Quarterly Journal of Economics

Réka Juhász · Shogo Sakabe · David E Weinstein

Research question and motivation: Why did the First Industrial Revolution (IR) spread to Meiji Japan—and to essentially no other non-Western country—during the first wave of globalization? The paper …

Xavier Cirera · Diego Comin · Marcio Cruz

Research question and motivation: How sophisticated are the technologies establishments actually use, and how close are they to the world frontier? Traditional measures (since Ryan-Gross 1943 and …

Ilyana Kuziemko · Nicolas Longuet-Marx · Suresh Naidu

Why have less-educated voters in the United States abandoned the Democratic Party over recent decades? The paper argues that the Democratic Party's evolution on economic policy — specifically its …

Ana Costa-Ramón · Michaela Slotwinski · Ursina Schaede · Anne Ardila Brenøe

This paper investigates whether information constraints — rather than fully forward-looking choices — contribute to mothers' reduced labor supply after childbirth, a key driver of gender inequality. …

Pedro Bordalo · Nicola Gennaioli · Giacomo Lanzani · Andrei Shleifer

Bordalo, Gennaioli, Lanzani, and Shleifer develop a cognitive theory of choice in which a decision maker's attention to the features of options is determined by her categorization of the current …

N. Gregory Mankiw · David Romer · David N. Weil

This 1992 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil tests whether Robert Solow's (1956) neoclassical growth model, augmented to include accumulation of human as well as physical …

Robert M. Solow

Robert Solow's 1956 paper argues that the Harrod-Domar model's famous conclusion -- that steady economic growth is only ever balanced on a "knife-edge," liable to tip into growing unemployment or …

Marco Bassetto · David S Miller

Why do sudden inflations and currency crises occur, while symmetric sudden deflations never do? The paper asks whether treating nominal government bonds as analogous to ordinary corporate bonds — with …

Marco Errico · Danial Lashkari

Errico and Lashkari address two intertwined problems in the measurement of aggregate price indices: how to account for quality change and variety entry/exit when the demand system is not CES, and how …

Felipe Del Canto · John Grigsby · Eric Qian · Conor Walsh

The paper asks whether inflationary shocks are regressive, and demonstrates that the answer depends critically on the source of the shock. A single aggregate inflation statistic conceals radically …

Daron Acemoglu · Pascual Restrepo

Acemoglu and Restrepo examine the effects of automation in economies where labor market distortions cause some workers to earn rents—wages above their opportunity cost or outside option. The central …

Gita Gopinath · Jeremy C Stein

A currency's role as the unit of account in which trade is invoiced and its role as a safe store of value reinforce each other, because households who buy dollar-priced imports want dollar-denominated …

Sydnee Caldwell · Ingrid Haegele · Jörg Heining

How prevalent is individual wage bargaining in the labor market, what determines firms' bargaining strategies, how do bargaining encounters unfold for workers, and does heterogeneity in bargaining …

Bruno Pellegrino · Enrico Spolaore · Romain Wacziarg

Why do observed international investment positions and cross-country differences in rates of return to capital fail to conform to a frictionless capital-market benchmark? The paper asks how large the …

Dmitry Taubinsky · Luigi Butera · Matteo Saccarola · Chen Lian

Linking the monthly Danish Consumer Expectations Survey to the Danish administrative registry, this paper shows that households' inflation forecasts move strongly and negatively with their own recent …

Ariel T Burstein · Vasco M Carvalho · Basile Grassi

The paper asks how firm-level, sector-level, and aggregate markups comove with output at different levels of aggregation, and whether a single structural model can reconcile seemingly contradictory …

Christopher D. Carroll

This paper argues that once consumers face meaningful, uninsurable income risk and are "impatient," they behave as buffer-stock savers who hold a target wealth-to-income ratio and whose average …

Gorkem Bostanci · Guillermo Ordoñez

The paper studies how the two roles of stock markets — revealing information about firms' fundamentals, which guides capital allocation, and providing liquidity — interact, arguing that when stocks …

Raj Chetty · Will Dobbie · Benjamin Goldman · Sonya R Porter · Crystal S Yang

This paper documents sharp divergent trends in intergenerational economic mobility by race and class in the United States across the 1978 to 1992 birth cohorts, and investigates the causal mechanisms …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Sandra Sequeira

This paper examines the impact of conflict-driven forced displacement on human capital accumulation using the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992) as the empirical setting. During this war, over four …

Takuo Sugaya · Alexander Wolitzky

This paper asks how a third-party intermediary (an "algorithm") that observes market demand or costs superior to competing firms should optimally disclose that information to maximize the firms' …

Jonathan Payne · Bálint Szőke · George Hall · Thomas J Sargent

This paper constructs a new dataset of US federal bond prices and uses it to estimate the full term structure of yields on gold-denominated US federal debt from 1791 to 1933 — the entire gold standard …

Panle Jia Barwick · Siyu Chen · Chao Fu · Teng Li

This paper estimates the causal effects of mobile app usage on college students' academic performance, physical health, and labor market outcomes, while separately identifying behavioral (endogenous) …

Asger L. Andersen · Kilian Huber · Niels Johannesen · Ludwig Straub · Emil Toft Vestergaard

This paper develops and implements a system of disaggregated economic accounts that breaks down national accounting positions into bilateral flows between small groups of consumers, producers, the …

Amory Gethin

This paper constructs the first estimates of the aggregate and distributional effects of worldwide educational expansion since 1980 by developing a "distributional growth accounting" framework that …

Raj Chetty · David J Deming · John N Friedman

This paper studies why children from high-income families are more likely to attend Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago — 12 colleges total) and whether attending these …

Supreet Kaur · Sendhil Mullainathan · Suanna Oh · Frank Schilbach

The paper tests whether financial concerns distract workers sufficiently to meaningfully reduce their productivity, and whether receiving cash — by alleviating those concerns — can raise output even …

Michael McLeay · Silvana Tenreyro

An emerging view in international macroeconomics contends that dollar invoicing of exports renders monetary policy ineffective for non-U.S. countries: because export prices are allegedly sticky in …

Ali Almelhem · Murat Iyigun · Austin Kennedy · Jared Rubin

This paper tests Joel Mokyr's claim that Britain's industrialization was preceded and enabled by a cultural shift — specifically, that Enlightenment ideals produced a "progress-oriented" view of …

Sergio Correia · Stephan Luck · Emil Verner

Correia, Luck, and Verner ask a foundational question in banking: why do banks fail? Specifically, they seek to adjudicate between two theoretical views — the solvency view (failures caused by …

Amory Gethin · Emmanuel Saez

Drawing on about 5,000 labor force and household surveys from 160 countries that cover 97% of the world's population, this paper builds a new global database of hours worked and shows that hours …

Timothy Besley · Christopher Dann · Sacha Dray

This paper investigates whether individuals who have experienced stronger GDP growth over their lifetimes are more likely to trust their national government. The authors — Besley, Dann, and Dray — …

Ben Weidmann · Joseph Vecci · Farah Said · Sonia Bhalotra · Achyuta Adhvaryu · Anant Nyshadham · Jorge Tamayo · David Deming

This paper develops a novel experimental method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance, and uses it to evaluate which characteristics predict managerial effectiveness and …

Elliott Ash · Daniel L Chen · Suresh Naidu

This paper quantifies the effect of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges — an intensive two-week economics training program run by the Law and Economics Center from 1976 to 1998 — on the …

Kai Gehring · Paul Schaudt

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence that Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) — a remote-sensing-triggered, automated payout scheme for pastoralists — substantially reduces …

Mauricio Barbosa-Alves · Javier Bianchi · César Sosa-Padilla

The paper extends the Cole-Kehoe (2000) sovereign rollover crisis model to include international reserves and derives the joint optimal management of sovereign debt and reserves in a small open …

Abu Siddique · Michael Vlassopoulos · Yves Zenou

This paper investigates whether virtual contact — exposure to an outgroup through a documentary film — can promote interethnic harmony, and whether targeting network-central individuals amplifies …

Amy Finkelstein · Matthew J Notowidigdo · Frank Schilbach · Jonathan Zhang

Does the Great Recession reduce or increase mortality, and what are the welfare implications of incorporating recession-induced mortality changes into standard macroeconomic welfare frameworks?

Virginia Minni

This paper asks why managers matter for firm performance, and specifically whether managers improve productivity by matching workers to better-suited jobs inside firms rather than through supervision, …

Jack Mountjoy

This paper asks whether enrolling in an American public university generates positive net returns for marginal students — those who barely qualify for admission — and whether those returns justify …

Hadi Elzayn · Evelyn Smith · Thomas Hertz · Cameron Guage · Arun Ramesh · Robin Fisher · Daniel E Ho · Jacob Goldin

Do Black taxpayers face higher IRS audit rates than non-Black taxpayers, despite race-blind audit selection? And if so, why — and what would mitigation look like?

Ben S. Bernanke · Ilian Mihov

Bernanke and Mihov (1998, QJE) address a measurement problem in the monetary-VAR literature: the era's dominant methods for extracting a "monetary policy shock" -- Cholesky orderings built around the …

Ben S. Bernanke · Jean Boivin · Piotr Eliasz

This 2005 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Ben Bernanke, Jean Boivin, and Piotr Eliasz proposes the Factor-Augmented VAR (FAVAR) to address a specific problem with standard small monetary VARs: …

Peter Andre · Philipp Schirmer · Johannes Wohlfart

Using tailored surveys of more than 11,000 US and German households, retail investors, financial professionals, and academic experts, the paper documents the "mental models" people use when reasoning …

Jacob D Orchard · Valerie A Ramey · Johannes F Wieland

Do the high marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) estimated in the leading household studies of the 2008 U.S. tax rebates—particularly Parker et al. (2013), which found MPCs of 50–90 percent within …

Chang-Tai Hsieh · Peter J. Klenow

In a monopolistic-competition model with heterogeneous firms, a plant's revenue productivity should be equalised within an industry unless the plant faces distortions -- so the dispersion of revenue …

Cristina Arellano · Yan Bai · Gabriel Mihalache

This paper develops a New Keynesian small open economy model with endogenous sovereign default — the NK-Default framework — and uses it to study the interplay between monetary policy and sovereign …

Richard Clarida · Jordi Galí · Mark Gertler

Estimating a forward-looking Federal Reserve policy rule separately for 1960-79 and 1979-96, this paper finds that the Fed let real short-term rates fall as expected inflation rose before Volcker, but …

Mark Gertler · Simon Gilchrist

This 1994 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Mark Gertler and Simon Gilchrist asks whether small manufacturing firms bear a disproportionate share of the manufacturing decline that follows …

Gene M Grossman · Elhanan Helpman · Alejandro Sabal

Grossman, Helpman, and Sabal ask what market failures arise in vertical supply chains with multiple production tiers, limited (non-anonymous) supply networks, arms-length transactions, and recurrent …

Menaka Hampole · Francesca Truffa · Ashley Wong

This paper investigates whether exposure to a larger share of female peers during an MBA program causally affects the gender gap in senior corporate leadership positions. The research question is …

John H. Cochrane

Using simple two-variable autoregressions of consumption and GNP, and of dividends and stock prices, Cochrane shows that a shock to GNP (or to stock prices) that leaves consumption (or dividends) …

Matthew Baron · Luc Laeven · Julien Pénasse · Yevhenii Usenko

This paper investigates two interrelated questions about historical banking crises: (1) whether bank losses during banking crises are primarily temporary or permanent in nature, and (2) whether policy …

José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez · Salvador Gil-Guirado · Nicholas Ryan

This paper studies rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. The central research question is: why do people believe that prayer can bring rain, even though it does not work?

Peter Maxted · David Laibson · Benjamin Moll

Maxted, Laibson, and Moll study fiscal and monetary policy in a partial-equilibrium heterogeneous-agent model in which homeowners have present-biased time preferences (Instantaneous Gratification …

Antonio Coppola · Matteo Maggiori · Brent Neiman · Jesse Schreger

Because global firms raise capital through subsidiaries incorporated in tax havens, official residency-based statistics attribute those securities to the haven rather than to the parent's country; …

Carolina Arteaga · Victoria Barone

This paper establishes a causal connection between the opioid epidemic and the political realignment toward the Republican Party in the United States from the mid-2000s through 2022. The …

Josefin Meyer · Carmen M Reinhart · Christoph Trebesch

Two centuries of monthly prices for 1,552 foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York, matched bond-by-bond to a new archive of defaults and haircuts, show that external sovereign …

Joshua D Gottlieb · Maria Polyakova · Kevin Rinz · Hugh Shiplett · Victoria Udalova

What do U.S. physicians earn, how is that earnings variation structured across geography and specialty, and how much does government healthcare payment policy shape those earnings and — through them — …

Kyle Greenberg · Melanie Wasserman · E Anna Weber

Greenberg, Wasserman, and Weber (2024/2026) ask whether men negatively respond—in terms of job performance, behavior, and workplace perceptions—when women first enter an exclusively male occupation. …

Elio Nimier-David · David Sraer · David Thesmar

This paper studies the causal effects of mandatory profit-sharing on workers and firms using a quasi-experimental design arising from a 1990 French reform that lowered the eligibility threshold for …

Raymond Kluender · Neale Mahoney · Francis Wong · Wesley Yin

This paper asks whether relieving downstream medical debt — debt that has been sold to third-party debt collectors — causes improvements in financial outcomes, mental and physical health, and …

Tanguy Bernard · Stefan Dercon · Kate Orkin · Giulio Schinaia · Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

This paper tests whether a light-touch behavioral intervention targeting aspirations can produce persistent economic effects on a poor rural population. The research question is whether changing how …

Andrew Garin · Jonathan Rothbaum

Does government-led construction of large manufacturing plants in previously under-industrialized regions generate long-run improvements in regional economic development and in the lifetime earnings …

Masao Fukui · Emi Nakamura · Jón Steinsson

How does an exchange rate depreciation causally affect macroeconomic outcomes? The paper asks whether depreciations are expansionary or contractionary, and through which mechanism. The core …

Adrien Bilal · Diego R. Känzig

The paper shows that the macroeconomic impact of climate change is an order of magnitude larger than what standard country-level panel estimates suggest. The key identification innovation is to …

Francesco Caselli · James Feyrer

Backing the marginal product of capital straight out of output, the capital stock and the capital share gives a return in poor countries more than twice that in rich ones -- until two corrections are …

Mikhail Golosov · Ilia Krasikov

What is the optimal joint nonlinear earnings tax schedule for married couples? How should one spouse's marginal tax rate depend on the other's earnings? When is individual earnings-based (separable) …

Natalia Emanuel · Emma Harrington · Amanda Pallais

This paper studies how physical proximity to coworkers affects on-the-job training and productivity, using software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer observed from 2019 to 2024. The authors …

Ronan C Lyons · Allison Shertzer · Rowena Gray · David Agorastos

Lyons, Shertzer, Gray, and Agorastos construct the first consistent, annual, quality-adjusted market rent and home sales price series for American cities spanning 1890–2006. The paper addresses a …

William J. Baumol

This 1952 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by William J. Baumol applies inventory-control theory to the transactions demand for cash, modeling an individual who withdraws cash in evenly spaced …

Natalie Bau · Gaurav Khanna · Corinne Low · Alessandra Voena

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that compensates …

Kieu-Trang Nguyen

This paper investigates whether and how a CEO's inherited generalized trust enhances innovation within firms, offering a micro-foundation for the well-documented macro-level relationship between …

S. Rao Aiyagari

This paper builds the standard growth model modified so that a continuum of infinitely-lived agents face uninsured idiosyncratic labor-income risk and a borrowing constraint, and shows that the …

Desmond Ang · Sahil Chinoy

This paper provides the first causal evidence on how military service shaped Black civil rights activism in the aftermath of World War I. The research question is whether random induction into the …

Ellora Derenoncourt · David Weil

This paper studies the labor market effects of voluntary minimum wages (VMWs) — company-wide, publicly announced wage floors set by large private employers — in the U.S. low-wage retail and service …

Sacha Dray · Camille Landais · Stefanie Stantcheva

Wealth data for the nineteenth-century United States barely exist, and this paper builds them from an unusual source: the paper trail of the General Property Tax, a levy that — unlike land taxes …

John J Conlon · Dev Patel

Conlon and Patel test whether students stereotype the link between college majors and occupations — that is, whether they exaggerate the likelihood that majors lead to their "representative" careers …

Barbara Biasi · Julien Lafortune · David Schönholzer

This paper investigates which types of school facility investments benefit students (as measured by test scores) and are valued by homeowners (as measured by house prices), and for which student …

Paul Bouscasse · Emi Nakamura · Jón Steinsson

When did sustained productivity growth begin in England? This paper constructs new estimates of the evolution of productivity in England from 1250 to 1870, with the goal of both dating the onset of …

Samuel Dodini · Anna Stansbury · Alexander Willén

This paper studies who bears the cost when unions raise worker wages — consumers, shareholders, other workers, or nobody, if productivity offsets the cost — using a legislative change in Norway that …

Nirupama L Rao · Max Risch

This paper asks how independent (pass-through) businesses in the United States accommodate minimum wage increases — specifically whether they reduce employment, compress profits, pass costs through to …

Marcella Alsan · Yousra Neberai

This paper investigates a critical juncture in the development of national health insurance (NHI) in the United States: the post-World War II period when most peer nations moved to establish …