Concentration and Geographic Proximity in Antitrust Policy: Evidence from Bank Mergers

By David Benson, Samuel Blattner, Serafin Grundl, You Suk Kim, and Ken Onishi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

Antitrust often uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for merger screening and review. We argue that HHI-based antitrust policy using predefined markets in the banking industry misses anticompetitive effects that are predicted by the proximity of merg...

Communicating about Confidence: Cheap Talk with an Ambiguity-Averse Receiver

By Philippe Colo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

An expert, who is only informed of the probability of possible states, communicates with a decision-maker through cheap talk. The decision-maker considers different probability distributions over states as possible and is ambiguity averse. I show that all...

Public Debt and the Political Economy of Reforms

By Pierre C. Boyer, Brian Roberson, and Christoph Esslinger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

How do electoral incentives influence the choice to experiment with a policy reform that generates uncertain future benefits? To answer this question, we examine a two-period model of redistributive politics with uncertain policy outcomes involving a mixt...

Intelligence Disclosure and Cooperation in Repeated Interactions

By Marco Lambrecht, Eugenio Proto, Aldo Rustichini, and Andis Sofianos

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

How does information about players' intelligence affect strategic behavior? Game theory, based on the assumption of common knowledge of rationality, does not provide useful predictions. We experimentally show that, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, disclosure ha...

Monitoring Teams

By Marina Halac, Ilan Kremer, and Eyal Winter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

A principal incentivizes a group of agents to work by choosing a monitoring structure and a scheme of performance-contingent rewards. The monitoring structure partitions the set of agents into monitoring teams, each delivering a signal of joint performanc...

Monopolization with Must-Haves

By Enrique Ide and Juan-Pablo Montero

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

An increasing number of monopolization cases have been constructed around the notion of "must-have" items: products that distributors must carry to "compete effectively." Motivated by these cases, we consider a multiproduct setting where upstream supplier...

Promotions and Productivity: The Role of Meritocracy and Pay Progression in the Public Sector

By Erika Deserranno, Philipp Kastrau, and Gianmarco León-Ciliotta

American Economic Review: Insights

We study promotion incentives in the public sector through a field experiment with the Ministry of Health in Sierra Leone. The experiment introduces exogenous variation in the meritocracy of promotions from health worker to supervisor positions and in ...

Call for Papers: Sydney Annual Business Research Conference (SABRC) 2025

[News]

July 29, 2024

The submission deadline is October 25, 2024.

2024 Annual National HBCU Week Conference

[News]

July 29, 2024

The conference will be held on September 15–19, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2025 ASSA Annual Meeting

[Page]

Front Matter

American Economic Review, August 2024

Crowding in School Choice

By William Phan, Ryan Tierney, and Yu Zhou

American Economic Review, August 2024

We consider the market design problem of matching students to schools in the presence of crowding effects. These effects are salient in parents' decision-making and the empirical literature; however, they cause difficulties in the design of satisfactory m...

Indirect Effects of Access to Finance

By Jing Cai and Adam Szeidl

American Economic Review, August 2024

We created experimental variation across markets in China in the share of firms having access to a new loan product. Access to finance had a large positive direct effect on the performance of treated firms but a similar-sized negative indirect effect on t...

Long-Run Trends in Long-Maturity Real Rates, 1311–2022

By Kenneth S. Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing

American Economic Review, August 2024

Taking advantage of key recent advances in long-run economic and financial data, we analyze the statistical properties of global long-maturity real interest rates over the past seven centuries. In contrast to existing consensus, we find that real interest...

Strengthening State Capacity: Civil Service Reform and Public Sector Performance during the Gilded Age

By Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu

American Economic Review, August 2024

We use newly digitized records from the post office to study the effects of strengthened state capacity between 1875 and 1901. Exploiting the implementation of the Pendleton Act—a landmark statute that shielded bureaucrats from political interference—...

Learning by Necessity: Government Demand, Capacity Constraints, and Productivity Growth

By Ethan Ilzetzki

American Economic Review, August 2024

This paper studies how firms adapt to demand shocks when facing capacity constraints. I show that increases in government purchases raise total factor productivity in quantity units at the production line level. Productivity gains are concentrated in plan...

Repeated Trading: Transparency and Market Structure

By Ayça Kaya and Santanu Roy

American Economic Review, August 2024

We analyze the effect of transparency of past trading volumes in markets where an informed long-lived seller can repeatedly trade with short-lived uninformed buyers. Transparency allows buyers to observe previously sold quantities. In markets with intrape...

Monotone Function Intervals: Theory and Applications

By Kai Hao Yang and Alexander K. Zentefis

American Economic Review, August 2024

A monotone function interval is the set of monotone functions that lie pointwise between two fixed monotone functions. We characterize the set of extreme points of monotone function intervals and apply this to a number of economic settings. First, we leve...

Data, Competition, and Digital Platforms

By Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti

American Economic Review, August 2024

A monopolist platform uses data to match heterogeneous consumers with multiproduct sellers. The consumers can purchase the products on the platform or search off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their products to con...

A Discrimination Report Card

By Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters

American Economic Review, August 2024

We develop an empirical Bayes ranking procedure that assigns ordinal grades to noisy measurements, balancing the information content of the assigned grades against the expected frequency of ranking errors. Applying the method to a massive correspondence e...