Sources of Limited Consideration and Market Power in E-Commerce

By Michael Rolland Sullivan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

This article develops techniques for the empirical analysis of repeated sequential search over unordered alternatives using data on consumer search processes. I use these techniques to assess why consumers conduct little search in e-commerce and often pay...

How to Allocate Money?

By Piotr Dworczak

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

I study a simple equity-efficiency problem: A designer allocates a fixed amount of money to a population of agents differing in privately observed marginal values for money. She can only screen by imposing an "ordeal"—that is, by allocating more money t...

Behavioral Communities and the Atomic Structure of Networks

By Matthew O. Jackson and Evan C. Storms

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

When people coordinate their behaviors with their friends—e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, protest against a government, attend university—divisions within a social network can lead to contrasting norms of behavior in different parts ...

Power, Property Rights, and the Dynamics of Local Wealth Appropriation

By Dan Cao, Roger Lagunoff, and Yingqi Xu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We examine the dynamic connections between local wealth inequality and the local politics of property rights. A jurisdiction comprises a politically dominant in-group and a marginalized out-group. At each date, the jurisdiction exploits weaknesses in due ...

Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions

By Shiri Alon and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We provide axioms that relate the preferences of each group in a society to the preferences of the subgroups contained in them. These axioms yield cardinal utility indices for each individual and a representation of group preferences as the group-dependen...

The Limits of Limited Commitment

By Jacopo Bizzotto, Toomas Hinnosaar, and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We study limited strategic leadership. A collection of subsets covering the leader's action space determines her commitment opportunities. We characterize the outcomes resulting from all possible commitment structures of this kind. If the commitment struc...

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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Real Credit Cycles

By Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Stephen J. Terry

American Economic Review

We embed diagnostic expectations in a workhorse neoclassical model with heterogeneous firms and risky debt. A realistic degree of overreaction estimated from US firms’ earnings forecasts generates realistic credit cycles. Good times produce economic a...

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...

A Long and a Short Leg Make For a Wobbly Equilibrium

By Nicolae Gârleanu, Stavros Panageas, and Geoffery Zheng

American Economic Review

We provide a model to explain how the interaction between the spot and lending markets for stocks can lead to abrupt changes in short selling activity. Furthermore, rational short sellers may choose to abandon the market even as mispricing widens. We d...

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...