(Forthcoming Article) - Development accounting is the search for proximate sources of cross-country income differences. This article describes how knowledge in this field has evolved over the two decades since the influential work of Caselli (2005). There have been large advances in the measurement of production inputs (labor, physical capital, and human capital). These advances have raised the estimated contribution of inputs, mostly human capital, in development accounting. Our preferred estimate is that inputs account for 55–70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) per worker differences, versus 30 percent using the classic specification. The literature has also made progress in moving away from Cobb-Douglas production functions and measuring factors such as management quality that were previously bundled into total factor productivity (TFP). Our review highlights the new implications of these advances, areas where future research would be beneficial, and the limitations of development accounting.

A 2016 zoning reform in São Paulo increased the ability of developers to supply housing units by lifting limitations on permitted densification on a block-by-block basis.

(Forthcoming Article) - There is substantial heterogeneity in economic, educational, and health outcomes among American Indians, shaped by factors such as geographic location, resource endowments, and historical experiences with federal policies. There is clear evidence that past policies, including forced relocation, boarding schools, and assimilation efforts, have had long-lasting negative effects on human capital development and intergenerational mobility. Recent decades have seen improvements in some areas, particularly where tribes have exercised greater self-governance and implemented innovative economic development strategies. This paper emphasizes that a “one-size-fits-all” approach is inadequate for analyzing the sources and potential remediation of disparities between Native populations and descendants of later arrivals. Measures for American Indian outcomes are complicated by issues of racial and tribal identification, data limitations, and changing definitions. This article comments on the need for caution and clarity in the use and analysis of data for this population in both historical and contemporary settings.

(Forthcoming Article) - We study how fertility decisions interact with labor supply and human capital accumulation of men and women. First, we use longitudinal Danish register data and tax reforms to show that increases in wages of women decrease fertility while increases in wages of men increase fertility. Second, we estimate a life-cycle model to quantify the importance of fertility adjustments for labor supply and long-run gender inequality. Wage elasticities of women are more than 10% lower if fertility cannot be adjusted. Finally, we show that the long-term consequence of human capital depreciation around childbirth is an important driver of the long-run gender wage gap in the model.

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper examines the unequal impact of unsafe public spaces on women’s human capital attainment through their choice of college. Combining survey data from students attending the University of Delhi, a mapping of actual and potential travel routes to all colleges in students’ admission choice set, and mobile-application safety data from Delhi, I find that, relative to men with comparable choice sets, women choose colleges that are 20 percent lower in the college-quality distribution because of travel-safety concerns. These large effects have implications for other economic decisions, such as women’s participation in the labor force.

(Forthcoming Article) - The risk of ending up poor in old age is shaped at young ages and it is concentrated among women. Many countries attempt to mitigate this risk by redistributing income through lifetime-earnings-based pension systems. Using a quantitative model, we show that basing redistribution on annual rather than lifetime earnings generates much better labor market outcomes and leads to a more favorable distribution of old-age income. Such a system provides broad employment incentives, particularly for individuals at high risk of old-age poverty, and thereby addresses the underlying causes rather than merely the consequences of old-age poverty.

(Forthcoming Article) - We define the concept of customer overlap of product j with product k as the share of j’s customers who buy k. We argue that, in appropriate contexts, customer overlaps are an excellent proxy for diversion ratios, a useful and popular way to summarize competition between sellers of substitute products. Unlike diversion ratios, which are often challenging to estimate, customer overlaps are straightforwardly observed in many datasets. We show theoretically, and validate empirically, the close connection between customer overlaps and diversion ratios. We illustrate the potential use of customer overlap in contexts where estimation of diversion ratios could be prohibitive.

(Forthcoming Article) - Standard models of information frictions explain sluggishness in forecasts but struggle to account for excessive sensitivity. I argue that this gap reflects a narrow definition of information frictions: these models constrain the processing of new information while assuming agents can access and use previously acquired information without error. I propose a broader framework with two constraints: attention frictions introduce errors in how agents use new information, and memory frictions introduce errors in how they use previously acquired information. This unified model better matches observed forecast biases and jointly identifies attention and memory frictions using survey forecasts.

(Forthcoming Article) - U.S. states gave economic rights to married women between 1850 and 1920. Prior to this “women’s liberation,” the laws of coverture granted virtually unlimited power to husbands. Using the full count U.S. census and county-border pairs, we use an event-study analysis to show that rights reduced fertility. Additionally, women’s rights were not granted retroactively, allowing us to compare people married before and after the reforms, confirming our findings. Shifting bargaining power accounts for our results, with spousal disagreement over fertility plausibly due to maternal mortality risk. Women’s empowerment explains about 18% of the decline in fertility during the demographic transition.

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(Forthcoming Article) - We develop a segmented markets model which rationalizes the effects of monetary policy on the term structure of interest rates. When arbitrageurs’ portfolio features positive duration, an unexpected rise in the short rate lowers their wealth and raises term premia. A calibration to the U.S. economy accounts for much of the transmission of monetary shocks to long rates. We discuss the additional implications of our framework for state-dependence in policy transmission, the volatility and slope of the yield curve, and trends in term premia accompanying trends in the natural rate.

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Vol. 116 No. 10 October 2026

US tariffs collected in 2025 were less than half of the announced rates.

(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.

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(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) - 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.

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(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.