International Trade Responses to Labor Market Regulations

By Mathilde Muñoz

American Economic Review, November 2025

This paper demonstrates that labor market regulations, such as minimum wages or payroll taxes, shape trade competition in labor-intensive activities. I exploit data from a large European trade program where firms from different countries supply labor serv...

The Trade-Off between Flexibility and Robustness in Instrumental Variables Analysis

By Ben Deaner

American Economic Review, November 2025

In additive instrumental variables models, the robustness to some failure of instrumental validity or additive separability depends on the strength of a priori restrictions on the structural relationship between outcomes and treatments. I provide theoreti...

Distinguishing Causes of Neighborhood Racial Change: A Nearest-Neighbor Design

By Patrick Bayer, Marcus Casey, W. Ben McCartney, John Orellana-Li, and Calvin Zhang

American Economic Review, November 2025

We study neighborhood choice using a novel research design that contrasts the move rate of homeowners who receive a new different-race neighbor immediately next-door versus slightly farther away on the same block. This approach isolates a component of pre...

Managers and Public Hospital Performance

By Pablo Muñoz and Cristóbal Otero

American Economic Review, November 2025

We study whether the quality of managers can affect public service provision in the context of public health. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we show how the introduction of a competitive recruitment system and better pay for public hospi...

Anatomy of the Phillips Curve: Micro Evidence and Macro Implications

By Luca Gagliardone, Mark Gertler, Simone Lenzu, and Joris Tielens

American Economic Review, November 2025

We develop a bottom-up approach to estimate the slope of the primitive form of the New Keynesian Phillips curve, which features marginal cost as the real activity variable. Using quarterly micro data on prices, costs, and output, we estimate dynamic pass-...

ASSA 2026 General Information

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Pricing with Algorithms

By Rohit Lamba and Sergey Zhuk

American Economic Review: Insights

This paper studies Markov perfect equilibria in a repeated duopoly model where sellers choose algorithms. An algorithm is a mapping from the competitor’s price to own price. Once set, the algorithms respond quickly. Customers arrive randomly and sell...

Message from the AEA Ombuds Team at MWI

[News]

November 04, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from November 5th, 2025.

Collusion by Exclusion in Public Procurement

By Regina Seibel and Samuel Škoda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper studies bid-rigging in auctions with bidder preselection. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the optimal behavior of partial bid-rigging cartels and show how commonly used two-stage auction formats, in which the first stage is used to...

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction

By Bernhard Kasberger and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction (CMRA) is a new auction format used in recent European spectrum auctions. We show that an auction-specific version of truthful bidding leads to an efficient allocation. We then characterize different ex-p...

Welfare of Competitive Price Discrimination with Captive Consumers

By Yanlin Chen, Xianwen Shi, and Jun Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study the welfare effects of price discrimination in a duopoly with both captive and contested consumers. Using a unified information design approach, we characterize the best and worst market segmentations for producer surplus, consumer surplus, an...

Retrospectives: W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard Economics, and Marginalist Wage Theory

By Daniel Kuehn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) is best known as a sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader, but he is also increasingly appreciated as an economist. Du Bois's work in economics was primarily empirical, drawing heavily on the German Historical Schoo...

China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Sebastian Horn, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of China's lending to developing countries—a central feature of today's international financial system. Building on our previous research and the work of others, we document the scale, destination, and terms ...

Comparing Experimental and Nonexperimental Methods: What Lessons Have We Learned Four Decades after LaLonde (1986)?

By Guido W. Imbens and Yiqing Xu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

In 1986, Robert LaLonde published an article comparing nonexperimental estimates to experimental benchmarks (LaLonde 1986). He concluded that the nonexperimental methods at the time could not systematically replicate experimental benchmarks, casting doubt...

Industrial Policy, Asian Miracle Style

[Symposium: The East Asian Tigers]

By Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

We decipher the riddle of the meteoric rise of the Asian Miracles—Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, and Japan before them—in the second half of the twentieth century. We argue that the secret of their success lies in the specific type of industr...

The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?

[Symposium: The East Asian Tigers]

By Nancy Birdsall

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

The 1993 publication of a World Bank book on the East Asian Miracle explained the extraordinarily rapid growth of Japan and seven other economies of East Asia (at 5 percent a year) between 1965 and 1990 as grounded in those economies' adherence to market ...

Putting US Fiscal Policy on a Sustainable Path

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

Even allowing for uncertainty about the future economy, current US fiscal policies are almost certainly unsustainable. Therefore, policymakers must decide when and in what ways to raise taxes and reduce spending to put debt on a lower trajectory. Acting s...

Sovereign Debt and Fiscal Integration in the European Union

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Zsolt Darvas, Lennard Welslau, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

This paper examines sovereign debt risks in the European Union, which has centralized monetary policy within the euro area, while fiscal policies remain national. Institutional reforms, including common banking supervision, the European Stability Mechanis...

Japan's Debt Puzzle: Sovereign Wealth Fund from Borrowed Money

[Symposium: Government Debt]

By Yili Chien, Wenxin Du, and Hanno Lustig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2025

We analyze the risks associated with Japan's prolonged low-interest rate policies amid a global environment of rising rates. To finance its persistent deficits, the Japanese public sector depends on inexpensive domestic funding to invest in risky assets b...