Self-Fulfilling Fluctuations in HANK Economies

By Sushant Acharya and Jess Benhabib

American Economic Review, July 2026

We show that in heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) economies with countercyclical risk, the natural interest rate is endogenous and co-moves with output, leaving the economy susceptible to self-fulfilling fluctuations. Unlike in representative agent...

Ideological Alignment and Evidence-Based Policy Adoption

By Jorge García-Hombrados, Marcel Jansen, Ángel Martínez, Berkay Özcan, Pedro Rey-Biel, and Antonio Roldán- Monés

American Economic Review, July 2026

The implementation of evidence-based policies hinges on the dissemination of evidence to policymakers, a process influenced by the attributes of the sender. We conducted a nationwide RCT with ideologically opposite think tanks, major newspapers, and a res...

Monetary Policy without Commitment

By Hassan Afrouzi, Marina Halac, Kenneth Rogoff, and Pierre Yared

American Economic Review, July 2026

This paper studies the implications of central bank credibility for long-run inflation and inflation dynamics. We introduce central bank lack of commitment into a standard nonlinear New Keynesian economy with sticky-price monopolistically competitive firm...

A Welfare Analysis of Policies Impacting Climate Change

By Robert W. Hahn, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert D. Metcalfe, and Ben Sprung-Keyser

American Economic Review, July 2026

We study the welfare impacts of 96 climate-related tax and spending policies. We extend and apply the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) framework, most notably providing a new method for incorporating learning-by-doing spillovers. We find subsidies fo...

The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors

By Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, October 2021

The high-tech sector is concentrated in a small number of cities. The ten largest clusters in computer science, semiconductors, and biology account for 69 percent, 77 percent, and 59 percent of all US inventors, respectively. Using longitudinal data on 10...

Conducting Research

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Committee Spotlight: Q&A with the CSMGEP Co-Chairs Gary Hoover and Ebonya Washington

[News]

March 29, 2022

The CSMGEP Co-Chairs Gary Hoover and Ebonya Washington answer some questions about the committee's mission and activities.

Views on the dollar shortage controversy

[Research Highlight]

July 01, 2026

Harris Dellas and George Tavlas discuss the postwar dollar shortage debate between Charles Kindleberger and Milton Friedman.

A Model of the Attention Economy: Data, Platforms, and Discovery

By Daniel Chen

American Economic Review

This paper develops a dynamic model of the attention economy featuring two interlinked markets: a product market, where consumers have limited awareness of firms, and an attention market, where platforms attract attention by investing in free services ...

Combinatorial Discrete Choice: Theory and Application to Multinational Production

By Costas Arkolakis, Fabian Eckert, and Rowan Shi

American Economic Review

In general, finding the optimal combination among N items requires evaluating all 2^N possibilities. We develop a method applicable whenever items are complements or substitutes that uses this structure to discard suboptimal combinations without evalua...

Effects of Domestic Production Tax Incentives on Workers and Firms: Evidence from US Employee-Employer-Matched Tax Filings

By Christine L. Dobridge, Paul Landefeld, and Jacob Mortenson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper examines the effects of a corporate tax cut aimed at incentivizing domestic production on the within-firm distribution of worker earnings, firm employment, and firm capital investment. We use employee-employer-matched U.S. tax filings and find ...

Climate Policies and Electricity Prices: Why Abate When You Can Generate?

By Kathrine von Graevenitz and Elisa Rottner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Climate policies often increase electricity prices by more than they increase prices of fossil fuels. Using administrative data on German manufacturing plants from 2009 to 2017, we provide evidence that these price changes induce plants to generate ele...

Taxing Top Incomes in the Emerging World—Fiscal and Economic Impact under the Microscope

By Christopher Axelson, Antonia Hohmann, Jukka Pirttilä, Roxanne Raabe, and Nadine Riedel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper studies taxpayer responses to an increase in the top marginal tax rate in South Africa, drawing on rich administrative data and a transparent identification strategy. We show that treated taxpayers strongly reduced their reported taxable inc...

Employing the Unemployed of Marienthal: Evaluation of a Guaranteed Job Program

By Maximilian Kasy and Lukas Lehner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We evaluate a guaranteed job program in Austria in 2020–2024. Our evaluation is based on three approaches, pairwise matched randomization, a pre-registered synthetic control at the municipality level, and a comparison to individuals in control munici...

Index-Based Price Adjustment in US Strategic Petroleum Reserve Drawdowns

By Matthew O'Keefe

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Nature, Nurture, and Socioeconomic Outcomes: New Evidence from Sib Pairs and Molecular Genetic Data

By Gareth Markel, Rafael Ahlskog, Joakim Coleman Ebeltoft, René Mõttus, Sven Oskarsson, Uku Vainik, Eivind Ystrom, and Jonathan Pierre Beauchamp

American Economic Review: Insights

A consequence of Mendel’s First Law is that siblings' genetic relatedness varies randomly (with a mean of 50%). We use molecular genetic data to compute the genetic relatedness of ~80,000 sib pairs. We then compare the pairs' genetic relatedness to thei...

The Impact of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Clinics on Early 20th Century US Fertility and Mortality

By Stefan Bauernschuster, Michael Grimm, and Cathy Moran Hajo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

In 1916, Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in US history. From the mid-1920s, “Sanger clinics” spread over the entire US These clinics advised women on contraception, mainly by fitting diaphragms and explicitly instructing ...

Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D

By Justin Bloesch and Jacob P. Weber

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Adjusting the rate of R&D spending is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers ("onboarding") is decreasing in the number of hires ("congestion"). We show that such congestion induces R&D-producing firms to hire slowly...

How Worker Productivity and Wages Grow with Tenure and Experience: The Firm Perspective

By Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Søren Leth-Petersen, and Matthew D. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience shapes life-cycle earnings and losses from job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces a firm survey designed to separate ef...

Conditioning Out the Poor? Consumption Inequality and the Design of Cash Transfer Programs

By Santosh Anagol, Thomas Fujiwara, and Martin Navarrete

American Economic Review: Insights

Conditionality can exclude poor households from receiving transfers. Reanalyzing five randomized evaluations of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), we find that 9–37 percent of eligible recipients fail to meet conditions, and they typically have lower ...