High School Effects on Civic Engagement

By Kirsten Slungaard Mumma

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Preparing young people for citizenship is a foundational purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education, birth, and voting records for nine cohorts of students in Indiana, I e...

Health Insurance and Access to Care for the Near Elderly

By Michael Anderson, Carlos Dobkin, Nicole Maestas, and Liam Rose

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

The vast majority of Americans become eligible for Medicare at age 65. This results in 7 percent of the near elderly transitioning from uninsurance to insurance and 60 percent switching from some source of insurance to Medicare. We develop an extension...

From Banks to Nonbanks: Macroprudential and Monetary Policy Effects on Corporate Lending

By Bruno Albuquerque, Eugenio Cerutti, Nanyu Chen, and Melih Firat

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

The growing role of nonbanks in corporate credit intermediation raises important yet underexplored questions about the transmission of monetary policy (MP) and macroprudential policy (MaPP) to the real economy. Using syndicated loan data, we find that ...

A Static Capital Buffer is Hard To Beat

By Matthew Canzoneri, Behzad Diba, Luca Guerrieri, and Arsenii Mishin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

In a model with endogenous risk-taking, deposit insurance and limited liability may lead banks to make risky loans that are socially inefficient. Capital requirements can prevent excessive risk-taking at the cost of reducing liquidity-producing bank dep...

Using Machine Learning to Generate, Clarify, and Improve Economic Models

By Annie Liang

Journal of Economic Literature

This article examines how machine learning and other computational techniques can contribute to the development of economic models. First, comparing economic models to flexible algorithms can help clarify the strengths and limitations of existing models,...

Becoming Legible to the State: The Necessary but Not Sufficient Role of Identification in Taxation

By Oyebola Okunogbe

American Economic Review

Many lower-income countries know little about their citizens and their tax bases, which hinders effective taxation. This paper studies the impact of making the tax base more “legible” to the state and signaling this legibility to taxpayers. Leveragi...

Sunk Cost: Who's to Blame for the Nation's Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It by Jillian Berman

By Michael Dinerstein

Journal of Economic Literature

The economics of sanctioning a petrostate

[Research Highlight]

July 27, 2026

Lukasz Rachel and Catherine Wolfram discuss the G7 price cap on Russian oil and why it defied textbook predictions.

A Theory of Price Caps on Nonrenewable Resources

By Simon Johnson, Lukasz Rachel, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Review, July 2026

What is the optimal response of a resource exporter when a price cap is imposed on its main export? This paper develops a dynamic framework incorporating stochastic prices, financial frictions, and market power to study this novel tool of statecraft. With...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

Welfare of Competitive Price Discrimination with Captive Consumers

By Yanlin Chen, Xianwen Shi, and Jun Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study the welfare effects of price discrimination in a duopoly with both captive and contested consumers. Using a unified information design approach, we characterize the best and worst market segmentations for producer surplus, consumer surplus, and s...

Sequential Protest Formation

By Benjamin Matta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

People participate in protests even though it is costly, benefits are not exclusive to participants, and each individual is unlikely to be pivotal. Building on these characteristics, I propose a sequential model of protest formation where opportunities to...

Liquidity Constraints and the Value of Insurance

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

Insurance moves resources across both time and states. We study the consumption-smoothing benefits of insurance under liquidity constraints in a model where contracts span multiple consumption periods. The normative benchmarks for insurance demand under l...

Failures of Contingent Reasoning in Annuitization Decisions

By Erzo F.P. Luttmer ⓡ Priscila De Oliveira ⓡ Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

This paper studies psychological biases in take-up of annuities, using an incentivized experiment with a probability-based sample (N = 3,038). Choosing an annuity was payoff-maximizing in the experiment at all prices, but take-up was incomplete and price ...

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction

By Bernhard Kasberger and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction (CMRA) is a new auction format used in recent European spectrum auctions. We show that an auction-specific version of truthful bidding leads to an efficient allocation. We then characterize different ex post...

Exploiting Rivals' Strengths

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We analyze oligopolistic competition in which firms use contracts contingent on what buyers purchase from their rivals. We present a new mechanism through which a dominant firm, by using these contracts, can gain more from exploiting its rivals than from ...

Product Liability Litigation and Innovation: Evidence from Medical Devices

By Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study the impact of product liability litigation on new product introductions by leading medical device firms. We find that the defendant firms, and other firms to a lesser extent, reduce their propensity to introduce new products in the litigated prod...

Collusion by Exclusion in Public Procurement

By Regina Seibel and Samuel Škoda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

This paper studies bid rigging in auctions with bidder preselection. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the optimal behavior of partial bid-rigging cartels and show how commonly used two-stage auction formats, in which the first stage is used to pr...

Optimal Design of Market Access

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study a data provider's problem of optimally designing and selling marketing lists that enable a retailer with private types to access consumers with heterogeneous characteristics. When virtual values satisfy a particular form of convexity (named bound...

Higher-Order Beliefs and (Mis)learning from Prices

By Kevin He and Jonathan Libgober

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study misperceptions of private-signal correlation in an incomplete-information Cournot duopoly game. Exaggerating the correlation between players' demand signals is beneficial when agents hold flexible beliefs about price elasticity but is harmful whe...