Disentangling Probabilistic and Strategic Errors

By Sen Geng and Menglong Guan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

In many strategic environments with asymmetric information, systematic decision mistakes can arise from two sources: failures in probabilistic reasoning when updating beliefs and incorrect strategic inference about opponents’ private information or c...

The risk of research

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How do companies weigh the tradeoffs with R&D investment?

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2026

Remote Work and City Structure

By Ferdinando Monte, Charly Porcher, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, August 2026

Relative to remote work, working downtown facilitates valuable interactions with other in-office workers but entails commuting costs. The resulting coordination mechanism can lead to multiple stationary equilibria with varying levels of remote work. Tempo...

Professional Motivations in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Officers

By Aaron Chalfin and Felipe Gonçalves

American Economic Review, August 2026

We study how public sector workers balance their professional motivations with private economic concerns, focusing on police arrests. Arrests made near the end of an officer's shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest ...

Uncertainty and Change: Survey Evidence of Firms' Subjective Beliefs

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Kai Carstensen, Stefan Lautenbacher, Manuel Menkhoff, and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, August 2026

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new panel survey of German manufacturing firms, we observe both forecasts of sales growth and a quantitative measure of subjective uncertainty. We show that subjective uncertainty reflects chang...

Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets

By Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ashley Langer, and Mar Reguant

American Economic Review, August 2026

Natural gas has replaced coal as the dominant fuel for US electricity generation. However, utilities in regulated US states have retired coal more slowly than others. We build a structural model of rate-of-return regulation during an energy transition whe...

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

By Vivek Bhattacharya, Gastón Illanes, and David Stillerman

American Economic Review, August 2026

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

Designing Dynamic Reassignment Mechanisms: Evidence from GP Allocation

By Ingrid Huitfeldt, Victoria Marone, and Daniel Waldinger

American Economic Review, August 2026

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 misalloca...

Random Utility with Unobservable Alternatives

By Haruki Kono, Kota Saito, and Alec Sandroni

American Economic Review, August 2026

The random utility model (RUM), a cornerstone in economics, is typically studied under the assumption that choice frequencies of all alternatives are observable. In practice, however, some alternatives have unobservable choice frequencies and are commonly...

The Productivity of Professions: Evidence from the Emergency Department

By David Chan and Yiqun Chen

American Economic Review, August 2026

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus...

Additionality and Asymmetric Information in Environmental Markets: Evidence from Conservation Auctions

By Karl M. Aspelund and Anna Russo

American Economic Review, August 2026

Mechanisms that aim to reduce environmental degradation at low cost can be undermined when participants' conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive—or "additional"—as the lowest-cost participants may not be the highest social value. We inv...

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

By Felipe Gonçalves, Elisa Jácome, and Emily Weisburst

American Economic Review, August 2026

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 communitie...

Schedule and Pricing

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Education and Partisanship

By Daniel Firoozi

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Education weakens the historical link between income and partisanship across democracies, challenging classical models of political economy. Using administrative data on millions of voters exposed to discontinuities in compulsory schooling laws and coll...

Heterogeneous Firing Costs, Worker Types, and Productivity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By Andrea Caggese, Ozan Güler, Mike Mariathasan, and Klaas Mulier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We investigate how firing costs affect input choices and total factor productivity (TFP) by exploiting a labor reform in Belgium that increased firing costs of blue-collar workers relative to white-collar workers. Using a difference-in-differences desig...

Public Sector Salaries and the Quality of Governance: Evidence from Frontline Bureaucrats in India

By Siddharth Eapen George and Martin Mattsson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We examine the effects of increasing bureaucrat salaries, by analyzing a policy change in India that increased the salaries of a subset of frontline bureaucrats by 91 percent. Using a difference-indifferences design, we show that higher salaries (i) ha...

Country Designation for Submission Fees

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World Bank List of Low-Income Economies

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Low-income economies are defined based on GNI per capita, calculated by the World Bank using the World Bank Atlas method.

Building Blocks of Prosperity: The Job Impacts of Federal Block Grants for Developing Low-Income Communities

By George W. Zuo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

I study the job impacts of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), a federal program which provides local governments with block grants to flexibly invest in low-income neighborhoods. I leverage a one-time shock to the formula allocation process w...