Just a Few Seeds More: The Value of Network Data for Diffusion

By Mohammad Akbarpour, Suraj Malladi, and Amin Saberi

American Economic Review, November 2025

Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information ("seeds") in a social network to maximize expected diffusion is a widely studied question in many settings. Several studies propose network-centrality-based heuristics to select seeds...

Default Options and Retirement Saving Dynamics

By Taha Choukhmane

American Economic Review, November 2025

Using data from over 100 US retirement plans and a representative UK panel, I document the impact of auto-enrollment (AE) on retirement savings at different horizons. I replicate the impact of AE on participation and contributions in the short run (at 12 ...

A Preferred-Habitat Model of Term Premia, Exchange Rates, and Monetary Policy Spillovers

By Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Walker Ray, and Dimitri Vayanos

American Economic Review, November 2025

We develop a two-country model in which currency and bond markets are populated by different investor clienteles, and segmentation is partly overcome by arbitrageurs with limited capital. Risk premia in our model are time-varying, connected across markets...

Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillovers, and Industrial Quality Upgrading: Evidence from the Chinese Auto Industry

By Jie Bai, Panle Jia Barwick, Shengmao Cao, and Shanjun Li

American Economic Review, November 2025

This paper studies the impact of quid pro quo (technology for market access) in facilitating knowledge spillovers and quality upgrading in the Chinese automobile industry. The identification strategy exploits within-product quality variation across a rich...

Nonlinear Pricing and Misallocation

By Gideon Bornstein and Alessandra Peter

American Economic Review, November 2025

This paper studies the effect of nonlinear pricing on markups and misallocation. In a general equilibrium model in which firms are allowed to set a quantity-dependent pricing schedule, markup heterogeneity is not a sign of misallocation. Instead, we point...

Borrowing and Spending in the Money: Debt Substitution and the Cash-Out Refinance Channel of Monetary Policy

By Elliot Anenberg, Tess Scharlemann, and Eileen van Straelen

American Economic Review, November 2025

We show that the strong negative effect of higher mortgage rates on cash-out refinancing reflects substitution into other borrowing products, not large changes in total new household borrowing. We exploit plausibly exogenous changes in interest rates due ...

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-...

The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong by Rebecca Haw Allensworth

By Gabriel Scheffler

Journal of Economic Literature

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...

Survivors’ Mental Health and the Protective Role of Income Stability

By Itzik Fadlon, Astrid S. Fugleholm, and Torben H. Nielsen

American Economic Review: Insights

We use administrative records on the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors’ mental health following their spouse’s death. We provide visually clear evidence for the immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts and focus on study...

Message from the AEA Ombuds Team at MWI

[News]

November 04, 2025

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

Disagreement About Monetary Policy

By Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

This paper studies why central banks and markets hold different beliefs. I introduce a model that formalizes three mechanisms for disagreement: asymmetric information about fundamentals, different perceptions of the policy rule, and different confidence...

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...