The Missing Loan-to-Value Cycle

By Manuel Adelino, W. Ben McCartney, and Antoinette Schoar

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2026

We show that the equilibrium loan-to-value (LTV) distribution in the US mortgage market has been remarkably stable over the last quarter century, both in aggregate and region by region, despite large, cross-sectionally heterogeneous house price cycles. Wh...

How Test-Optional Policies in College Admissions Disproportionately Harm High-Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds

By Bruce Sacerdote, Douglas O. Staiger, and Michele Tine

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2026

We analyze data from one elite institution and find that test score-optional policies harm the likelihood of admission for high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under test-optional policies, these applicants submit test scores at too l...

Screening Adaptive Cartels

By Juan Ortner, Sylvain Chassang, and Kei Kawai

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2026

We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regulators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. Our main result establishes that...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2026

CSWEP South

[Page]

Presidential Address: Neighborhood Effects and Missing Markets for Opportunity

By Lawrence F. Katz

American Economic Review, September 2026

Experimental and quasi-experimental studies show that childhood neighborhoods have substantial causal impacts on children's adult earnings and other long-term socioeconomic outcomes. Several market failures are likely to lead to excessive residential segr...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2026

Optimal Public Transportation Networks: Evidence from the World's Largest Bus Rapid Transit System in Jakarta

By Gabriel Kreindler, Arya Gaduh, Tilman Graff, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken

American Economic Review, September 2026

Designing public transport networks involves trade-offs between coverage, service frequency, and direct service. We use the expansion of the bus system in Jakarta, Indonesia, to study these trade-offs. We analyze how new direct connections, changes in bus...

Corporate Tax Cuts, Firm Growth, and Workers' Earnings

By Patrick J. Kennedy, Christine L. Dobridge, Paul Landefeld, and Jacob Mortenson

American Economic Review, September 2026

We study the effects of the largest corporate income tax cut in US history on firms and workers. To identify causal effects, we use employer-employee matched tax records and event studies comparing similarly sized firms in the same industry that faced div...

Contextually Private Mechanisms

By Andreas Haupt and Zoë Hitzig

American Economic Review, September 2026

A designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations—information learned that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no prot...

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

By Ethan Ligon

American Economic Review, September 2026

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, unitary...

Rationing by Race

By Manasvini Singh and Atheendar Venkataramani

American Economic Review, September 2026

We document how deepening resource scarcity results in rationing on the basis of race in a high-stakes setting: health care. Using detailed, time stamped data on 107,000 inpatient admissions to a large health system, we find that in-hospital mortality inc...

Defying Distance? The Provision of Medical Services in the Digital Age

By Amanda Dahlstrand

American Economic Review, September 2026

Digital platforms reduce geographic frictions, enabling better matching between service providers and users. I quantify reallocation gains in Swedish online health care, using nationwide time-conditional random assignment between patients and physicians. ...

Intergenerational Impacts of Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Elizabeth Spelke, and Mark Walsh

American Economic Review, September 2026

We provide experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial and 15-year longitudinal follow-up. Secondary school scholarships delay fertility, reduce ...

Manipulation-Robust Prediction

By Daniel Björkegren, Joshua E. Blumenstock, and Samsun Knight

American Economic Review, September 2026

An increasing number of decisions are guided by machine learning algorithms. But when consequential decisions are encoded in algorithms, individuals may strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired outcomes. This paper develops an empirical appro...

Marriage, Fertility, and Cultural Integration in Italy

By Alberto Bisin and Giulia Tura

American Economic Review, September 2026

We study cultural integration as an equilibrium outcome of marital matching along cultural and education lines and intrahousehold investment decisions regarding fertility and cultural socialization. Our model allows us to identify cultural-ethnic-group-sp...

The Environmental Bias of Corporate Income Taxation

By Luigi Iovino, Thorsten Martin, and Julien Sauvagnat

American Economic Review, September 2026

We study the relationship between corporate income taxation and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States. We show CO2-intensive firms benefit more from the tax advantage of debt and pay lower income taxes on their capital ...

Buy Big or Buy Small? Procurement Policies, Firms’ Financing, and the Macroeconomy

By Julian di Giovanni, Manuel Garcia-Santana, Priit Jeenas, Enrique Moral-Benito, and Josep Pijoan-Mas

American Economic Review

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of public procurement. We exploit novel data to show that procurement eases firms’ borrowing constraints and has persistent effects on firm growth. Using a macroeconomic model with heterogeneous firms, as...

Editors' Introduction

By J. David Baldwin, J. David Baldwin, Ronald L. Oaxaca, and Ronald L. Oaxaca

American Economic Review, May 2005

Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark

By Daron Acemoglu, Alex Xi He, and Daniel le Maire

American Economic Review

We provide evidence that CEOs with a business degree reduce wages and the labor share in the US and Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter. Usi...