American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

Noah Williams

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: Williams asks whether the recurrent boom-bust dynamics of Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis — “periods of stability lead to …

Lukasz Rachel

Layer 1: Overview This paper builds a tractable, fully analytical version of the workhorse macro-epidemiology (“econ-epi”) model and uses it to characterize how susceptible individuals …

Ana Fostel · John Geanakoplos · Gregory Phelan

Layer 1: Overview The paper asks why large gross financial flows exist between similarly rich countries (especially the U.S. and Europe), why financial integration raises rather than lowers asset …

Mitali Das · Gita Gopinath · Helene Hall · Taehoon Kim · Jeremy C. Stein

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates why non-U.S. central banks accumulate large holdings of dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves, focusing on a previously under-emphasized motive: the …

Katharina Bergant · Prachi Mishra · Raghuram Rajan · Freddy Pinzon-Puerto

Layer 1: Overview This paper examines how unexpected changes in U.S. monetary policy transmit to cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activity globally, covering both the volume of deals and …

Taeyoung Doh · Dongho Song · Shu-Kuei Yang

This paper proposes a text-based measure of monetary policy stance by modelling FOMC post-meeting statements as convex combinations of the staff-drafted dovish (“alternative A”) and …

Julien Acalin · Laurence Ball

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. The fall in the US federal debt-held-by-the-public/GDP ratio from a postwar peak of 106% in fiscal year 1946 to a trough of 23% in 1974 is widely …

Stephen Ayerst · Loren Brandt · Diego Restuccia

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how institutional distortions to factor markets affect not only the static allocation of inputs across farms but also the dynamic choices — crop selection and …

Alvaro Garcia-Marin · Santiago Justel · Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

This paper provides a theory and evidence for why firms with higher markups extend more trade credit, focusing on a financing cost channel that is distinct from existing competition-based …

Eugene Tan

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates how the illiquidity of entrepreneurial capital shapes investment dynamics and wealth inequality. The central question is whether entrepreneurship drives …

Eric Jondeau · Gregory Levieuge · Jean-Guillaume Sahuc · Gauthier Vermandel

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether public subsidies to green-technology producers, financed by a carbon tax, can materially reduce the macroeconomic cost of reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by …

Ruixue Jia · Xiao Ma · Victoria Wenxin Xie

Layer 1: Overview This paper studies how the expectation of rising flood risk — distinct from realized flood events — reshapes where firms locate, where workers live and how much they work, and what …

Alessandro Ferrari · Francisco Queirós

Layer 1: Overview Ferrari and Queirós ask why US recoveries have become progressively slower and argue that rising firm heterogeneity and market power — well-documented long-run trends — can …

Hiroshi Inokuma · Juan M. Sánchez

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how the well-documented slowdown in labor-force growth affects aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth, a question that prior work on business dynamism had …

Rodrigo Adão · Costas Arkolakis · Federico Esposito

Layer 1: Overview How do international trade shocks propagate through spatially connected regional labor markets, and how large are the general equilibrium effects that standard shift-share …

Nick Pretnar · Maria Feldman

Layer 1: Overview The paper investigates why the U.S. health-services sector has simultaneously experienced a tripling of relative prices since 1948 and a rise in the personal consumption expenditure …

Flavien Moreau · Ludovic Panon

Layer 1: Overview Moreau and Panon ask how much cartels cost the aggregate economy — in terms of both total factor productivity and welfare — and find the losses are considerably larger than the …

S. Borağan Aruoba · Thomas Drechsel

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation: To study how monetary policy affects the economy, macroeconomists must isolate “shocks” — changes in interest rates that are not …

William A. Branch

Layer 1: Overview Branch (2022) asks whether subjective consumer inflation expectations causally raise the inflation rate — a question whose empirical answer has been elusive despite its central role …

Holger Breinlich · Elsa Leromain · Dennis Novy · Thomas Sampson

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. How does import liberalization affect a country’s export performance and welfare? Economic theory (Graham 1923, Ethier 1982, Krugman 1984) …

Maria-Jose Carreras-Valle

Layer 1: Overview This paper documents and explains a previously unreported reversal in U.S. manufacturing inventory trends: after a 25-year secular decline, inventories-to-sales ratios have been …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Ari Kutai · Rafi Melnick

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. How do firms form and update inflation expectations during a monetary-policy regime change and a transition from high/volatile inflation to a low, …

Carlo Altavilla · Giacomo Carboni · Michele Lenza · Harald Uhlig

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether uncertainty in the interbank market — distinct from general macroeconomic uncertainty — raises the cost of bank credit to firms, and whether bank-specific …

Isabel Cairó · Avi Lipton

Layer 1: Overview This paper addresses two connected questions: why do Black workers face persistently higher and more volatile unemployment than white workers, and can the Federal Reserve’s …

Benjamin Bridgman · Berthold Herrendorf

Layer 1: Overview The paper asks why the U.S. labor share has declined over the postwar period, and whether rising markups or capital deepening (automation, falling capital prices) is the primary …

Andrea Ferrero · Maurizio Michael Habib · Livio Stracca · Fabrizio Venditti

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates how institutional quality shapes (i) the domestic financial and macroeconomic impact of Global Financial Cycle (GFC) shocks on emerging market economies …

Sebastian Ellingsen

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether the location of economic activity adapts to changes in the location of trading opportunities, or whether historical patterns of trade permanently fix where …

Jianjun Miao · Zhouxiang Shen · Dongling Su

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how bank holdings of long-term government securities interact with interest-rate-driven monetary tightening to amplify macroeconomic downturns and generate banking …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether publicly funded (“free”) secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many …

Tuo Chen · Chang-Tai Hsieh · Zheng (Michael) Song

Layer 1: Overview Chen, Hsieh, and Song study the use of unofficial non-tariff barriers (NTBs) by China during the U.S.-China trade war of 2018–2019 and in the first year of the Phase 1 purchase …

Luca Gagliardone · Mark Gertler

Layer 1: Overview Gagliardone and Gertler ask why the US inflation surge that began in mid-2021 was both sudden and persistent, and whether a simple structural model can account for it without …

Minsu Chang · Frank Schorfheide

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how conventional and informational monetary policy shocks affect the cross-sectional distributions of labor earnings, consumption, and financial income in the United …

Damien Capelle · Yang Liu

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a tax on inflation policy (TIP)—a fiscal instrument that would require firms to pay a tax proportional to the increase in their prices—as a complement to …

Mohamad Adhami · Mark Bils · Charles I. Jones · Peter J. Klenow

Layer 1: Overview The paper asks how much economic progress looks different when one applies a total utilitarian welfare criterion — counting every person’s flow utility — rather than the …

Matthew Klepacz

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether increases in aggregate volatility reduce the effectiveness of monetary policy by making aggregate prices more flexible. The motivation is concrete: …

Andrés Fernández · Daniel Guzman · Ruy Lama · Carlos Végh

Layer 1: Overview Developing and emerging economies exhibit procyclical fiscal policy on both the spending and taxation sides: government expenditures expand in booms and contract in recessions, and …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Debora Revoltella · Jan Svejnar · Christoph T. Weiss

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates why firms in the European Union exhibit wide dispersion in marginal revenue products (MRP) of capital and labor — a direct indicator of resource misallocation …

Martin Shu

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks whether worker self-selection, rather than slow technological progress, can explain the low measured labor productivity growth in the U.S. service sector — a …

Sjak Smulders · Sophie Zhou

Layer 1: Overview This paper by Smulders and Zhou challenges the standard lock-in narrative for the slow green transition. The conventional explanation — path dependency in directed technical change …

Loren Brandt · Ruochen Dai · Gueorgui Kambourov · Kjetil Storesletten · Xiaobo Zhang

Layer 1: Overview This paper studies entrepreneurship and new firm creation in China through the lens of serial entrepreneurs (SEs) — individuals who establish more than one firm — contrasting them …

Sakai Ando · Tamon Asonuma · Prachi Mishra · Alexandre Sollaci

Layer 1: Overview Sovereign debt restructuring is a central tool for countries in debt distress, yet surprisingly little evidence exists on whether it actually reduces the debt-to-GDP ratio — the …

Esther Ann Bøler · Andreas Moxnes · Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

Layer 1: Overview Firms that invest heavily in intangible assets — patents, R&D, software — face a structural financing disadvantage: intangibles offer limited collateral value to banks, so …

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical …

Russell Cooper · Ozgen Ozturk

Layer 1: Overview This paper investigates what drives the countercyclical dispersion of TFPR — total factor productivity measured in revenue terms — a pattern that is well documented empirically but …

Jean-Félix Brouillette

Layer 1: Overview Women accounted for only 3% of U.S. inventors in 1976 and still just 14% in 2023, a pace of convergence far slower than in law (3% to 49%) or medicine (6% to 46%) over the same …

Eunkyung Lee

Layer 1: Overview Research question and motivation. This paper asks how monetary policy transmits to corporate investment through bank credit, and specifically whether the relevant credit margin is …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

Layer 1: Overview This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities …

Michael W. L. Elsby · Axel Gottfries · Pawel Krolikowski · Gary Solon

Layer 1: Overview This paper develops a tractable theoretical model of wage dynamics in long-term employment relationships, situated between two polar extremes in the existing literature: continual …

Maria Alsina-Pujols

Layer 1: Overview This paper asks how the threat of forced climate migration — international displacement driven by climate-induced natural disasters — should alter optimal carbon taxation. The …

Drago Bergholt · Fabio Canova · Francesco Furlanetto · Nicolò Maffei-Faccioli · Pål Ulvedal

Layer 1: Overview The paper addresses what drove the post-COVID inflation surge in the United States and internationally. Before answering the substantive question, the authors identify and diagnose a …