Financial Frictions: Micro versus Macro Volatility

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

American Economic Review, February 2026

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 dynamics a...

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, February 2026

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 inte...

"Potential" and the Gender Promotion Gap

By Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue

American Economic Review, February 2026

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 despite...

Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies

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

American Economic Review, February 2026

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

Take the Goods and Run: Contracting Frictions and Market Power in Supply Chains

By Felipe Brugués

American Economic Review, February 2026

This paper studies the efficiency of self-enforced relational agreements, a common solution to contracting frictions, when sellers have market power and contracts cannot be externally enforced. To this end, I develop a dynamic contracting model with limit...

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

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

American Economic Review, February 2026

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 captive le...

Work from Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse

By Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

American Economic Review, February 2026

We show remote work led to large drops in lease revenues, occupancy, and market rents in the commercial office sector. We revalue New York City office buildings, taking into account both the cash flow and discount rate implications of these shocks, and fi...

A Theory of Supply Function Choice and Aggregate Supply

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

American Economic Review, February 2026

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 c...

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars

By Pascaline Dupas, Amy Handlan, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Mateo Seré, Haoyu Sheng, Justin Wolfers, and Seminar Dynamics Collective

American Economic Review, February 2026

We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks, and conference presentations, leveraging human judgment and audio-processing algorithms to ...

Schedule and Pricing

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Specialized Field Journals

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AEASTAT: 2026 Annual Meeting

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Sessions for AEA Committee on Economic Statistics, ASSA Annual Meeting

AEA Ombuds Team

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When Democracy Falters: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review Essay on Polarization, Populism, and Authoritarianism

By Betsey Stevenson

Journal of Economic Literature

This multibook review argues that identity-driven polarization interacts with institutional design to erode democratic guardrails. Reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage, an...

Innovations and Issues in Monetary Policy: Panel Discussion

By Martin Feldstein, Mervyn King, and Janet L. Yellen

American Economic Review, May 2004

The Labor Market for New Ph.D. Economists: Panel Discussion

By Alan J. Auerbach, Francine D. Blau, and John B. Shoven

American Economic Review, May 2004

The Underrepresentation of Minority Faculty in Higher Education: Panel Discussion

By John Brooks Slaughter, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, and Eric A. Hanushek

American Economic Review, May 2004

American Economic Review: Insights — Editor Search: Request for Suggestions

[News]

February 03, 2026

View the AEA Member Announcement from February 3, 2026.

The hidden social costs of cancer

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A Danish study shows that an adverse health shock increases the chances of criminal behavior.

Antitrust Enforcement in Labor Markets

[Symposium: Competition in Labor Markets]

By Elena Prager

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Until recently, antitrust laws were rarely enforced in labor markets. Although the existence of labor market power has long been recognized, evidence only recently emerged that such market power regularly arises from sources that are actionable under anti...