that right-wing terrorism leads to significant increases in vote share for the right-wing, populist AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) party in Germany. To identify causal effects, we exploit quasi-random variation between successful and failed...

Transmitting Rights: Effective Cooperation, Inter-gender Contact, and Student Achievement

By Sultan Mehmood, Shaheen Naseer, and Daniel L. Chen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We provide experimental evidence of teacher-to-student transmission of gender attitudes in Pakistan. We randomly show teachers a pro-women's rights visual narrative. Treated teachers increase their and students' support for women's rights, unbiasedness in...

Pandering in the Shadows: How Natural Disasters Affect Special Interest Politics

By Ethan Kaplan, Jörg L. Spenkuch, and Haishan Yuan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We exploit the quasi-random timing of natural disasters to study the connection between public attention to politics and legislators' support for special interests. We show that when a disaster strikes, the news media reduce coverage of politics in genera...

Interbank Rate Uncertainty and Bank Lending

By Carlo Altavilla, Giacomo Carboni, Michele Lenza, and Harald Uhlig

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We propose a new measure of interbank rate uncertainty, defined as the crosssectional dispersion in interbank market rates for overnight unsecured loans. We show that higher interbank rate uncertainty increases lending rates for firm loans, with larger...

The Economic Consequences of Effective Carbon Taxes

By Felix Kapfhammer

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

This paper studies the sectoral and macroeconomic consequences of carbon taxes in four Nordic countries using a novel monthly measure of effective carbon tax rates. The suggested measure accounts for the time-varying emission coverage of taxes that are...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2025

Monopsony and Employer Misoptimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers

By Arindrajit Dube, Alan Manning, and Suresh Naidu

American Economic Review, August 2025

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk; we fail t...

Direct and Indirect Effects of Investment Tax Incentives

By Adrian Lerche

American Economic Review, August 2025

This paper estimates the direct effects and indirect spillover effects of investment tax credits on firms. Exploiting a differential tax credit rate change by firm size in the German manufacturing sector, I find that lowering a firm's investment cost by 7...

Robustness Measures for Welfare Analysis

By Zi Yang Kang and Shoshana Vasserman

American Economic Review, August 2025

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions on demand curves to derive welfare conclusions. How sensitive are these conclusions to such assumptions? In this paper, we develop robustness measures that quantify the extent to which the true demand ...

Employers and Unemployment Insurance Take-Up

By Marta Lachowska, Isaac Sorkin, and Stephen A. Woodbury

American Economic Review, August 2025

We quantify the employer's role in unemployment insurance (UI) take-up. Employer effects on claiming and appeals are substantial, and those effects are negatively correlated, consistent with appeals deterring claims. Low-wage workers are less likely to cl...

From Retributive to Restorative: An Alternative Approach to Justice in Schools

By Anjali Adukia, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Fatemeh Momeni

American Economic Review, August 2025

School districts historically approached conflict resolution from the perspective that suspending disruptive students was necessary to protect their classmates, even if this caused harm to perceived offenders. Restorative practices (RP)—focusing on repa...

Monetary Policy and Rational Asset Price Bubbles: Comment

By Franklin Allen, Gadi Barlevy, and Douglas Gale

American Economic Review, August 2025

Galí (2014) showed that a monetary policy rule that raises rates when bubbles exceed some steady-state benchmark can paradoxically lead to larger deviations from steady state. Nevertheless, this comment shows that a central bank can always dampen a bubbl...

Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections

By Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, August 2025

We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center...

Cursed Sequential Equilibrium

By Meng-Jhang Fong, Po-Hsuan Lin, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, August 2025

This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multistage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies and imposes sequent...