Dominated Pension Investments: The Role of Search Frictions and Unawareness

By Karin Kinnerud and Louise Lorentzon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the Swedish pension system to examine to what extent information and search frictions explain dominated high-fee index fund choices. Three findings stand out: (i) Letters that increase awareness of a dominat...

Order Effects and Teacher Labor Supply: A Nation-Wide RCT in Ecuador

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Gregory Elacqua, Luana Marotta, and Anne Sofie Olsen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We evaluate a nationwide zero-cost intervention to reduce teacher sorting, where lower-income students are more likely to attend understaffed schools with less qualified teachers. Our approach was grounded in an insight from behavioral economics known as ...

The Economic Impacts of AI: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review

By Kevin A. Bryan

Journal of Economic Literature

This essay reviews seven books from the past dozen years by social scientists examining AI’s economic impact. These works offer valuable insights—AI as cheap prediction, architectural barriers to adoption, data as an economic asset, implementation cha...

Call for Papers: Los Angeles Annual Business Research Conference 2026

[News]

September 09, 2025

The submission deadline is December 20, 2025.

Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists by Maria Bach

By Alex M. Thomas

Journal of Economic Literature

On the Programmability and Uniformity of Digital Currencies

By Jonathan Chiu and Cyril Monnet

American Economic Review: Insights

Central bankers argue that programmable digital currencies may compromise the uniformity or singleness of money. We explore this view in a stylized model where programmable money arises endogenously, and differently programmed monies have varying liqui...

CSQIEP Award for Outstanding Research Paper in LGBTQ+ Economics

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Learn more about this annual award.

Reviewing residential segregation

[Research Highlight]

September 10, 2025

Trevon Logan and John Parman discuss the meaning of segregation and how it has shaped US history.

Racial Residential Segregation in the United States

By Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the United States. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and health care. There is an ever-evolving literature across the soci...

An Evolutionary Perspective on Updating Risk and Ambiguity Preferences

By Philipp Sadowski and Todd Sarver

American Economic Review: Insights

Using an evolutionary approach, we address the prominent tension in the literature that updating of ambiguity and non-expected-utility preferences cannot, in general, be both dynamically consistent and consequentialist. Perhaps not surprisingly, evoluti...

Prediction Errors, Incarceration, & Violent Crime: Evidence from Linking Prosecutor Surveys to Court Records

By Emma Harrington, William Murdock III, and Hannah Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Incarceration is often justified by a defendant’s risk of future crime. To what extent do biased beliefs about predictors of crime distort incarceration decisions? We survey prosecutors about how violent re-arrest rates vary by defendant age and crim...

Report on the Second AEA Member Survey on the Professional Climate in Economics

[News]

September 15, 2025

View the AEA Member Announcement from September 15th, 2025.

Concentration in Product Markets

By C. Lanier Benkard, Ali Yurukoglu, and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper measures concentration in narrowly defined product markets for a broad range of consumer goods and services in the U.S. from 1994 to 2019. We document two main empirical facts. First, concentration levels are high. 44.4% of the markets in ou...

Voter Information and Distributive Politics

By Benjamin Blumenthal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously-informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screenin...

Sharing Model Uncertainty

By Chiaki Hara, Sujoy Mukerji, Frank Riedel, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper examines efficient allocations in economies where consumers exhibit heterogeneous smooth ambiguity preferences and face model uncertainty with a common set of identifiable models. Aggregate endowment is ambiguous. We characterize economies ...

Medical Technology and Life Expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria

By Philipp Ager, Casper W. Hansen, and Peter Z. Lin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We examine the impact of the free supply of diphtheria antitoxin, the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease, on the historical health transition in Massachusetts. Using newly collected municipality-level data on the distribution of...

AEA Committees

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Learn about the Committees of the American Economic Association.

Federal Statistical System

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The 13 principal U.S. statistical agencies and their coordination

Call for Submissions for the ASSA Annual Meeting

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The Committee on Economic Statistics sponsors sessions every year at the ASSA Annual Meeting.