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...

The Effect of Omitted Variables on the Sign of Regression Coefficients

By Matthew A. Masten and Alexandre Poirier

American Economic Review

We show that, depending on how the impact of omitted variables is measured, it can be substantially easier for omitted variables to flip coefficient signs than to drive them to zero. This behavior occurs with “Oster’s delta” (Oster 2019b), a widel...

Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

By Felipe Gonçalves, Elisa Jácome, and Emily Weisburst

American Economic Review

We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety. We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communit...

Designing Dynamic Reassignment Mechanisms: Evidence from GP Allocation

By Ingrid Huitfeldt, Victoria Marone, and Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Review

We study the problem of designing a dynamic reassignment mechanism when agents’ preferences over objects change over time. In the context of Norway’s system for (re)assigning patients to general practitioners (GPs), we provide direct evidence of mis...

Merger Effects and Antitrust Enforcement: Evidence from US Consumer Packaged Goods

By Vivek Bhattacharya, Gastón Illanes, and David Stillerman

American Economic Review

We document the effects of a comprehensive set of mergers of US consumer packaged goods manufacturers on prices, quantities, and product assortment. Across specifications, we find a small average price effect of mergers (-0.5% to 1.1%) but substantial ...

Manipulation-Robust Prediction

By Daniel Björkegren, Joshua E. Blumenstock, and Samsun Knight

American Economic Review

An increasing number of decisions are guided by machine learning algorithms. But when consequential decisions are encoded in algorithms, individuals may strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired outcomes. This paper develops an empirical ap...

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

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Committee on Professional Climate

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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

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