Backward Induction Reasoning beyond Backward Induction

By Emiliano Catonini and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Backward induction (BI) is only defined for perfect information games, but its logic is also invoked in many concepts for imperfect or incomplete information games. Yet, the meaning of BI reasoning is not clear in these settings, and we lack a way to capt...

Attitudes toward Success and Failure

By Larbi Alaoui and Antonio Penta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

Individuals often attach a special meaning to attaining a certain goal, and getting past a threshold marks the difference between success and failure. In this paper, we take a standard expected utility (EU) setting with an exogenous reference point that s...

Asymmetric Models of Sales

By David P. Myatt and David Ronayne

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We generalize the captive-and-shopper model of sales to allow asymmetries in production costs and captive audiences, in oligopoly. Both kinds of asymmetry determine the firms that compete (via randomized sales) to serve the price-comparing shoppers, while...

ASSA 2026 Annual Meeting

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2026 AEA Poster Videos

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Efficiency Criteria, Income Taxation, and Heterogeneous Elasticities

By John Sturm Becko and André Sztutman

American Economic Review

A common interpretation of Pareto-efficient policies is that, for some cardinal utility representations of preferences, they maximize utilitarian welfare. We show in the context of income taxation that such cardinalizations are often extreme, requiring...

Labor Market Competition and the Assimilation of Immigrants

By Christoph Albert, Albrecht Glitz, and Joan Llull

American Economic Review

This paper shows that the wage assimilation of immigrants is the result of the intricate interplay between individual skill accumulation and dynamic labor market equilibrium effects. When immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, rising immigrant ...

Effects of Parental Death on Labor Market Outcomes

By Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen and Ning Zhang

American Economic Review

We use Danish administrative data to examine the effects of parental death on labor market outcomes. Leveraging the timing of sudden, first parental deaths and a matched-control difference-in-differences strategy, we find that men's earnings decline by 2%...

Innovation and Competition on a Rugged Technological Landscape

By Steven Callander, Nicolas S. Lambert, and Niko Matouschek

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We propose a model of dynamic spatial competition over a rugged technological landscape where product quality is revealed only after market introduction. Firms enter sequentially, deciding whether and how to innovate—either beyond the frontier or within...

Targeted Advertising in Elections

By Maria Titova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted advertising enable...

Degree-Weighted Social Learning

By Chen Cheng, Xiao Han, Xin Tong, Yusheng Wu, and Yiqing Xing

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study social learning in which agents weight neighbors’ opinions differently based on their degrees, capturing situations in which agents place more trust in well-connected individuals or, conversely, discount their influence. We derive asymptotic...

The Lasting Effects of Working while in School: A Long-Term Follow-Up

By Mery Ferrando, Noemí Katzkowicz, Thomas Le Barbanchon, and Diego Ubfal

American Economic Review: Insights

This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the long-term effects of work-study programs, leveraging a randomized lottery design from a national program in Uruguay. Participation leads to a persistent 11 percent increase in formal labor earn...

A quiet revolution

[Research Highlight]

January 27, 2026

The role of faith-based government policies in reshaping Americans’ beliefs and values.

Innovation through Inventor Mobility: Evidence from Non-Compete Agreements

By Kate Reinmuth and Emma Rockall

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Proponents of labor mobility restrictions argue that innovation incentives more than offset harm to workers. Yet the causal effect of such policies on innovation is an open empirical question. Leveraging plausibly exogenous state-level changes in the en...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

Black Lives: The High Cost of Segregation

By Robynn Cox, Jamein P. Cunningham, Alberto Ortega, and Kenneth Whaley

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

Exploiting the arrangement of railroad tracks in northern cities, we explore the extent to which segregation impacts homicide victimization by race. Our results reveal a robust positive relationship between segregation and non-White homicide victimization...

Are Complementary Policies Substitutes? Evidence from R&D Subsidies in the United Kingdom

By Jacquelyn Pless

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

This paper studies whether grants and tax incentives for private R&D are complements or substitutes. I use multiple quasi-experimental research designs to examine firms in the United Kingdom and find that increasing tax credit generosity substantially enh...

Polling Place Location and the Costs of Voting

By Gaurav Bagwe ⓡ Juan Margitic ⓡ Allison Stashko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study how distance to one's polling place affects the likelihood of voting using a geographic regression discontinuity design with data from Pennsylvania and Georgia. A one-mile increase in distance to the polling place reduces the likelihood of voting...

Insecurity and Firm Displacement: Evidence from Afghan Corporate Phone Records

By Sylvan Herskowitz, Joshua E. Blumenstock, Tarek Ghani, Ethan B. Kapstein, Thomas L. Scherer, and Ott Toomet

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We provide empirical evidence on how insecurity affects firm behavior by linking data on deadly terrorist attacks in Afghanistan to geolocated data on corporate mobile phone activity. We first develop an approach to estimate the geographic footprint of fi...

Geographic Variation in Mental Health Treatment Utilization: Evidence from Migration

By Hui Ding

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

The older population bears a heavy burden of mental illness. Despite the availability of effective treatments, including services (e.g., psychotherapy) and drugs (e.g., antidepressants, antipsychotics), this paper documents substantial geographic variatio...