Quality and Imperfect Competition

By Germain Gaudin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We study quality distortions when firms hold market power. We develop a model allowing for flexible functional forms of demand in order to extend Spence's (1975) monopoly analysis to imperfect competition. We show that quality distortions are determined b...

The Organization of Innovation: Incomplete Contracts and the Outsourcing Decision

By Thomas Jungbauer, Sean Nicholson, June Pan, Michael Waldman, and Lucy Xiaolu Wang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Why do firms outsource research and development (R&D) for some products while conducting R&D in-house for similar ones? An innovating firm risks cannibalizing its existing products. The more profitable these products, the more the firm wants to limit ...

The Effect of Mergers on Innovation

By Kaustav Das, Tatiana Mayskaya, and Arina Nikandrova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We study the effect of a merger on R&D activity in a dynamic model with uncertainty about the feasibility of innovation. The merger has three effects: It may reduce the number of follow-up innovations (cannibalization effect), increase the probability of ...

Sharing Model Uncertainty

By Chiaki Hara, Sujoy Mukerji, Frank Riedel, and Jean-Marc Tallon

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

This paper examines efficient allocations in economies where consumers exhibit heterogeneous smooth ambiguity preferences and face model uncertainty with a common set of identifiable models. Aggregate endowment is ambiguous. We characterize economies wher...

A Measure of Behavioral Heterogeneity

By Jose Apesteguia and Miguel A. Ballester

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

In this paper, we propose a novel way to measure behavioral heterogeneity in a population of stochastic individuals. Our measure is choice-based; it evaluates the probability that, over a randomly selected menu, the sampled choices of two sampled individu...

Opportunity Hunters: A Model of Competitive Sequential Inspections

By Ran Eilat, Zvika Neeman, and Eilon Solan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

We introduce a new type of games, called "opportunity-hunting games," in which two players compete to discover an uncertain event ("opportunity") that occurs at an unobserved and random point in time. Players can inspect whether the event has already occu...

Concentration in Product Markets

By C. Lanier Benkard, Ali Yurukoglu, and Anthony Lee Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

This paper measures concentration in narrowly defined product markets for a broad range of consumer goods and services in the United States from 1994 to 2019. We document two main empirical facts. First, concentration levels are high. Of the markets in ou...

Self-Enforced Job Matching

By Ce Liu, Ziwei Wang, and Hanzhe Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Complementarities and peer effects are common in matching markets, yet incorporating them often leads to nonexistence of stable matchings. We observe that matching is often an ongoing process rather than a static allocation, where long-lived firms interac...

Voter Information and Distributive Politics

By Benjamin Blumenthal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2026

Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screening o...

Quantifying the Role of Firms in Intergenerational Mobility

By Caue Dobbin and Tom Zohar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We quantify the role of firms in intergenerational mobility using administrative data from Israel. We decompose the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE) into an individual-IGE and a firm-IGE using an AKM framework. The firm-IGE—reflecting t...

Annual Elections and Other Announcements

[News]

April 28, 2026

View the AEA Member Announcement from April 28, 2026.

Reference List Entries for Datasets and Registered Studies

[Page]

Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI

By Eleanor W. Dillon, Sonia Jaffe, Nicole Immorlica, and Christopher T. Stanton

American Economic Review: Insights

We present evidence from a field experiment across 66 firms and 7,137 knowledge workers. Workers were randomly selected to access a generative AI tool integrated into applications they already used at work for email, meetings, and writing. In the secon...

Did Recent Inflation Reflect a Nonlinear Phillips Curve?

By Paul Beaudry, Chenyu Hou, and Franck Portier

American Economic Review: Insights

To examine the potential role of a nonlinear Phillips curve in explaining recent US inflation, we combine evidence from both crosscity variation and aggregate time series data. A central challenge relates to how best to control for the potential confou...

ⓡ Random Order of Author Names

[Page]

Authors may opt to publish joint papers in random order of coauthors with the symbol ⓡ between author names.

ⓡ Random Order of Author Names

[Page]

Authors may opt to publish joint papers in random order of coauthors with the symbol ⓡ between author names.

Monopolistic Data Dumping

By Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

A profit-maximizing monopolist curates a database for users seek- ing to learn a parameter. There are two user types: "Nowcasters" wish to learn the parameter's current value, while "forecasters" target its long-run value. Data storage involves a const...

A Laboratory Test of Flow Trading

By Daniel Friedman, Yilin Li, and Kristian López Vargas

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Perceived shortcomings in the dominant asset market format, CDA, have provoked reform proposals including Flow, which features gradual trading. We report a laboratory experiment comparing formats in a simple single-asset private values environment. We ...

How Costly Are Cartels?

By Flavien Moreau and Ludovic Panon

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We study the cost of cartels in an oligopoly model with het- erogeneous firms, endogenous markups, and collusion. Cartels can amplify or dampen misallocation, by charging supracompetitive markups and reallocating demand towards non-colluding firms. Usi...

Disruption and Displacement in Health Care: Evidence from Nursing Home Closures

By Andrew Olenski

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper examines the impacts of health care provider exits on patient outcomes and displacement. Leveraging data on the universe of long-stay nursing home patients, I estimate the mortality effects of 1,104 nursing home closures using a difference-in...