Mental Accounts and Consumption Sensitivity across the Distribution of Liquid Assets

By James Graham and Robert A. McDowall

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We study consumption spending responses to predictable income using household-level data from a US financial institution. Even for households with large liquid asset balances, we find no spending in anticipation of income receipt, substantial spending fol...

Parallel Digital Currencies and Sticky Prices

By Harald Uhlig and Taojun Xie

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

The rise of digital currencies may result in domestic parallel currencies. Their exchange rate shocks present new challenges for monetary policy. We analyze these issues in a New Keynesian framework. Firms set prices in one of the currencies. A one-time a...

2025 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 16, 2025

Economists addressed issues related to automation, climate change, industrial policy, and more.

Front Matter

American Economic Review, January 2026

Across-Country Wage Compression in Multinationals

By Jonas Hjort, Xuan Li, and Heather Sarsons

American Economic Review, January 2026

Many employers link wages at establishments outside of the home region to the level at headquarters. We show this using new data on 1,200 multinationals' establishments across the world and linked employee-level data on their establishments in Brazil. Hea...

The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter

American Economic Review, January 2026

We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts...

Risk Preferences and Field Behavior: The Relevance of Higher-Order Risk Preferences

By Sebastian O. Schneider and Matthias Sutter

American Economic Review, January 2026

Using new methods, we measure the intensities of higher-order risk preferences (prudence and temperance) in an incentivized experiment with 658 adolescents. Aligned with theory, we find that higher-order risk preferences are strongly related to field beha...

Optimal Taxation and Market Power

By Jan Eeckhout, Chunyang Fu, Wenjian Li, and Xi Weng

American Economic Review, January 2026

Should optimal income taxation change when firms have market power? We analyze how the planner can optimally tax labor income of workers and profits of entrepreneurs. We derive optimal tax rates that depend on markups and identify four distinct components...

Monetary Cooperation during Global Inflation Surges

By Luca Fornaro and Federica Romei

American Economic Review, January 2026

We study optimal monetary policy during times of global scarcity of tradable goods. The optimal monetary response entails a surge in inflation, which helps rebalance production toward the tradable sector. While the inflation costs are fully borne domestic...

Monotonicity among Judges: Evidence from Judicial Panels and Consequences for Judge IV Designs

By Henrik Sigstad

American Economic Review, January 2026

Judge IV designs rely on monotonicity—each judge being weakly stricter than more lenient judges in all cases. I measure monotonicity in judicial panels in five different settings and find that it is violated in up to 50 percent of nonunanimous cases. Th...

Sequential Learning under Informational Ambiguity

By Jaden Yang Chen

American Economic Review, January 2026

This paper investigates a sequential social learning problem in which individuals face ambiguity about others' signal structures and have max-min expected utility preferences, thereby exhibiting ambiguity aversion. Unlike previous findings, which suggest ...

Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming

By Philipp Ager, Marc Goñi, and Kjell G. Salvanes

American Economic Review, January 2026

This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in twentieth-century Norway. In the 1950s, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace milking cows by hand, a task typically performed by you...

Racial Disparities in Housing Returns

By Amir Kermani and Francis Wong

American Economic Review, January 2026

We show that higher rates of distressed home sales (i.e., foreclosures and short sales) among Black and Hispanic homeowners severely reduce realized housing returns for these groups—in particular, to a level below that realized by White homeowners. Yet ...

Tying with Network Effects

By Jay Pil Choi, Doh-Shin Jeon, and Michael D. Whinston

American Economic Review, January 2026

We develop a leverage theory of tying in markets with network effects. When a monopolist in one market cannot perfectly extract surplus from consumers, tying can be a mechanism through which unexploited consumer surplus is used as a demand-side leverage t...

Past Journal Editors

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JOE Openings by Week - Pre-ASSA

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The Value of School Social Climate Information: Evidence from Chicago Housing Transactions

By Rene A. Crespin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

I study how publicly released school social climate information is capitalized into housing markets and affects household sorting. Using the initial release of school climate ratings in Chicago as a plausibly exogenous information shock, I combine a borde...

ASSA 2025 Live-Streamed Sessions

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2026 AEA Excellence Awards & Distinguished Address

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2026 AEA Presidential Address

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