Shaping Institutions

By William Fuchs and Satoshi Fukuda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We propose a simple model of the evolution of institutional strength, where leaders' actions have a persistent effect by shaping the norms of the institutions they lead. This leads to different long-run behaviors even for institutions with the same form...

Campaign Connections

By Samuel Bazzi and Claudio Labanca

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper explores the labor market returns to working for a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track campaign workers’ employment and earnings before and after close mayoral elections over nearly 20 years...

Sovereign Debt Restructuring and Reduction in Debt-to-GDP Ratio

By Sakai Ando, Tamon Asonuma, Prachi Mishra, and Alexandre Sollaci

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

How do sovereign debt restructurings affect debt-to-GDP ratios? We explore this empirically using a comprehensive dataset covering 115 countries over 1950–2021. After addressing selection bias through an Augmented Inverse Probability Weighted estimator,...

General Equilibrium Effects in Space: Theory and Measurement

By Rodrigo Adão, Costas Arkolakis, and Federico Esposito

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We examine the general-equilibrium effect of the China shock on US regions. We demonstrate that spatial linkages intensify the shock’s negative impact on employment across regions, leading to differential effects that are substantially larger than predi...

Today’s Ombuds Drop-In Hour and Recognition for Team Member Dr. Brent Epperson

[News]

June 23, 2026

View the AEA Member Announcement from June 24, 2026.

Comment on “Development Effects of Electrification: Evidence from the Topographic Placement of Hydropower Plants in Brazil”

By Jörg Ankel-Peters, Gunther Bensch, and Colin Vance

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Lipscomb, Mobarak, and Barham (2013) document large positive effects of electrification in Brazil due to broad-based improvements in labor productivity. They instrument electrification by simulating a hypothetical power grid roll-out driven solely by ge...

On the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks on Income and Consumption Heterogeneity

By Minsu Chang and Frank Schorfheide

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We use the functional autoregressive framework of Chang, Chen, and Schorfheide (2024) to examine the effects of monetary policy shocks on the cross-sectional distributions of U.S. earnings, consumption, and financial income. An expansionary shock reduces ...

Time-Varying Cost of Distancing: Distancing Fatigue and Lockdowns

By Christoph Carnehl, Satoshi Fukuda, and Nenad Kos

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We study a behavioral SIR model with time-varying costs of distancing. We explore the consequences of distancing fatigue and public policies. For a second wave to arise, a steep increase in distancing cost is necessary. We introduce prudent distancing ...

An Experimental Implementation of the Core

By Ailin Leng

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This study experimentally examines a non-cooperative implementation of the core. The protocol adopts a continuous-time frame, which allows a flexible coalition formation process. In the experiment, the core can be a singleton, a set of points that exclu...

Increasing Employment with Coarse Information

By Surajeet Chakravarty, Todd R. Kaplan, and Luke Lindsay

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We investigate whether an agency can increase employment by strategically coarsening information provided to employers about workers' skills. Theoretically, we find that such an increase is possible under fixed wages, and a range of employment levels c...

The Dynamics of Global Sourcing

By Trang Hoang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

This paper studies a model of heterogeneous importers that incorporates static cross-country interdependence and dynamic dependence in firmlevel decisions. Using data on Chinese importers between 2000–2006, I find that source countries are complement...

Coordination with Cognitive Noise

By Cary Frydman and Salvatore Nunnari

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We experimentally study how cognitive noise affects behavior in coordination games. Our key testable prediction is that equilibrium behavior depends on context, which we define as the distribution from which games are drawn. This prediction arises from ...

How Border and Distance Effects Shape the Multinational Wage Premium

By Hartmut Egger, Elke Jahn, and Udo Kreickemeier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

The multinational wage premium is well documented across countries. Using a new German dataset, we identify two previously overlooked determinants. First, wages paid by foreign multinationals in German plants increase with the distance between headquarte...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

The Dynamic Effects of Cash Transfers to Agricultural Households

By Shilpa Aggarwal, Jenny C. Aker, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

Little is known about the evolution and persistence of the effects of one-time cash transfers, especially in rural agricultural settings with limited productive investment opportunities. We use bimonthly phone surveys to estimate dynamic impacts for cash ...

The Political Geography of Cities

By Richard Bluhm, Christian Lessmann, and Paul Schaudt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

We study the link between regional capitals and urban development. We exploit new global data on hundreds of first-order administrative and capital city reforms from 1987 until 2018 to estimate the capital city premium. Gaining capital status increases ci...

Order Effects and Teacher Labor Supply: A Nationwide RCT in Ecuador

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Gregory Elacqua, Luana Marotta, and Anne Sofie Olsen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

We evaluate a nationwide zero-cost intervention to reduce teacher sorting, where lower-income students are more likely to attend understaffed schools with less qualified teachers. Our approach was grounded in an insight from behavioral economics known as ...

Dominated Pension Investments: The Role of Search Frictions and Unawareness

By Karin Kinnerud and Louise Lorentzon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the Swedish pension system to examine to what extent information and search frictions explain dominated high-fee index fund choices. Three findings standout: (i) Letters that increase awareness of a dominated c...

Which Reference Groups Matter and How? A Relative Income Information Experiment with Administrative Data

By Xiaogeng Xu, Satu Metsälampi, Michael Kirchler, Kaisa Kotakorpi, Peter Hans Matthews, and Topi Miettinen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

Received wisdom holds that income rank matters for life satisfaction, but causal evidence on the nature and impact of income comparisons is limited. We randomize individuals from a representative sample of mid-career Finns to receive personal rank informa...

The Welfare Economics of Reference Dependence

By Daniel Reck and Arthur Seibold

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2026

We analyze welfare under reference-dependent preferences. We decompose the first-order welfare effects of reference point and price changes into direct and behavioral effects. The sign of these effects depends on the form of reference-dependent payoffs; w...