Collective Bargaining Rights, Policing, and Civilian Deaths

By Jamein P. Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Using an event-study design, we examine whether states' introduction of duty-to-bargain requirements for police unions led to meaningful changes in civilians killed by law enforcement. We find that the introduction of collective bargaining rights signific...

Flood Risk Mapping and the Distributional Impacts of Climate Information

By Joakim A. Weill

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

This paper examines the provision of official flood risk information in the United States and its distributional impacts on residential flood insurance take-up. Assembling all flood maps produced after Hurricane Katrina, I document that updated maps decre...

The Option Value of Municipal Liquidity

By Andrew Haughwout, Benjamin Hyman, and Or Shachar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

States and localities are relied upon to implement macroeconomic stabilization policies and ensure service delivery in times of crisis. In April 2020, the introduction of the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) added an emergency lending instrument to the ...

Perils of the Paperwork: The Impact of Information and Application Assistance on Social Benefit Take-Up in India

By Sarika Gupta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Governments worldwide administer social programs for vulnerable groups, yet many eligible citizens fail to benefit. This paper studies barriers to take-up of an unconditional cash transfer program for poor women in Delhi, India, where only one-third of el...

Tax and Occupancy of Business Properties: Evidence from UK Business Rate Reliefs

By Ben Lockwood, Martin Simmler, and Eddy H. F. Tam

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

We study how UK property tax rates impact commercial vacancies and rents, using new data and exploiting exogenous variations in two major property tax reliefs: small business relief and retail relief. We estimate that both reliefs are effective at achievi...

Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools

By Andrew Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Eric Hanushek, Ben Ost, and Steven Rivkin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Attracting and retaining effective teachers in high-poverty schools remains a persistent challenge. We evaluate the impact of an initiative that offered substantial performance-based compensation to highly effective teachers in the lowest-achieving school...

Alcohol, Labor, and Agriculture

By David M. A. Murphy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

I evaluate a randomized control trial in rural Kenya in which selected households received cognitive behavioral therapy and medication to reduce alcohol abuse. At 16 months post-intervention, the program decreased the likelihood of positive spot breathaly...

Female Leaders and Intrahousehold Dynamics: Evidence from State Elections in India

By S. Anukriti, Bilge Erten, and Priya Mukherjee

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

We study the impact of women's political representation on the well-being of their female constituents, specifically in the domain of health. Increasing women's political representation leads to greater public provision of reproductive health care service...

Are Building Codes an Effective Adaptation to Wind Risk? Evidence from Remotely Detected Blue Tarps

By David Wolf and Kenji Takeuchi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Hurricanes cause significant wind and water damage, yet economic research primarily focuses on the latter due to data limitations. We overcome this problem by analyzing photographs taken after Hurricane Irma (2017 ) to locate blue-tarped homes. Using a re...

Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform

By Santosh Anagol, Fernando Ferreira, and Jonah Rexer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

We estimate the economic value of zoning reform in São Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction along transportation corridors. Developers increased filings for multifamily construction in blocks affected by the reform, leading to more housing...

Racial and Ethnic Inequality and the China Shock

By Lisa B. Kahn, Lindsay Oldenski, and Geunyong Park

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Minority workers tend to be disproportionately harmed by negative economic shocks. Indeed, we show that Hispanic populations experienced worse employment losses, relative to Whites, due to import competition from China largely due to lower education level...

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...