Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution by Paul E. Smaldino

By Alberto Bisin

Journal of Economic Literature

What Caused the U.S. Pandemic-Era Inflation?

By Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

We estimate a simple dynamic model of prices, wages, and short-run and long-run inflation expectations that allows us to analyze and quantify the sources of recent U.S. inflation. We find that, contrary to early concerns that inflation would be spurred by...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, April 2024

Anticipatory Anxiety and Wishful Thinking

By Jan B. Engelmann, Maël Lebreton, Nahuel A. Salem-Garcia, Peter Schwardmann, and Joël J. van der Weele

American Economic Review, April 2024

Across five experiments (N = 1,714), we test whether people engage in wishful thinking to alleviate anxiety about adverse future outcomes. Participants perform pattern recognition tasks in which some patterns may result in an electric shock or a monetary ...

Motivated Errors

By Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Review, April 2024

Myriad environments allow for the possibility of confusion. Agents may appeal to such confusion—or the possibility of making an honest mistake—to justify their behavior. In three sets of experiments involving thousands of subjects, we document evidenc...

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

By Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Review, April 2024

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply chains form in anticipation of free...

Local Productivity Spillovers

By Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Nicolas Gendron-Carrier, and Ronni Pavan

American Economic Review, April 2024

Using Canadian administrative data, this paper presents evidence of revenue and productivity spillovers across firms at fine spatial scales. Accounting for the endogenous sorting of firms across space, we estimate an average elasticity of firm revenue and...

Redesigning the US Army's Branching Process: A Case Study in Minimalist Market Design

By Kyle Greenberg, Parag A. Pathak, and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, April 2024

We present a proof-of-concept for minimalist market design (Sönmez 2023) as an effective methodology to enhance an institution based on stakeholders' desiderata with minimal interference. Four objectives—respecting merit, increasing retention, aligning...

The Political Development Cycle: The Right and the Left in People's Republic of China from 1953

By Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, April 2024

We quantify the effects of the political development cycle—the fluctuations between the Left (Maoist) and the Right (pragmatist) development policies—on growth and structural transformation of China in 1953–1978. The left policies prioritized struct...

The Opportunity Cost of Debt Aversion

By Alejandro Martínez-Marquina and Mike Shi

American Economic Review, April 2024

We provide evidence of the existence of debt aversion and its negative implications for financial decisions. In a new experimental design where subjects are assigned debt randomly, we quantify the opportunity cost of subjects' debt-biased decisions. One-t...

Nurturing Childhood Curiosity to Enhance Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Pedagogical Intervention

By Sule Alan and Ipek Mumcu

American Economic Review, April 2024

We evaluate a pedagogical intervention aimed at improving learning in elementary school children by fostering their curiosity. We test the effectiveness of the pedagogy using achievement scores and a novel measure of curiosity. The latter involves creatin...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms

By E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, September 2010

I develop a general theory of monopoly pricing of networks. Platforms use insulating tariffs to avoid coordination failure, implementing any desired allocation. Profit maximization distorts in the spirit of A. Michael Spence (1975) by internalizing only n...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms: Comment

By Hongru Tan and Julian Wright

American Economic Review, September 2018

Weyl (2010) shows that in multi-sided platform settings, profit maximization leads to classical and Spence distortions, with the Spence distortion providing a new explanation for why prices may sometimes be too high (or too low) on platforms. However, the...

A Price Theory of Multi-sided Platforms: Reply

By E. Glen Weyl

American Economic Review, September 2018

I appreciate the clarification of my work by Tan and Wright, regret the confusing way my equations were labeled and intended them to be interpreted in the manner they suggest is correct.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

Dynamism Diminished: The Role of Housing Markets and Credit Conditions

By Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

We estimate the effects of house price changes on young-firm employment shares and industry-level employment growth in local economies. A novel test shows that house price effects on local economies work through wealth, liquidity, and collateral effects o...

Financial Frictions, Capital Misallocation, and Input-Output Linkages

By Hsuan-Li Su

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

I study how input-output linkages amplify the aggregate impact of sectoral financial distortions in a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous capital wedges. The aggregate impact of a shock can be decomposed into weighted productivity changes an...

Ambiguity Aversion and Heterogeneity in Households' Beliefs

By Claudio Michelacci and Luigi Paciello

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

UK households that wish for lower inflation and lower nominal interest rates have higher expected inflation. We interpret the evidence through the lens of a New Keynesian model where ambiguity-averse households differ in wealth, skill, labor market partic...

The Heterogeneous Effects of Social Assistance and Unemployment Insurance: Evidence from a Life Cycle Model of Family Labor Supply and Savings

By Peter Haan and Victoria Prowse

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by ag...

Redistributive Capital Taxation Revisited

By Özlem Kina, Ctirad Slavík, and Hakki Yazici

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2024

This paper uses a rich quantitative model with endogenous skill acquisition to show that capital-skill complementarity provides a quantitatively significant rationale to tax capital for redistributive governments. The optimal capital income tax rate is 67...