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Front Matter

òòò½Íø Review: Insights, September 2025

The long-term impacts of Reconstruction-era education

[Research Highlight]

August 25, 2025

How did educational opportunities after the American Civil War shape economic outcomes for Black families?

Reconstruction-Era Education and Long-Run Black-White Inequality

By Daniel B. Jones and Ethan Schmick

òòò½Íø Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

The Reconstruction era of American history (c. 1866–1877) saw widespread efforts to educate recently freed people—efforts that were partially curtailed after Reconstruction. This paper examines the impact of childhood exposure to educational opportuni...

Front Matter

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

Imperfect Competition and Rents in Labor and Product Markets: The Case of the Construction Industry

By Kory Kroft, Yao Luo, Magne Mogstad, and Bradley Setzler

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We develop, identify, and estimate a model of imperfect competition in both labor and product markets. Our context is the US construction industry, where firms compete for workers, private market projects, and government procurements. Our empirical approa...

Nested Bundling

By Frank Yang

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

A nested bundling strategy creates menus in which more expensive bundles include all the goods of less expensive ones. We study when nested bundling is optimal and determine which nested menu is optimal, when consumers differ in one dimension. We define a...

Labor Market Power, Self-Employment, and Development

By Francesco Amodio, Pamela Medina, and Monica Morlacco

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

This paper shows that self-employment shapes labor market power in low-income countries, with implications for industrial development. Using Peruvian data, we find that wage-setting power increases with employer concentration but less so where self-employ...

Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

By Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This "offset" ...

The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income

By Amelia Hawkins, Christopher Hollrah, Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, Gloria Aldana, and Mitchell Wong

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

The Supplemental Security Income program uses a birth weight cutoff at 1,200 grams to determine eligibility. Using birth certificates linked to administrative records, we find low-income families of infants born just below the cutoff receive higher monthl...

Test-Optional Admissions

By Wouter Dessein, Alex Frankel, and Navin Kartik

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

Many US colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say, with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve decisions? This pap...

Market-Wide Predictable Price Pressure

By Samuel M. Hartzmark and David H. Solomon

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We demonstrate that predictable uninformed cash flows forecast aggregate market stock returns. Buying pressure from dividend payments (announced weeks prior) predicts higher value-weighted market returns, with returns for the top quintile of payment days ...

A Model of Populism as a Conspiracy Theory

By Adam Szeidl and Ferenc Szucs

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We model populism as the dissemination of a false "alternative reality," according to which the intellectual elite conspires against the populist for purely ideological reasons. If enough voters are receptive to it, this alternative reality—by discredit...

Drivers of Change: Employment Responses to the Lifting of the Saudi Female Driving Ban

By Chaza Abou Daher, Erica Field, Kendal Swanson, and Kate Vyborny

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We conduct a field experiment to quantify the impact of the lifting of the Saudi women's driving ban on women's employment by randomizing rationed spaces in driver's training. Treated women are 41 percent more likely to be employed yet are 19 percent less...

Micro versus Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: The Role of Dynamic Returns to Effort

By Henrik Kleven, Claus Kreiner, Kristian Larsen, and Jakob ³§Ã¸²µ²¹²¹°ù»å

òòò½Íø Review, September 2025

We investigate long-run earnings responses to taxes in the presence of dynamic returns to effort. First, we develop a theoretical model of earnings determination with dynamic returns to effort. In this model, earnings responses are delayed and mediated by...

ASSA 2026 Participant Information

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Generative AI for Economic Research: Use Cases and Implications for Economists

By Anton Korinek

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2023

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize research. I analyze how large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can assist economists by describing dozens of use cases in six areas: ideation and feedback, writing, backgro...

The Economics of Attention

By George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Attention is an important resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics with a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain documented ...

Declining Wage Inequality in Developing Countries: The Case of Brazil

By Sergio Firpo and Alysson Portella

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Despite rising inequality in rich countries, many developing economies have experienced a decline in inequality in recent decades. Brazil is a notable example. From 1995 to 2015, its Gini index decreased from 58 to 48 points. An extensive body of research...

A Review Essay of The Economics of Structural Racism by Patrick Mason

By Stephan Lefebvre

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

This essay provides a streamlined presentation of stratification economics (SE) in three pillars and comments on Patrick L. Mason's (2023) book The Economics of Structural Racism: Stratification Economics and US Labor Markets. SE, a field that se...

Income Equality in the Nordic Countries: Myths, Facts, and Lessons

By Magne Mogstad, Kjell G. Salvanes, and Gaute Torsvik

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025

Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a socioeconomic model that combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article critically assesses that claim by integrating theoretical ...