Exogenous Exits, Market Structure, and Equilibrium Contracts in Health Care

By Natalia Serna

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

This paper quantifies the causal effects of exogenous health insurer exits on contract structure and health care market outcomes, proposing market concentration as a likely mechanism for these effects. Leveraging the termination of the largest health insu...

Consumer-Financed Fiscal Stimulus: Evidence from Digital Coupons in China

By Jing Ding, Lei Jiang, Lucy Msall, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

In 2020, local governments in China began issuing digital coupons to stimulate spending in targeted categories such as restaurants and supermarkets. Using data from a large e-commerce platform and a bunching estimation approach, we find that the coupons c...

Quantifying Threshold Manipulation in the Presence of Rounding: The Case of Lead Monitoring in US Drinking Water

By Tihitina Andarge, Dalia Ghanem, David A. Keiser, and Gabriel E. Lade

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

Many laws and economic actions depend on thresholds. As a consequence, threshold manipulation is a common concern in a variety of settings. Existing methods for detecting and quantifying threshold manipulation assume a continuous counterfactual distributi...

Discrimination in the Formation of Academic Networks: A Field Experiment on #EconTwitter

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Bruno Ferman, and Pedro C. Sant'Anna

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

This paper documents discrimination in the formation of professional networks among academic economists. We created 80 bot accounts that claim to be PhD students differing in three characteristics: gender (male or female), race (Black or White), and unive...

A Theory of Fair CEO Pay

By Pierre Chaigneau, Alex Edmans, and Daniel Gottlieb

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

This paper studies executive pay with fairness concerns: If the CEO's wage falls below a perceived fair share of output, he suffers disutility that is increasing in the discrepancy. Fairness concerns do not always lead to fair wages; instead, the firm thr...

Interpreting TSLS Estimators in Information Provision Experiments

By Vod Vilfort and Whitney Zhang

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

In information provision experiments, researchers often estimate the causal effects of beliefs on actions using two-stage least squares (TSLS). This paper formalizes exclusion and monotonicity conditions that ensure that TSLS recovers a positive-weighted ...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2025

The long-term impacts of Reconstruction-era education

[Research Highlight]

August 25, 2025

How did educational opportunities after the American Civil War shape economic outcomes for Black families?

Reconstruction-Era Education and Long-Run Black-White Inequality

By Daniel B. Jones and Ethan Schmick

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

The Reconstruction era of American history (c. 1866–1877) saw widespread efforts to educate recently freed people—efforts that were partially curtailed after Reconstruction. This paper examines the impact of childhood exposure to educational opportuni...

AEA Continuing Education: Recent Developments Lectures

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Learn about the AEA's annual program for continuing education.

Editors

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Current editors and editorial staff of the AEJ: Applied Economics.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2025

Imperfect Competition and Rents in Labor and Product Markets: The Case of the Construction Industry

By Kory Kroft, Yao Luo, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

American Economic Review, September 2025

We develop, identify, and estimate a model of imperfect competition in both labor and product markets. Our context is the US construction industry, where firms compete for workers, private market projects, and government procurements. Our empirical approa...

Nested Bundling

By Frank Yang

American Economic Review, September 2025

A nested bundling strategy creates menus in which more expensive bundles include all the goods of less expensive ones. We study when nested bundling is optimal and determine which nested menu is optimal, when consumers differ in one dimension. We define a...

Labor Market Power, Self-Employment, and Development

By Francesco Amodio, Pamela Medina, and Monica Morlacco

American Economic Review, September 2025

This paper shows that self-employment shapes labor market power in low-income countries, with implications for industrial development. Using Peruvian data, we find that wage-setting power increases with employer concentration but less so where self-employ...

Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

By Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker

American Economic Review, September 2025

We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This "offset" ...

The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income

By Amelia Hawkins, Christopher Hollrah, Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, Gloria Aldana, and Mitchell Wong

American Economic Review, September 2025

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthl...

Test-Optional Admissions

By Wouter Dessein, Alex Frankel, and Navin Kartik

American Economic Review, September 2025

Many US colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say, with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve decisions? This pap...

Market-Wide Predictable Price Pressure

By Samuel M. Hartzmark and David H. Solomon

American Economic Review, September 2025

We demonstrate that predictable uninformed cash flows forecast aggregate market stock returns. Buying pressure from dividend payments (announced weeks prior) predicts higher value-weighted market returns, with returns for the top quintile of payment days ...

A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory

By Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs

American Economic Review, September 2025

We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discredit...