The Consumption Origins of Business Cycles: Lessons from Sectoral Dynamics

By Christian Matthes and Felipe Schwartzman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We measure the impact of household consumption shocks on aggregate fluctuations. These shocks affect household consumption directly, and production and prices indirectly through their impact on aggregate consumption. We show how to identify such shocks us...

GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, W. Erwin Diewert, Felix Eggers, and Kevin J. Fox

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

The welfare contributions of new goods and free goods are not well-measured in standard statistical agency metrics like GDP or productivity. We derive explicit terms for the contributions of these goods and introduce a new framework and metric, GDP-B, whi...

Real Exchange Rates and Endogenous Productivity

By Nils Gornemann, Pablo A. Guerrón Quintana, and Felipe Saffie

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

Two-thirds of the real exchange rate's (RER's) volatility occurs at low frequencies. We provide empirical evidence that links movements in the RER to changes in research and development spending and patents. A two-country real business cycle model with en...

Time to Say Goodbye: The Macroeconomic Implications of Termination Notice

By Tomer Ifergane

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

Insuring households against unemployment risk is a cornerstone of modern economic policy. Many countries provide unemployment insurance partly by employment protection mandates, most commonly using termination notice mandates. Unlike unemployment insuranc...

Cyclical Attention to Saving

By Alistair Macaulay

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

I explore the business-cycle implications of household inattention to savings product choices. In a model with heterogeneous banks, savers pay more attention to their bank choice when the marginal utility of income is high. Consistent with this, in data f...

Market Segmentation and International Bond Prices: The Role of ECB Asset Purchases

By Ester Faia, Juliana Salomao, and Alexia Ventula Veghazy

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We estimate euro-dollar yields differences, hedged and unhedged, with euro area confidential corporate bond holdings data. We find that euro yields significantly decline relative to dollar yields—more for securities in the portfolios of investors that p...

Temporary Layoffs, Firm Entry and Exit Dynamics, and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Sanjay K. Chugh and Alan Finkelstein Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We build a model to study how the countercyclicality of temporary layoffs affects unemployment, firm entry and exit, and macroeconomic fluctuations. The model can quantitatively generate the rich cyclical dynamics of temporary layoffs, unemployment, and f...

Bias in academic networking

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A social media field experiment suggests that gender, race, and university affiliation influence the formation of professional relationships among economists.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, October 2025

Intermediated Asymmetric Information, Compensation, and Career Prospects

By Ron Kaniel and Dmitry Orlov

American Economic Review, October 2025

Adverse selection benefits firms able to identify talent. An informed intermediary expropriates agents' ability by threatening to fire and expose them to undervaluation of their skill. An agent's track record gradually reduces intermediary's information a...

Place-Based Redistribution

By Cecile Gaubert, Patrick Kline, Damian Vergara, and Danny Yagan

American Economic Review, October 2025

We study optimal income taxation in a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous locational preferences, labor supply decisions, and competitive housing and labor markets. Expressions characterizing the optimal tax schedule in each community are provide...

Consistent Evidence on Duration Dependence of Price Changes

By Fernando Alvarez, Katarína Borovičková, and Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, October 2025

We develop a linear GMM estimator of the discrete-time mixed proportional hazard (MPH) model of duration with an arbitrary distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. We allow for competing risks, observable characteristics, and censoring. We prove our esti...

Treatment Effects in Market Equilibrium

By Evan Munro, Xu Kuang, and Stefan Wager

American Economic Review, October 2025

Policy-relevant treatment effect estimation in a marketplace setting requires assessing both the direct treatment benefit and spillovers induced by changes to the market equilibrium. We show how to identify and estimate policy-relevant treatment effects u...

The Value of Software

By Roberto Gómez-Cram and Alastair Lawrence

American Economic Review, October 2025

Software is one of the most important assets that needs to be priced in the digital economy. It has emerged as a disruptive technology, with companies primarily valued for their software offerings growing from 2 percent to 13 percent of market share betwe...

Monetary Policy and the Labor Market: A Quasi-experiment in Sweden

By John Coglianese, Maria Olsson, and Christina Patterson

American Economic Review, October 2025

We analyze a monetary quasi-experiment in Sweden from 2010–2011, when the Riksbank raised the interest rate substantially. We argue that this increase was beyond what labor market conditions warranted, driven instead by new concerns about financial stab...

Diffusion of Reproductive Health Behavior through International Migration: Effects on Origin-Country Fertility

By Susan Godlonton and Caroline Theoharides

American Economic Review, October 2025

International migrants may facilitate the transmission of ideas across countries. We examine the impact of migrant exposure to reproductive health policies on origin-country fertility in the Philippines. We exploit temporal variation in destination-countr...

Politics at Work

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Valdemar Pinho Neto, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2025

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes using new microdata from Brazil. We first show that business owners are considerably more likely to employ copartisan workers. This phenomenon is in part driven by the o...

Apart but Connected: Online Tutoring, Cognitive Outcomes, and Soft Skills

By Michela Carlana and Eliana La Ferrara

American Economic Review, October 2025

We study the Tutoring Online Program (TOP), where tutoring is entirely online and tutors are volunteer university students matched with underprivileged middle school students. We leverage random assignment to estimate effects during and after the pandemic...

The Dynamic Effects of Cash Transfers to Agricultural Households

By Shilpa Aggarwal, Jenny C. Aker, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Little is known about the evolution and persistence of the effects of one-time cash transfers, especially in rural agricultural settings with limited productive investment opportunities. We use bi-monthly phone surveys to estimate dynamic impacts for ca...

The Political Geography of Cities

By Richard Bluhm, Christian Lessmann, and Paul Schaudt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We study the link between regional capitals and urban development. We exploit new global data on hundreds of first-order administrative and capital city reforms from 1987 until 2018 to estimate the capital city premium. Gaining capital status increases...