(Visualizing) Plausible Treatment Effect Paths

(Forthcoming Article) - We study inference on dynamic treatment effects. We propose simple additions to standard visualizations aimed at enhancing their informativeness. First, we recommend reporting joint hypothesis tests and summary measures that are often of direct interest alongside the standard event-study plot. Second, we introduce a data-driven procedure that estimates a smooth approximation to the treatment-effect path within a prespecified, economically motivated class and produces corresponding confidence regions. The resulting intervals can be substantially tighter than conventional uniform bands while maintaining formal coverage guarantees through post-selection inference (Berk et al. 2013). The accompanying R package plausibounds implements our suggestions.

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Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession by Ann Mari May

(Forthcoming Article)

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Reproducible Aggregation of Sample-Split Statistics

(Forthcoming Article) - Statistical inference is often simplified by sample-splitting. This simplification comes at the cost of the introduction of randomness not native to the data. We propose a simple procedure for sequentially aggregating statistics constructed with multiple splits of the same sample. The user specifies a bound and a nominal error rate. If the procedure is implemented twice on the same data, the nominal error rate approximates the chance that the results differ by more than the bound. We illustrate the application of the procedure to several widely applied econometric methods.

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Building Blocks of Prosperity: The Job Impacts of Federal Block Grants for Developing Low-Income Communities

(Forthcoming Article) - I study the job impacts of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), a federal program which provides local governments with block grants to flexibly invest in low-income neighborhoods. I leverage a one-time shock to the formula allocation process which permanently re-shuffled grant generosity, simultaneously creating large funding shocks in both directions. While job counts increased in positively shocked localities relative to unaffected localities, job counts remained steady in negatively shocked localities. I document asymmetric effects on local public finance mechanisms to support these findings. I also leverage itemized CDBG expenditure data to uncover correlates of high-impact place-based investments.

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Education and Partisanship

(Forthcoming Article) - Education weakens the historical link between income and partisanship across democracies, challenging classical models of political economy. Using administrative data on millions of voters exposed to discontinuities in compulsory schooling laws and college admissions in Florida and California, I show that both the extensive margin of years of high school education and the intensive margin of college selectivity can reduce Republican Party affiliation. Effects generalize across generations (1969 to present), settings, and institutions. Results are consistent with peer socialization shaping sociocultural attitudes alongside career-path mechanisms, rather than deliberate instructor-driven persuasion.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

Vol. 40 No. 3 Summer 2026

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The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from US Appropriations Shocks

(Forthcoming Article) - Based on a narrative classification of all significant postwar changes in R&D appropriations for five major federal agencies, we find that an increase in nondefense R&D appropriations leads to increases in various measures of innovative activity and higher business-sector productivity in the long run. We structurally estimate the production function elasticity of nondefense government R&D capital using the SP-IV methodology of Lewis and Mertens (2024) and obtain implied returns of 140 to 210 percent over the postwar period. The estimates indicate that government-funded R&D accounts for one-fifth of business-sector TFP growth since WWII, and imply substantial underfunding of nondefense R&D.

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Disentangling Probabilistic and Strategic Errors

(Forthcoming Article) - In many strategic environments with asymmetric information, systematic decision mistakes can arise from two sources: failures in probabilistic reasoning when updating beliefs and incorrect strategic inference about opponents’ private information or choices. Using a sequential belief elicitation design in persuasion games, we experimentally disentangle and quantify these two reasoning errors. We find that probabilistic and strategic reasoning errors are comparable in magnitude, largely orthogonal, and their patterns and overall degree are stable across various settings. These results suggest that an improved behavioral theory should account for both strategic naivete and non-Bayesian updating, without significant concern for their interaction.

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Firm Adaptation in Production Networks: Evidence from Extreme Weather Events in Pakistan

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper considers how far private adaptation may reduce future vulnerability to climate risks. Using data on monthly firm-to-firm transactions from Pakistan, we find that flood-affected firms are more likely to relocate to safer ground, and shift purchases towards suppliers in less flood-prone regions and reached via less flood-prone roads. The results indicate that firms are imperfectly in- formed about flood risk, and update their beliefs following floods. We quantify aggregate impacts using a spatial model of endogenous production network formation. The findings suggest that firms' learning will shape the economic impact of increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.

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Sunk Cost: Who's to Blame for the Nation's Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It by Jillian Berman

(Forthcoming Article)

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American Economic Review

Vol. 116 No. 8 August 2026

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American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Vol. 18 No. 3 August 2026

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A Static Capital Buffer is Hard To Beat

(Forthcoming Article) - In a model with endogenous risk-taking, deposit insurance and limited liability may lead banks to make risky loans that are socially inefficient. Capital requirements can prevent excessive risk-taking at the cost of reducing liquidity-producing bank deposits. A policy that sets capital requirements just high enough to prevent excessive risktaking will move capital requirements pro-, counter-, or a-cyclically depending on the shock source. However, such a policy requires full knowledge of all the shocks hitting the economy and is not implementable. Simple rules that respond to cyclical conditions—in line with Basel III guidance—perform poorly, whereas a small static capital buffer can do much better.

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Becoming Legible to the State: The Necessary but Not Sufficient Role of Identification in Taxation

(Forthcoming Article) - Many lower-income countries know little about their citizens and their tax bases, which hinders effective taxation. This paper studies the impact of making the tax base more “legible” to the state and signaling this legibility to taxpayers. Leveraging a new digitized property database, a randomized experiment in Liberia finds that including identifying information (owners’ names and property photographs) in tax notices quadruples the likelihood of payment from 2 percent to over 8 percent, but only when the notice also details noncompliance penalties. The effects of the intervention persist to the 4th year. These results underscore that both legibility and enforcement are essential for taxation.

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Health Insurance and Access to Care for the Near Elderly

(Forthcoming Article) - The vast majority of Americans become eligible for Medicare at age 65. This results in 7 percent of the near elderly transitioning from uninsurance to insurance and 60 percent switching from some source of insurance to Medicare. We develop an extension of two-sample IV to estimate the effect of uninsurance on access to care while accounting for the effects of the other transitions. We find that not having insurance results in much lower probabilities of having a medical provider or receiving inpatient care. The foregone hospitalizations are for life-threatening emergent conditions and elective surgeries that increase quality of life.

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Knowledge Spillovers, Competition, and Individual Careers

(Forthcoming Article) - Exposure to better peers in the workplace can influence career trajectories through two opposing channels: positively, via knowledge spillovers, and negatively, through competition for advancement. We disentangle these effects by studying untrained labor market entrants and distinguishing between coworkers in the same occupation with whom they are likely to compete versus those with whom they are unlikely to compete. We find robust evidence of persistent knowledge spillovers but also identify countervailing competition effects of comparable magnitude. Both effects are more pronounced for men than for women.

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American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Vol. 18 No. 3 August 2026

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The economics of sanctioning a petrostate

Lukasz Rachel and Catherine Wolfram discuss the G7 price cap on Russian oil and why it defied textbook predictions.

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Social Push and the Direction of Innovation

(Forthcoming Article) - What are the implications of unequal access to innovation careers for the direction of innovation and inequality? Leveraging novel linked datasets in the United States and Finland, we document that innovators create products more likely to be purchased by consumers like them in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and age. Homophily exists both within narrow product categories and across industries, and has been stable in recent decades. Incorporating this “social push” channel into a growth model, we estimate that unequal access to innovation careers has a large effect on cost-of-living inequality and long-run growth.

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High School Effects on Civic Engagement

(Forthcoming Article) - Preparing young people for citizenship is a foundational purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education, birth, and voting records for nine cohorts of students in Indiana, I estimate and assess the validity of high school e!ects on voting. School e!ects on voting are significant and practically meaningful: a one standard deviation increase in school civic e!ects increases the probability of voting by 2.1 percentage points (5.3 percent) and also predicts increases in voter registration and times voting. School civic e!ects are positively associated with peer parental civic norms.

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From Banks to Nonbanks: Macroprudential and Monetary Policy Effects on Corporate Lending

(Forthcoming Article) - The growing role of nonbanks in corporate credit intermediation raises important yet underexplored questions about the transmission of monetary policy (MP) and macroprudential policy (MaPP) to the real economy. Using syndicated loan data, we find that nonbanks act as shock absorbers, cushioning nonfinancial firms from both MaPP and MP tightening. These shocks drive credit away from weaker banks toward nonbanks, raising concerns about credit quality. Our findings highlight that the side effects of tighter MaPP and MP are nontrivial as credit intermediation migrates to a sector largely outside the regulatory perimeter, posing new financial stability risks.

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Using Machine Learning to Generate, Clarify, and Improve Economic Models

(Forthcoming Article) - This article examines how machine learning and other computational techniques can contribute to the development of economic models. First, comparing economic models to flexible algorithms can help clarify the strengths and limitations of existing models, for instance how far they are from the predictive limit. Second, algorithms can adversarially probe economic models to identify cases in which the theoretical predictions fail. Third, “hybrid” models can combine interpretable economic structure with flexible learning methods to leverage the strengths of both. Finally, large language models introduce qualitatively new possibilities, from simulating human responses to generating novel hypotheses. Throughout, I emphasize both promise and limits: while machine learning can uncover patterns that standard models miss, translating these algorithmic insights into interpretable and portable economic understanding typically still requires human judgment.

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The Inflation Attention Threshold and Inflation Surges

(Forthcoming Article) - The recent inflation surge brought inflation back on people’s minds. I quantify when and how much attention to inflation changes and derive the macroeconomic implications of these attention changes. I estimate an attention threshold at an inflation rate of 4 percent, that attention doubles when inflation exceeds this threshold, and that supply shocks have stronger and more persistent effects on inflation in times of high attention. Developing a model featuring the attention threshold, I show that attention changes offer a joint explanation for inflation surges, inflation’s co-movement with inflation expectations, and a long last mile of disinflation.

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The Causal Effects of Global Supply Chain Disruptions on Macroeconomic Outcomes: Evidence and Theory

(Forthcoming Article) - We study the causal effects of global supply chain disruptions by constructing a new index of real-time port congestion using Automatic Identification System data from container ships and a spatial clustering algorithm. We develop a model with search frictions between producers and retailers that links upstream production slack to downstream supply shortages and captures output and price responses to supply chain shocks. The co-movements of output, prices, spare capacity, and market tightness provide novel identification restrictions. We find demand and supply shocks drove US disinflation in 2020, while the inflation surge in 2021 was driven mainly by supply chain shocks.

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Predictably Unpredictable Inspections

(Forthcoming Article) - Inspections are a common tool for acquiring information and incentivizing compliance. Though typically unannounced, they often follow a predictable schedule. We study how this predictability shapes firm effort and patient outcomes in U.S. nursing homes. Nursing homes “slack” in the low-risk period following an inspection and ramp up effort as their next inspection approaches. Patient survival mirrors this pattern, suggesting meaningful consequences for care quality. We embed these estimates in a dynamic model capturing how inspection regimes incentivize effort and reveal quality. Unpredictability induces as much additional effort as increasing inspection frequency by 10 percent, with minimal loss of informational value.

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Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

(Forthcoming Article)

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The long shadow of infant illness

Danish data reveal how viruses brought home by older siblings influence lifetime income.

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Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5 Million Neighborhoods

(Forthcoming Article) - We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the United States. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighborhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighborhoods within cities—at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy.

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Fighting for Growth: Labor Scarcity and Technological Progress During the British Industrial Revolution

(Forthcoming Article) - We establish a link between labor scarcity and the adoption of labor-saving technology in industrializing England. During the Napoleonic Wars, more than 10 percent of the male population served in the armed forces. Where recruitment was heavy, more machines economizing on labor were adopted. Naval recruitment, instrumented by warships’ coastal access, provides exogenous variation in labor scarcity and suggests that the link between labor shortages and adoption is causal. Where mechanical skills were abundant, the impact of labor scarcity on adoption appears to be larger.

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Union Bargaining Power and the Amenity-Wage Tradeoff

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper studies how collective bargaining affects wages and amenities. By merging collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) to linked employer-employee data in Brazil, I combine rich contracted amenities with wage information. I implement a difference-in-difference strategy that exploits a court ruling enforcing CBA continuation (i.e., ultractivity) to estimate the effects of union bargaining power. Strengthening unions raises wages and amenities without reducing employment—increasing retention despite some labor-labor substitution. A revealed preference approach shows that amenities account for 45% of total compensation gains. These findings suggest that collective bargaining can offset monopsony power, but employers retain the right-tomanage workforce composition.

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