Local Elites as State Capacity: How City Chiefs Use Local Information to Increase Tax Compliance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

By Pablo Balán, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek, and Jonathan L. Weigel

American Economic Review, March 2022

This paper investigates the trade-offs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in low-capacity states. We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a large Congolese city to property tax collection by city chiefs or s...

AEACGR: Contact the Committee

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Government Relations Office

American Economic Association Announces 2022 Clark Medalist

[News]

April 11, 2022

Congratulations to the 2022 John Bates Clark Medalist Oleg Itskhoki.

AER: Accepted Articles

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Information for Authors of Accepted Articles

AER: Insights Accepted Articles

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Information for Authors of Accepted Articles

CERGE-EI 30th Anniversary Celebration

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April 20, 2022

The event will be held on April 26, 2022.

Call for nominations for CSWEP’s Carolyn Shaw Bell Award and Elaine Bennett Research Prize

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April 21, 2022

Nominations are due by September 15, 2022.

Slate of Candidates for the 2022 Election Announced

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April 15, 2022

Balloting opens on August 1, 2022.

Annual Elections and other Announcements

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April 18, 2022

View the Member Announcement from April 19, 2022.

Call for Applications for Successfully Navigating Your Economics Ph.D.: A Mentoring Workshop for 3rd and 4th Year Women/Non-Binary Economics Ph.D. Students

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April 21, 2022

The workshop will be held on November 18, 2022.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

False Positives and Transparency

By Jonathan Libgober

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

I develop a theoretical model of costly information acquisition in order to evaluate transparency requirements in empirical research. A sender chooses an experiment characterized by multiple dimensions, while a receiver observes the experiment's outcome (...

Preference Conditions for Invertible Demand Functions

By Theodoros M. Diasakos and Georgios Gerasimou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

It is frequently assumed in several domains of economics that demand functions are invertible in prices. At the primitive level of preferences, however, the corresponding characterization has remained elusive. We identify necessary and sufficient conditio...

Promoting Wellness or Waste? Evidence from Antidepressant Advertising

By Bradley T. Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

It is taken as given by many policy makers that Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of prescription drugs drives inappropriate patients to treatment. Alternatively, advertising may provide useful information that causes appropriate patients to seek treatment. ...

Start-up Search Costs

By David P. Byrne and Nicolas de Roos

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

Workhorse economic models used for studying the market impacts of search frictions assume constant search costs: individuals pay the same cost to obtain price information each time they search. This paper provides evidence on a new form of search costs: s...

Tractable Model of Dynamic Many-to-Many Matching

By Marcin Pęski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We develop a tractable, dynamic, and strategic model of many-to-many matching with payoff externalities across links. The joint dynamic surplus or certain second properties of individual utilities, like pay-off externalities, can typically be identified. ...

Friend-Based Ranking

By Francis Bloch and Matthew Olckers

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We analyze the design of a mechanism to extract a ranking of individuals according to a unidimensional characteristic, such as ability or need. Individuals, connected on a social network, only have local information about the ranking. We show that a plann...

Optimal Nonlinear Pricing by a Dominant Firm under Competition

By Yong Chao, Guofu Tan, and Adam Chi Leung Wong

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We consider a nonlinear pricing problem faced by a dominant firm competing with a minor firm. The dominant firm offers a general tariff first, and then the minor firm responds with a per-unit price, followed by a buyer choosing her purchases. By developin...

Transforming Ordinal Riskless Utility into Cardinal Risky Utility: A Comment on Chung, Glimcher, and Tymula (2019)

By Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

Chung, Glimcher, and Tymula (2019) observed both consumers' choices over commodity bundles and choices under risk. They assumed a cardinal riskless utility function V representing consumer choices and a cardinal risky utility function U. The two were inco...

Intermediation and Steering: Competition in Prices and Commissions

By Tat-How Teh and Julian Wright

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We explore the implications of steering by an informed profit-maximizing intermediary. The intermediary steers consumers by recommending firms, taking into account both the commissions firms offer and the prices they set. Such steering results in higher c...