Fiscal Procyclicality in Commodity Exporting Countries: How Much Does It Pour and Why?

By Francisco Arroyo Marioli and Carlos A. Vegh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

A large literature has documented that fiscal policy is procyclical in emerging markets/developing countries and acyclical/countercyclical in advanced economies. This paper analyzes fiscal procyclicality in commodity-exporting countries. The paper makes t...

State Recreational Cannabis Laws and Racial Disparities in the Criminal Legal System

By Angélica Meinhofer, Adrian Rubli, and Jamein P. Cunningham

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

We estimate the direct and spillover effects of cannabis legalization on longstanding racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. We find that legalization reduces cannabis possession and sales arrests for White and Black populations, narrowing but n...

Prediction Errors, Incarceration, and Violent Crime: Evidence from Linking Prosecutor Surveys to Court Records

By Emma Harrington, William III Murdock, and Hannah Shaffer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

Incarceration is often justified by a defendant's risk of future crime. To what extent do biased beliefs about predictors of crime distort incarceration decisions? We survey prosecutors about how violent rearrest rates vary by defendant age and criminal h...

Short- and Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool: Evidence from the Arab Population in Israel

By Elad DeMalach and Analia Schlosser

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

We estimate the causal impacts of universal preschool by leveraging a quasi-experimental design based on Israel's implementation of free public preschool for children ages 3 and 4 beginning in September 1999. We focus on the Arab population, who were the ...

Medical Technology and Life Expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria

By Philipp Ager, Casper W. Hansen, and Peter Z. Lin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

We examine the impact of the free supply of diphtheria antitoxin, the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease, on the historical health transition in Massachusetts. Using newly collected municipality-level data on the distribution of a...

Punishing Financial Crimes: The Impact of Prison Sentences on Defendants and Their Colleagues

By Kristiina Huttunen, Martti Kaila, David C. Macdonald, and Emily Nix

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

Financial crimes are costly to society but less severely punished than other nonviolent crimes. We investigate whether prison sentences reduce financial crimes. Using random assignment of judges in Finland to identify causal impacts, we find a prison sent...

Cooking, Health, and Daily Exposure to Pollution Spikes

By Susanna B. Berkouwer and Joshua T. Dean

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

Many routine daily activities—such as cooking and commuting—cause large recurring pollution spikes that may impact health without significantly affecting average exposure. We study pollution spikes by combining experimental variation in cooking techno...

Information on Co-Impact Grant Awarded to CSWEP and CPC

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Information on Co-Impact Grant Awarded to CPC and CSWEP

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Lawrence F. Katz, Distinguished Fellow 2026

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Distinguished Fellows

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Learn more about the Distinguished Fellows Award and recipients

Risk Sharing Tests and Covariate Shocks: Drought, Floods, and Pests in Uganda

By Ethan Ligon

American Economic Review

Efficient risk-sharing implies a simple factor structure for marginal utilities of expenditure (MUEs): Pareto weights divided by a common price. The standard approach infers MUEs from total expenditures, implicitly assuming homothetic preferences, unit...

CTREE Conference 2026

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May 27–29, 2026 | Rio Hotel, Las Vegas

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2026

Production and Financial Networks in Interplay

By Kenan Huremović, Gabriel Jiménez, Enrique Moral-Benito, José-Luis Peydró, and Fernando Vega-Redondo

American Economic Review, May 2026

We show that bank shocks to firms propagate along the production network with stronger upstream than downstream effects. Our identification relies on (i) administrative datasets from Spain covering supplier-customer transactions and bank loans, (ii) bank ...

Social Preferences over Ordinal Outcomes

By Sandro Ambuehl and B. Douglas Bernheim

American Economic Review, May 2026

We study social preferences in settings where someone who chooses on behalf of others knows how those individuals rank the available options but may lack cardinal information concerning those comparisons. Contrary to majoritarian principles, most people p...

The Gender Pay Gap: Micro Sources and Macro Consequences

By Iacopo Morchio and Christian Moser

American Economic Review, May 2026

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, ame...

Effects of Parental Death on Labor Market Outcomes

By Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen and Ning Zhang

American Economic Review, May 2026

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 ...

The Effect of Field Training Officers on Police Use of Force

By Chandon Adger, Matthew B. Ross, and CarlyWill Sloan

American Economic Review, May 2026

The influence of on-the-job training and supervisors, especially in high-stakes settings like policing, is poorly understood. Examining a central behavior in the debate surrounding police reform, we investigate the impact of a field training officer (FTO)...

The Attention-Information Trade-Off

By Marta Serra-Garcia

American Economic Review, May 2026

How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? This paper combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals' incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experime...