Public-Finance

Ilyana Kuziemko · Nicolas Longuet-Marx · Suresh Naidu

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question. Why have less-educated voters in the United States abandoned the Democratic Party over recent decades? The paper argues that the Democratic Party’s …

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 …

Davide Viviano · Kaspar Wüthrich · Paul Niehaus

This paper develops an economic framework for determining when and how much multiple hypothesis testing (MHT) adjustment is warranted in research settings. The research question is: under what …

Robert W. Hahn · Nathaniel Hendren · Robert D. Metcalfe · Ben Sprung-Keyser

This paper extends and applies the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) framework to evaluate the welfare consequences of 96 climate-related tax and spending policies in the United States. The MVPF …

Karl M. Aspelund · Anna Russo

This paper investigates the problem of additionality — the likelihood that a conservation action is marginal to (i.e., caused by) an incentive — in the United States Department of Agriculture’s …

Minsu Chang · Hanbaek Lee

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper investigates the fiscal multiplier of infrastructure investment, specifically by incorporating firm-level investment decisions — a dimension absent from …

Robert M. Anderson · Haosui Duanmu

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question Anderson and Duanmu (2025) ask how general equilibrium (GE) interactions — factor reallocation across sectors, capital misallocation under climate uncertainty, and …

Matti Liski · François Salanie

This paper develops a general model of experimentation under catastrophe risk in which the catastrophe is triggered when a stock variable exceeds an unknown threshold, but occurs only after a …

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 …

Felipe Gonçalves · Elisa Jácome · Emily Weisburst

This paper studies how immigration enforcement affects public safety, asking two questions: (1) what is the effect of increased enforcement on criminal victimization, and (2) how does increased …

Marco Cosconati · Yi Xin · Fan Wu · Yizhou Jin

This paper studies imperfect competition in selection markets where competing firms have heterogeneous information about consumers — a layer of asymmetry distinct from the classic buyer-seller …

Andreas Haupt · Zoë Hitzig

Haupt and Hitzig introduce a framework for comparing the privacy properties of different mechanism protocols. The core research question is: when a designer commits to implementing a social choice …

Frank Yang

This paper studies when a principal can improve upon simple one-dimensional mechanisms by also deploying costly nonprice screening instruments — actions that are socially wasteful yet potentially …

Victor Chernozhukov · Kaspar Wuthrich · Yinchu Zhu

Chernozhukov, Wüthrich, and Zhu propose a debiased synthetic control (SC) estimator and an accompanying self-normalized t-test for making inferences on the average treatment effect on the treated …

José Luis Montiel Olea · Chen Qiu · Jörg Stoye

This paper applies classical statistical decision theory (Wald 1950) to treatment choice problems where the data only partially identify payoff-relevant parameters. The policy maker chooses an action …

Taha Choukhmane

Overview Research question. Does automatic enrollment (auto-enrollment) in retirement savings plans increase lifetime wealth accumulation and welfare? The prior literature established large short-run …

Amanda Dahlstrand

This paper asks whether digital platforms can improve healthcare outcomes by enabling needs-based matching between patients and physicians unconstrained by geography. Amanda Dahlstrand studies digital …

Nikhil Agarwal · Paulo Somaini

Agarwal and Somaini study demand estimation in markets where consumers face latent choice constraints — situations where a consumer’s effective choice set is determined not only by her …

Ingrid Huitfeldt · Victoria Marone · Daniel Waldinger

This paper studies the design of dynamic reassignment mechanisms—centralized systems that must not only provide good initial matches but also accommodate changes in agents’ preferences over …

Andreas Hornstein · Marios Karabarbounis · André Kurmann · Etienne Lalé · Lien Ta

This paper isolates the disincentive effects of pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on employment recovery, separating them from the simultaneously operating stimulative (demand) effects …

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 …

Alec Brandon · Paul J Ferraro · John A List · Robert D Metcalfe · Michael K Price · Florian Rundhammer

This paper asks why the Home Energy Report (HER) — a widely deployed social-comparison nudge that shows households how their electricity consumption compares to their neighbors — produces behavioral …

Lee K. Davison · Carlos D. Ramirez

Overview Research question. Does deposit insurance promote financial depth by arresting the outflow of deposits from the banking system during periods of bank distress? The paper tests and quantifies …

Matthew Leisten · Nicholas Vreugdenhil

This paper evaluates the efficiency of linked environmental regulation, a targeting mechanism whereby inspectors who discover violations at one plant can increase enforcement pressure on other plants …

John Sturm Becko · André Sztutman

Overview Research Question. Can income tax schedules be justified as utilitarian-optimal without adopting extreme normative assumptions about how household welfare should be measured? The paper …

Gautam Gowrisankaran · Ashley Langer · Mar Reguant

This paper asks how rate-of-return (RoR) regulation in U.S. electricity markets affects the speed and efficiency of energy transitions, specifically the transition from coal to combined-cycle natural …

Thomas R Covert · Ryan Kellogg

Covert and Kellogg study policies that aim to “keep carbon in the ground” by blocking fossil fuel infrastructure investment, with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as their empirical …

Naoki Aizawa · Corina Mommaerts · Stephanie Rennane

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper studies (1) how firm accommodation decisions respond to financial incentives in the context of workplace disability under workers’ compensation, …

Eduardo Azevedo · Jonathan Beauchamp · Richard Karlsson Linnér

This paper asks how much adverse selection would arise in critical illness insurance (CII) markets if consumers can observe polygenic indexes (PGIs) — genetic risk scores derived from millions of …

N. Meltem Daysal · Hui Ding · Maya Rossin-Slater · Hannes Schwandt

This paper studies the short- and long-term consequences of intra-household respiratory disease transmission from older to younger siblings in Danish families. The central research questions are: (1) …

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 — …

Elena Capatina · Michael Keane

Capatina and Keane build and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings for U.S. men that incorporates health shocks, endogenous human capital accumulation via learning-by-doing, …

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 …

Aprajit Mahajan · Christian Michel · Alessandro Tarozzi

This paper addresses two related problems: the formal identification of time-inconsistent preferences in dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneous types, and the structural …

Jorge García-Hombrados · Marcel Jansen · Angel Martínez · Berkay Özcan · Pedro Rey-Biel · Antonio Roldán-Monés

This paper investigates how the ideological alignment between knowledge-disseminating institutions and policymakers affects the adoption of evidence-based policies. The core research question is …

Paul H S Kim · Anran Li

Kim and Li study how publicly provided reinsurance affects insurer behavior and market outcomes in health insurance markets where firms face substantial cost uncertainty. The central question is …

Marianne Bertrand · Matilde Bombardini · Raymond Fisman · Francesco Trebbi · Eyub Yegen

This paper investigates whether institutional investors influence the political activities of their portfolio firms, using political action committee (PAC) giving as a window into the broader question …

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

Overview Research Question. Does the Great Recession reduce or increase mortality, and what are the welfare implications of incorporating recession-induced mortality changes into standard …

Daniel Björkegren · Joshua E. Blumenstock · Samsun Knight

This paper addresses the problem of algorithmic manipulation: when consequential decisions are encoded in machine learning algorithms, individuals strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired …

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 …

Matthew Elliott · Andrea Galeotti · Andrew Koh · Wenhao Li

This paper asks what market outcomes an information designer — modeled as an internet platform that knows consumers’ preferences — can achieve by choosing what information to disclose to …

Niko Jaakkola · Florian Wagener

This paper by Jaakkola and Wagener addresses a long-standing open problem in the theory of differential games: how to make Markov-perfect equilibria (MPE) well-defined when best-response policy …

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

Overview Research Question. 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? Data and …

Vivek Bhattacharya · Gastón Illanes · David Stillerman

This paper by Bhattacharya, Illanes, and Stillerman makes two contributions to the debate over US antitrust enforcement stringency. First, it documents the price, quantity, and assortment effects of a …

David Berger · Kyle Herkenhoff · Simon Mongey

Overview Research question. Can minimum wages improve welfare through efficiency — by correcting monopsony-driven under-employment — and, if so, by how much? What is the optimal minimum wage, and how …

Kelli Marquardt

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of ADHD diagnosis to decompose the mechanisms driving the observed 2.3:1 male-to-female diagnostic difference in the United States. The research …

Anmol Bhandari · Tobey Kass · Thomas J. May · Ellen R. McGrattan · Evan Schulz

This paper uses a novel longitudinal administrative dataset drawn from U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records to characterize income dynamics and the …

Árpád Ábrahám · Eva Carceles-Poveda · Yan Liu · Ramon Marimon

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks how to optimally design a Financial Stability Fund (Fund) for a union of sovereign countries that must simultaneously (i) prevent sovereign …

Daron Acemoglu · Daniel Huttenlocher · Asuman Ozdaglar · James Siderius

Acemoglu, Huttenlocher, Ozdaglar, and Siderius develop a two-sided platform model to study the welfare consequences of digital advertising as an online business model. The platform intermediates …

Volker Britz · Hans Gersbach

This paper revisits the open rule legislative bargaining model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989) — the dominant workhorse model in political economy for analyzing how legislatures divide a surplus — and …

Timothy Christensen · Hyungsik Roger Moon · Frank Schorfheide

This paper derives asymptotically optimal statistical decision rules for discrete choice problems when the payoffs associated with some choices are only partially identified. The research question is: …

Gabriel Kreindler · Arya Gaduh · Tilman Graff · Rema Hanna · Benjamin A. Olken

This paper studies how commuter preferences over wait times, travel times, and transfers should shape the design of urban bus networks, using the world’s largest Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system — …

Jan Eeckhout · Chunyang Fu · Wenjian Li · Xi Weng

Overview This paper asks whether and how optimal income taxation should change when firms have market power. The question is motivated by the documented rise in economy-wide markups since 1980, which …

Michela Maria Tincani

This paper investigates the mechanisms behind peer effects in the classroom using exogenous variation in study disruptions generated by the 2010 Maule mega-earthquake in Chile (magnitude 8.8, the …

Beat Hintermann · Beaumont Schoeman · Joseph Molloy · Thomas Götschi · Alberto Castro · Christopher Tchervenkov · Uros Tomic · Kay W Axhausen

This paper reports on the MOBIS experiment, a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) implementing a multi-modal Pigovian transport pricing scheme in urban areas of German- and French-speaking …

Cecile Gaubert · Patrick Kline · Damian Vergara · Danny Yagan

Place-Based Redistribution: Overview Research Question Should national governments redistribute income to residents of poor areas through place-based transfers, or should redistribution rely solely on …

Stefano DellaVigna · Woojin Kim

DellaVigna and Kim study the innovation and diffusion of policies across U.S. states using a dataset of over 700 state laws spanning seven decades. The central question is what predicts whether a …

Emanuele Colonnelli · Valdemar Pinho Neto · Edoardo Teso

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question Do individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes in the private sector? Specifically, do business owners sort copartisan workers into …

Aaron Chalfin · Felipe Goncalves

This paper studies how public sector workers balance professional motivations against private economic concerns, using arrest decisions by Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers as the empirical …

Lassi Ahlvik · Jørgen Juel Andersen · Jonas Hveding Hamang · Torfinn Harding

This paper asks three questions about supply-side climate policies in the oil market: how do oil companies respond to production-based taxes; what are the aggregate effects of such taxes on global CO2 …

Ian Schofield Ball · Deniz Kattwinkel

Ball and Kattwinkel study quota mechanisms — linking mechanisms that impose aggregate constraints on agents’ reports across multiple decision problems — and provide the first theoretical …

Cody Tuttle

This paper studies racial disparities in federal criminal sentencing by analyzing abnormal bunching in the distribution of crack-cocaine amounts recorded at sentencing. The identifying variation comes …

Manasvini Singh · Atheendar Venkataramani

Singh and Venkataramani ask whether resource scarcity causes discriminatory rationing of health care by patient race, with patient death as the starkest possible outcome of biased allocation …

Johnny Tang

This paper quantitatively assesses the consequences of jurisdictional competition in the US life insurance industry, an $8 trillion market. The central question is whether competition between state …

Samuel Bazzi · Masyhur Hilmy · Benjamin Marx

This paper studies how Indonesia’s Islamic education sector responded to one of the largest state-driven mass schooling expansions in history — the SD INPRES program (Sekolah Dasar Presidential …

Boaz Abramson · Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Abramson and Van Nieuwerburgh study Rent Guarantee Insurance (RGI), a product in which an insurer pays the landlord on behalf of a tenant who defaults on rent due to a negative income or health …

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 …

Andrew B. Abel · Stavros Panageas

Running Primary Deficits Forever in a Dynamically Efficient Economy: Feasibility and Optimality Research Question The paper addresses two questions about government debt rollover. First, a positive …

Aram Grigoryan

Grigoryan (2021) develops a unified general-equilibrium framework that jointly models school assignment mechanisms and the housing market to evaluate the welfare and distributional consequences of …

Giulia Brancaccio · Karam Kang

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper investigates whether intermediaries in the U.S. municipal bond market strategically exploit product design to increase search frictions and, through …

Deniz Dutz · Ingrid Huitfeldt · Santiago Lacouture · Magne Mogstad · Alexander Torgovitsky · Winnie van Dijk

This paper addresses nonresponse bias in surveys — the distortion that arises when survey participants differ systematically from nonparticipants in ways that correlate with the survey’s …

Mariaflavia Harari · Maisy Wong

This paper estimates the long-term causal effects of the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP), one of the world’s largest slum upgrading programs, on urban development in Jakarta, Indonesia. KIP …

Nicola Mastrorocco · Edoardo Teso

Mastrorocco and Teso study how the internal organization of a state evolves during national development, framing state capacity as an organizational — specifically a principal-agent — problem. Using a …

Ivan T Ivanov · Luke Pettit · Toni M Whited

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question Does corporate income taxation raise or lower corporate leverage? The canonical Modigliani-Miller (1963) view holds that the interest tax deduction makes debt more …

Xiaoming Li · Zheng Liu · Yuchao Peng · Zhiwei Xu

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks how changes in the composition (not the size) of Chinese local government debt influence bank risk-taking, credit allocation between privately …

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

Overview Research Question. 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 …

Ravi Jagadeesan · Alexander Teytelboym

This paper develops an economic theory of competitive equilibrium with indivisible goods that accommodates both complementarities and substitutabilities. The central research question is: what …

Ulrika Ahrsjo · Costas Meghir · Marten Palme · Marieke Schnabel

This paper studies the intergenerational effects of education policy on crime, asking whether a compulsory schooling reform that reduced crime among those directly exposed also reduced crime among …

Michael Frakes · Jonathan Gruber

This paper asks whether racial concordance between patients and medical providers — specifically, whether Black patients are treated by Black physicians — improves use of preventive care and reduces …

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

Layer 1: Overview Research Question This paper asks whether relieving downstream medical debt — debt that has been sold to third-party debt collectors — causes improvements in financial outcomes, …

Luigi Iovino · Thorsten Martin · Julien Sauvagnat

This paper documents and quantifies an “environmental bias” embedded in the U.S. corporate income tax code: CO2-intensive (“dirty”) firms systematically face lower effective …

Javier D Donna · José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez

Donna and Espín-Sánchez investigate whether a market (sequential English auction) or a non-market institution (fixed quota) more efficiently allocates an intermediate good — irrigation water — when …

Andrew Garin · Dmitri Koustas · Carl McPherson · Samuel Norris · Matthew Pecenco · Evan K. Rose · Yotam Shem-Tov · Jeffrey Weaver

Overview This paper estimates the causal effect of incarceration on employment, wage earnings, self-employment, and tax filing behavior using administrative criminal justice data linked to Internal …

Andrew Garin · Jonathan Rothbaum

Overview Research Question. Does government-led construction of large manufacturing plants in previously under-industrialized regions generate long-run improvements in regional economic development …

Mikhail Golosov · Ilia Krasikov

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question. 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 …

Clare Balboni · Robin Burgess · Benjamin A Olken

This paper studies the economics of illegal tropical forest fires in Indonesia, framed as a modern counterpart to Pigou’s canonical externality example of sparks from railway engines. The …

David Chan · Yiqun Chen

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) versus physicians performing overlapping tasks in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) emergency departments (EDs), exploiting a …

Eliana Carranza · Aletheia Donald · Florian Grosset-Touba · Supreet Kaur

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks whether informal redistributive pressure — the social obligation to share earned income with kin and social networks — distorts labor supply in …

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 …

Daniel Björkegren · Joshua E Blumenstock · Samsun Knight

This paper asks a fundamental question about policy design: when a program prioritizes one group over another, is that because the group benefits more from the intervention, or because the policy …

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 …

Barbara Biasi · Julien Lafortune · David Schönholzer

What Works and for Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across the U.S. Research Question This paper investigates which types of school facility investments benefit …

Nirupama L Rao · Max Risch

Layer 1 — Overview Research Question This paper asks how independent (pass-through) businesses in the United States accommodate minimum wage increases — specifically whether they reduce employment, …

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 …