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...

Correct (and Incorrect) Inference with a Single Instrumental Variable: Practical Takeaways from the Weak Instruments Literature

[Symposium: Instrumental Variables]

By David S. Lee and Jack Porter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

Most empirical economists have encountered the warning that instrumental variables can be "weak," but the underlying issues—what makes an instrument weak, why weakness distorts inference, and what to do about it—are less widely understood. This articl...

Leniency Designs: An Operator's Manual

[Symposium: Instrumental Variables]

By Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Peter Hull, and Michal Kolesár

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

We develop a step-by-step guide to leniency (a.k.a. judge or examiner instrument) designs, drawing on recent econometric literatures. The unbiased jackknife instrumental variables estimator (UJIVE) is purpose-built for leveraging exogenous leniency variat...

Stefanie Stantcheva, 2025 Clark Medalist

By James Poterba and Iván Werning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

The American Economic Association awarded the 2025 John Bates Clark Medal to Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University. Her research ranges widely in the field of public economics. It includes theoretical contributions to optimal income taxation, empirica...

The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality

[Symposium: Tariffs]

By Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

In 2025, statutory tariff rates on US imports rose to levels not seen in over one hundred years. What were the implications for prices? On the one hand, shipping lags, exemptions, and enforcement gaps kept the actual implemented rates at only half of the ...

US Tariff Policy since 1789

[Symposium: Tariffs]

By Miguel Acosta, Lydia Cox, Andrew Greenland, John Lopresti, Christopher M. Meissner, Martin Rotemberg, and Sharon Traiberman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

We use a newly assembled, tariff-line-level dataset spanning the full history of US trade policy to revisit the evolution of tariffs since 1789. We document the institutional shift from Congressional setting to multilateral negotiation, the steady growth ...

Labor Market Responses to Tariffs: Frictions, Dynamics, and Policy Responses

[Symposium: Tariffs]

By Rafael Dix-Carneiro and Brian K. Kovak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

This article introduces the evidence and associated modeling frameworks contemporary economists use to understand the effects of trade and trade policy on labor markets, with a particular emphasis on labor-market frictions and adjustment dynamics. The eff...

Evaluating the Fiscal and Distributional Implications of Tariffs

[Symposium: Tariffs]

By Kyle Pomerleau and Erica York

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

The Trump administration has enacted a series of significant taxes on imports, including an across-the-board tariff on nearly all imports. Tariffs are now expected to raise nearly 1 percent of GDP in revenue. Given tariffs' growing importance as a source ...

Should We Tax Trade? A Pigouvian Perspective

[Symposium: Tariffs]

By Arnaud Costinot and Iván Werning

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

We develop a simple and intuitive Pigouvian perspective on optimal trade policy. Our approach unifies a wide range of rationales for taxing trade, from the classical optimal tariff argument to contemporary debates about global carbon emissions and geopoli...

AI and Our Economic Future

[Symposium: Artificial Intelligence]

By Charles I. Jones

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely be the most transformative technology of the modern era. What if machines—AI for cognitive tasks and AI plus advanced robots for physical tasks—can perform every task a human can? This essay makes three main po...