(Forthcoming Article) - Are consumers aware of their future inertia? We run a field experiment that offers over a million readers of a European newspaper auto-renewing or auto-canceling contracts. Many consumers are inert yet most anticipate and account for their inertia: though offering auto-renewing contracts benefits the firm in the short-term, it lowers subscriptions take-up by 35% and total subscribers by 23% over 20 months. Inertia’s impact on market outcomes depends on consumers’ overall awareness of it, which is often ignored by the literature, firms, and policy makers. In our context, consumer sophistication limits the firm from exploiting their behavioral limitations.

(Forthcoming Article) - We study the forces behind Google’s large web-search market share. We develop a demand model with switching costs, quality beliefs, and inattention, and estimate it using a field experiment. We find that (i) requiring active choice barely increases Bing’s market share; (ii) Google users paid to try Bing update positively about its quality and many prefer to continue using it; (iii) many Google users defaulted into Bing do not switch back, consistent with inattention. Counterfactuals suggest that eliminating demand frictions doubles Bing’s market share. Successful remedies expose users to alternative search engines, while data sharing mandates have small effects.

Vol. 18 No. 4 October 2026

Vol. 18 No. 4 October 2026

(Forthcoming Article) - A sender wishes to persuade a group of receivers but can only communicate with one target receiver. The target’s actions, in turn, may influence others. Who should she target? How should she customize her communication? The sender optimally customizes communication to the target as if other receivers did not exist and trades off popularity against influence: she may optimally target less popular receivers. We characterize a measure of a target’s market influence that the sender maximizes and show that, in large markets, she strictly prefers less customizable communication if the market is more polarized or if high-popularity influencers are rare.

Manisha Shah discusses the factors that drive intimate partner violence and the impact of policies aimed at reducing it in low- and middle-income countries.

(Forthcoming Article)

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper analyzes private and social incentives for levying ad valorem licensing fees in a supply chain under the legal principle of patent exhaustion. With perfect competition at both upstream and downstream stages, the licensing segment choice is irrelevant. However, if one segment is monopolistic, the patent holder prefers licensing at that stage, aligning private and social incentives. Under imperfect competition at both stages, excessive downstream licensing may occur. We show that ”double-dipping” (charging fees at both stages) can be profitable for the patent holder and beneficial for consumers, with implications for applying the patent exhaustion principle.

(Forthcoming Article) - We estimate the economic impacts of sexual assault using population-wide Finnish police reports and hospital admissions. Over the five years following a sexual assault, victims’ employment falls by 6 percentage points and annual earnings decline by ¤1,500, alongside a 6 percentage point increase in anti-depressant use, relative to otherwise observationally equivalent women. These effects persist for at least a decade and correspond to a 15% decline in employment, 17% earnings loss, and 28% rise in anti-depressant use relative to pre-assault baselines. Sexual assault also generates spillover effects to victims’ networks: female schoolmates and victims’ parents experience significant mental health deterioration.

(Forthcoming Article) - How does ethnic identification vary with education among disadvantaged minorities? We study this question for Roma people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, using linked Romanian census data and birth records. We measure how individuals change reported ethnicity over time. Roma identification strongly declines with education, from 80% for those with no education to 40% for postsecondary graduates. We estimate a model with persistent individual heterogeneity and find 3-6 times more Roma post-secondary graduates than in official data. Survey data we collect shows that most Romanians are unaware of these patterns. Such selective changes in ethnic identification may reinforce stereotypes about marginalized groups.

(Forthcoming Article) - How do market power and nominal price rigidity influence inflation dynamics? We formulate a tractable model of oligopolistic competition and sticky prices, and derive closed-form expressions for the pass-through of idiosyncratic and common cost shocks to firms’ prices. Using confidential micro data for Canadian wholesale firms, we estimate that idiosyncratic cost pass-through is incomplete and independent of the sector price stickiness, while common cost pass-through declines with price stickiness. These estimates imply a degree of strategic complementarity that lowers the slope of the New Keynesian Phillips curve by 30% in a one-sector model and by 64% in a multi-sector model.

(Forthcoming Article) - In recent decades, economists studying international trade have gained access to an unprecedented volume and variety of data. These data have provided new insights and a more granular understanding of the mechanics of trade. Analyzing a large corpus of papers, we document that the nature of research has also shifted. Previously, the typical trade paper was either purely theoretical or an empirical paper testing theoretical predictions. More recently, scholarship has shifted toward a more integrated approach, particularly quantitative modeling. This development is surprising. We might have expected the data revolution (and contemporaneous credibility revolution) to increase the share of primarily empirical papers—although the markers of these revolutions are clearly evident in the rise of causal inference within empirical work. This article reviews these developments, assessing the strengths and limitations of different modes of inquiry, and plotting a path forward to harness the growing richness of data within the field.

(Forthcoming Article) - When communicating numeric estimates, experts often choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to analyze whether experts strategically use language to persuade. In Study 1, senders in the general public communicate probabilities of abstract events to receivers; in Study 2, academic researchers communicate findings from research papers to policymakers. Incentives to persuade increase the likelihood of using language rather than numbers by 25–29 percentage points, and receivers are effectively persuaded. Experts slant language more than numbers when they prefer language. Our findings suggest that experts leverage the imprecision of language to excuse communicating slanted messages.

The impact of product liability litigation on medical device firms.

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(Forthcoming Article)

(Forthcoming Article) - Concerned about the low academic ability of teachers, in the 1990s and 2000s, some states increased occupational licensing stringency to weed out low-academic-ability candidates, while others decreased restrictions in hopes of attracting more competitive candidates, with states differing in the nature of their requirements. Studying 1991– 2007, we show that academic coursework requirements constitute the most prominent changes in licensing requirements and that stricter requirements increased the left tail of the distribution of college selectivity among secondary school teachers. We find no evidence of disparate negative effects for high-poverty school districts but some evidence for high-minority districts.

A reexamination of how America shed its post-World War II debt.

(Forthcoming Article) - How do inflation expectations affect the job search behavior of workers when wages are set in nominal terms? A canonical job search model incorporating nominal wage rigidities predicts that on-the-job search should increase with expected inflation. Using novel survey questions, we show that workers are more likely to search at higher values of hypothetical inflation. In the Survey of Consumer Expectations, within-respondent variation in inflation expectations predicts on-the-job search.

(Forthcoming Article) - Existing evidence suggests that wealth may decline before dementia onset, but the mechanisms underlying these reductions are poorly understood. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare household finance trajectories for individuals who later develop dementia and those who do not. We find that wealth divergence between the two groups is not explained by reduced earnings, higher healthcare spending, intentional “spend-down” to qualify for Medicaid coverage, state-dependent utility, or reverse causation by which wealth declines cause dementia. Instead, our results point to impaired financial decision-making beginning about six years prior to clinically recognizable dementia.

(Forthcoming Article) - Disagreement among researchers is a central and productive feature of scientific progress. Yet researchers’ incentives and behaviors, some only partly visible to readers, may affect empirical results. When these sources of variation affect estimates, standard errors may understate uncertainty. This paper synthesizes evidence on how researcher variation shapes empirical conclusions and presents new evidence on its sources and implications. We report results from a many-analyst study in which 146 research teams estimate the same causal effect under varying constraints. Although central estimates are broadly aligned, dispersion remains substantial. Imposing a shared research design reduced agreement, partly due to adherence errors. Further restricting data cleaning and preparation improved agreement. Variation across researchers is often comparable in magnitude to sampling uncertainty but is unevenly distributed across stages of the research process. Overall, the evidence suggests that conventional uncertainty summaries understate total uncertainty and that less visible research decisions warrant greater scrutiny.

(Forthcoming Article) - Electricity blackouts impose substantial costs in developing countries. We advance a new explanation for their prevalence in India: utilities’ wholesale electricity demand is downward-sloping. We construct a novel dataset on India’s wholesale electricity sector. Instrumenting for average variable cost with plausibly exogenous power plant equipment outages, we estimate a wholesale demand elasticity of −0.49. Voltage monitoring data confirm that equipment outages drive blackouts. Increases in procurement costs therefore reduce the quantity of electricity delivered to end-use consumers. Our counterfactual simulations suggest that lowering wholesale electricity costs could eliminate blackouts for millions of Indian households.

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper assesses the literature that links macroeconomics and climate change. We organize the paper around three themes: (i) loss and damage, which analyzes long-run economic costs and non-market impacts from climate change; (ii) mitigation and the energy transition, which evaluates the macroeconomic consequences of shifting away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy; and (iii) adaptation, which explores the economic adjustments to manage heat exposure, increasingly frequent severe weather events, and rising seas. We discuss macroeconomic frameworks that incorporate these forces as well as empirical estimates that guide their calibration. We suggest areas in which macroeconomic research on climate is needed.

(Forthcoming Article) - Universal health coverage is a central goal in many low-income countries. We conducted a large, four-year randomized trial of premiums and subsidies for India’s first national public hospital insurance program, RSBY. Demand was substantial (~60% uptake) even at prices equal to the government’s premium cost, but enrollment showed strong adverse selection. Insurance increased claims but not healthcare use, implying primarily financial benefits. Many enrollees failed when attempting to use coverage, underscoring the importance of learning. We find little effect on health outcomes. Given India’s high marginal cost of public funds, universal free insurance is unlikely to raise welfare.

(Forthcoming Article) - Using German administrative data, we document that high-wage locations have lower labor shares and higher wage dispersion. We show that a parsimonious model, in which firm monopsony power stems from search frictions, can explain these facts if "superstar" firms sort into productive locations. This positive sorting, which emerges under sufficiently strong firm–location complementarity or large frictions, steepens local wage ladders and raises wages and wage inequality. Moreover, sorting reduces labor shares because more productive firms have more monopsony power. Our estimates indicate that firm sorting rationalizes lower local labor shares in high-wage locations and 40% of their increased wage dispersion.

(Forthcoming Article)

(Forthcoming Article) - Seasonal allergies affect over 400 million people globally, yet the broader economic consequences of pollen exposure remain understudied. Evidence from Japan’s ambulance records suggests that high-pollen days are associated with increases in accidents, including traffic accidents and work-related injuries, which may reflect impaired cognitive performance. Retail scanner data and cellphone mobility records indicate that individuals already engage in avoidance behaviors, such as purchasing allergy products and limiting outdoor activities on weekends. This suggests that relying on individual self-protection may be insufficient to offset these risks, and thus greater government intervention may be warranted to mitigate pollen-related harm.

(Forthcoming Article) - We build a model of production network formation that enables econometric estimation of the determinants of supplier choice, like trade costs or matching frictions. The model informs an estimator obtained from a transformation of the multinomial logit likelihood function that conditions on two network statistics: the out-degree of sellers (a sufficient statistic for the seller marginal costs) and the in-degree of buyers (which is determined by decisions of buyers, like “make-or-buy”). In an empirical application, this estimator shows that a prominent Costa Rican highway fostered firm-to-firm connections between core and peripheral regions, and within the core regions themselves.

(Forthcoming Article) - We present a model of associative networks that captures how decision makers expand their consideration set through mental associations between alternatives. Our model provides a tractable approach to study how associations shape choice when some alternatives are available and others are merely observable but unavailable. We characterize the model within a random attention framework and demonstrate unique identification of all parameters. This framework delivers a unified account of several prominent choice anomalies, including classic menu effects and their “phantom” counterparts. We illustrate how associative links serve as a strategic variable in applications such as branding, imitation, and platform design.

(Forthcoming Article) - In the 4th millennium BC, our ancestors witnessed a remarkable transformation, progressing from petty chiefdoms to political states and cities. The causes of this “Urban Revolution” remain unclear. We conjecture that the discovery of bronze and the ensuing long-distance trade played a crucial role. Using novel panel data and 2SLS techniques, we demonstrate that trade corridors linking metal mines to fertile lands were more likely to experience the Urban Revolution. We propose that transit bottlenecks facilitated the emergence of a new taxing elite. We formally test this appropriability theory and provide several case studies in support.

(Forthcoming Article) - Although groups usually manage to combine information to make well-informed decisions, they also make mistakes. We investigate experimentally one source of suboptimal decision-making by groups: the selective and asymmetric sharing of egorelevant information within teams. We show that positive performance feedback is shared more often with team members than negative performance feedback. Asymmetric information sharing combined with the receivers’ selection neglect boosts team confidence compared to an unbiased exchange of feedback. Consequently, weaker teams make worse investment decisions in bets whose success depends on the team’s ability. The endogenous social exchange of ego-relevant information may foster detrimental group delusion.

(Forthcoming Article) - We estimate the causal effect of a large-scale cash assistance program for refugee returnees on conflict in Afghanistan. Leveraging historical returnee settlement patterns and novel combat records, we find that policy-induced return had cross-cutting effects, reducing insurgent violence but increasing social conflict. Cash assistance may have raised reservation wages in returnee-receiving communities, reducing labor-intensive combat, increasing lethality of capital-intensive attacks, and reducing counterinsurgent effectiveness. Social capital and local institutions significantly offset risks of communal violence after repatriation. Together, these results highlight unintended consequences of repatriation assistance programs, and clarify conditions under which refugee return affects conflict.

(Forthcoming Article) - People often make decisions quickly when presented with a choice. Are their initial answers a good approximation of what they would choose if they took more time to decide? We explore how individuals’ choices change with deliberation and find that later choices systematically differ from early ones. We focus on prosocial decisions and find that individuals’ choices respond more to social efficiency as they deliberate over the course of a minute. Our results call into question the use of revealed preference for welfare when prosocial choices are made quickly and provide guidance to policy makers and charities.

(Forthcoming Article) - The Vietnam draft conscripted hundreds of thousands of young Americans into an integrated military. I combine near-random draft lottery variation with administrative voter data to study the long-run racial integration effects of coerced national service. Black and Native American veterans became more likely to marry white spouses, identify as Republicans, and live in more-integrated neighborhoods. Improved economic standing may partly mediate these effects. Effects are larger for Southerners and are precisely null for white veterans. Coerced military service generates substantial but asymmetric cross-racial political convergence and racial integration: Vietnam-era service caused about 20 percent of affected cohorts’ interracial marriages.

(Forthcoming Article) - This study examines the implications of the traditional 40-hour work week using an incomplete-markets model that incorporates both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, along with a wage penalty for working fewer hours than a specified threshold. The 40-hour standard emerges as a key driver of labor supply elasticities: micro-level elasticities remain small, whereas macro-level elasticities are larger, reflecting adjustment that occurs primarily along the extensive margin. Households constrained by the 40-hour schedule face the adverse welfare effects of business cycle fluctuations, as the rigid schedule limits their ability to adjust hours in response to wage changes.

(Forthcoming Article) - We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation. Leveraging new data, we use age of SSN assignment to identify immigrant status. Immigrants represent 16 percent of inventors, but authored 23 percent of patents. Immigrant inventors contribute to knowledge diffusion across borders. They disproportionately rely on foreign technologies and inventor collaborations. Using variation from premature inventor deaths, we find immigrant inventors create stronger innovation productivity spillovers on their collaborators, as compared to US-born inventors. A simple model implies immigrants are responsible for 32 percent of aggregate innovation, over half of which is due to human capital externalities on US-born collaborators.

(Forthcoming Article) - In designing priority-based matching problems such as school choice, the quota of each school is, to some extent, a design variable. We define an ex-post student-optimal stable matching (ESOSM) as a matching that is stable at some implementable quota distribution and not Pareto dominated by any other stable matching among all implementable quota distributions. We propose a novel mechanism called a quota adjustment process (QAP) that improves existing stable mechanisms by endogenously finding an ESOSM and the corresponding optimal quota distribution for any preference relation. This method has been successfully implemented at the University of Tsukuba in Japan since 2021.

(Forthcoming Article) - 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. Using an IV strategy based on the composition of the board of directors at the time of new appointments, these appear as causal effects. Exploiting exogenous export shocks, we establish that a key mechanism for these wage effects is changes in rent-sharing practices and provide evidence suggesting that these effects are driven by business managers prioritizing shareholder value.

(Forthcoming Article) - This review assesses John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai’s book entitled Fixed. Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. The volume is an excellent discussion of the research on household finances around the world. Most importantly, the authors examine how and why the financial system tends to fail instead of helping consumers and retail investors. Campbell and Ramadorai also propose solutions to the problem, including stronger regulation and simplified financial instruments. However, if the system is to work for most of us, an additional factor is required: better financial literacy. Indeed, enhancing financial knowledge is essential if people are to be empowered to make better financial decisions, guard against deceptive practices, utilize financial instruments to their benefit, and take advantage of the opportunities offered by financial markets and the government. Without such basic knowledge, regulation and simplified financial instruments will not fix personal finance.

(Forthcoming Article) - 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, asset- and earnings-based borrowing frictions, and government purchasing, we simulate expenditure-neutral reforms that increase the share of small firms in procurement. We find that, despite helping financially constrained firms grow, these policies lead to non-trivial unintended negative effects. On net, the policies lead to a modest decline in GDP. The findings highlight how procurement design influences aggregate outcomes through firm-level financial frictions and reallocation dynamics.

(Forthcoming Article) - Many environmental hazards have long-run health effects, but quasi-experimental studies typically measure outcomes and treatment over short time periods. We develop a new framework for quantifying the effect of air pollution exposure on life expectancy. Using daily changes in wind direction as an instrument for air pollution, we first charac- terize the dynamic mortality effects of short-run exposure. We then incorporate these estimates into a demographic model to quantify the lifelong effects of a permanent re- duction in air pollution exposure. Ninety percent of the survival benefits accrue after the first fifty years of life.

(Forthcoming Article) - Secondary markets for sovereign bonds are illiquid because of trad- ing frictions. I build a framework with endogenous illiquidity to study its implications on credit spreads and default risk. The model integrates directed search in secondary markets into a sovereign de- fault model. With trading frictions, secondary market demand and supply flows are important drivers of bond prices, while they are irrelevant in standard sovereign default models. I find that small trading frictions can significantly tighten a government's financial constraint and that policy interventions that reduce the sell flows in the secondary markets can partially revert the effect of trading frictions.

Large stipends drew effective educators into Dallas's lowest-performing schools.

Vol. 64 No. 3 September 2026

(Forthcoming Article) - We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector. Estimating a Roy-like model of researcher supply using 1960- 2021 U.S. microdata, we find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%, depending on specification. Adjusting for efficiency units attenuates the decline in researcher productivity by the same proportion, implying significant upward revisions in long-run growth predicted by a broad class of growth models.

(Forthcoming Article) - How should monetary policy respond to sectoral shocks in a world where consumption baskets vary systematically across households? We present a multi-sector New-Keynesian model with generalized, non-homothetic preferences and inequality. The output gap is governed by a Marginal Consumer Price Index (MCPI), rather than the regular CPI. Policy trade-offs are shaped by a novel wedge in the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). Analytical results and quantitative simulations show that, following negative shocks to necessity sectors, the NKPC is shifted upward, increasing CPI inflation but decreasing the output gap. We find that the optimal policy response is relatively accommodative.

(Forthcoming Article) - Although research has shown that court-ordered hiring quotas increase the number of minority police officers in litigated cities, there has been little insight into how workforce diversity, or lack thereof, may impact police violence against civilians. Using an event study framework, we find that the threat of affirmative action litigation reduces police killings of non-White civilians in the long-run. In addition, we find evidence of lower arrest rates for non-White civilians and more diverse police departments 25 years after litigation. Our results highlight the vital role that federal interventions have in addressing police behavior and the use of lethal force.

Vol. 116 No. 9 September 2026

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper explores how to reduce emissions from electricity generation while preventing blackouts. Wind and solar are zero-emissions but intermittent, which can lead to blackouts if the entry of renewables causes more reliable power plants to retire. I build a structural dynamic oligopoly model of investment in generators of different energy sources. Using data from Western Australia, I show that a combination of carbon taxes and capacity subsidies substantially reduces emissions while keeping reliable generators from retiring, thereby maintaining a low risk of blackouts. I also explore the impact of renewable subsidies and storage.

(Forthcoming Article) - Dynamic complementarity is the concept that past investments that lead to higher stocks of skill at one age promote the growth of skills from investment at that age. We define and provide evidence on dynamic complementarity using unique Chinese data from a home visiting program for young children targeted to parents in rural China. In addition, we investigate growth in learning due to innate, parental, and environmental factors that occur in the absence of any formal intervention.