Raising the Stakes: Physician Facility Investments and Provider Agency

By Elizabeth L. Munnich, Michael R. Richards, Christopher M. Whaley, and Xiaoxi Zhao

American Economic Review

Principal-agent problems often extend beyond what can be directly addressed through conventional incentive arrangements. We examine a context where physicians are likely under-incentivized to minimize total medical costs until their private financial i...

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

Consumer Credit and the Incidence of Tariffs: Evidence from the Auto Industry

By Kristine W. Hankins, Morteza Momeni, and David Sovich

American Economic Review

Captive finance subsidiaries create a channel for trade policy to affect consumer credit. Examining the impact of the Trump administration’s metal tariffs on captive automobile lenders, we find that consumers received higher interest rates from captiv...

Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá’s TransMilenio

By Nick Tsivanidis

American Economic Review

This paper estimates the effects of improving public transit infrastructure on city structure and welfare. It develops a sufficient statistics approach common to a class of quantitative urban models, and estimates the elasticities needed to implement the ...

Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies

By Rodrigo Carril, Andres Gonzalez-Lira, and Michael S. Walker

American Economic Review

We study the effects of intensifying competition for contracts in the context of U.S. Defense procurement. Leveraging a discontinuous regulation that mandates agencies to publicize certain contract opportunities, we document that expanding the set of bidd...

A Theory of Supply Function Choice and Aggregate Supply

By Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, and Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Review

Modern theories of aggregate supply are built on the foundation that firms set prices and commit to producing whatever the market demands. We remove this strategic restriction and allow firms to choose supply functions, mappings that describe the prices...

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“Potential” and the Gender Promotion Gap

By Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue

American Economic Review

We show that subjective assessments of employee “potential” contribute to gender gaps in promotion and pay. Using data on 29,809 management-track employees from a large retail chain, we find that women receive substantially lower potential ratings ...

Financial Frictions: Micro vs Macro Volatility

By Renato Faccini, Seungcheol Lee, Ralph Luetticke, Morten O. Ravn, and Tobias Renkin

American Economic Review

We argue that consumer credit spreads matter for household choices and that time-varying spreads have important distributional consequences. Studying Danish household data, we show that consumer credit spreads have heterogeneous impact on asset dynamic...

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...

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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...

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...