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...

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...

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