When doctors lose control over the end users of their services — as with secondary markets for prescription drugs — most become more cautious. This can be helpful when overprescribing is rampant, but resale to misusers still causes harm. buff.ly/SnoMuMq

Random Priority—a popular no-transfer allocation mechanism—is efficient, fair, & simple to participate in. Is it the only mechanism with these properties? Marek Pycia @econ.uzh.ch and Peter Troyan, UVA Economics, answer this long-standing question in the positive. buff.ly/zlSjmC0

A structural model of applicant-examiner negotiation finds U.S. patent screening moderately effective, with social costs of $15.4bn/year. Examiner intrinsic motivation sharply improves screening quality, and capping negotiation rounds reduces social costs. @willmatcham.bsky.social buff.ly/W3Qciiu

Econometrica Volume 94, Issue 4 (July 2026) is now online www.econometricsociety.org/publications...

Are you also torn between small sample performance and robustness to heteroskedasticity? You can have both! One can produce an exact test for subvectors that is asymptotically robust to heteroskedasticity. @guillaumeecon.bsky.social buff.ly/gIsdPs7

What securities emerge when competing investors design financing contracts? With dispersed information about common values, debt best protects investors from the winner’s curse and sellers’ informed selection—unlike in monopoly or private-value settings. buff.ly/g6q6D9Y

On July 1, Econometrica welcomed new AEs to its editorial board: Laurent Bouton (Georgetown), Alex Frankel (UChicago), Annie Liang (Northwestern), Zhipeng Liao (UCLA), Luciano Pomatto (Caltech), Todd Schoellman (Minneapolis Fed), Isaac Sorkin (Stanford), and Thomas Wollmann (BU).

Why do workers dislike inflation? Because wages catching up to prices means costly conflict: tough pay talks, job search, bargaining. Survey + model show conflict more than doubles inflation costs. Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian & Christina Patterson. buff.ly/S1GJdlV

When treatment locations are as-good-as-random, how do we estimate causal effects on nearby observations? Use counterfactual locations, known ex-ante or predicted via neural nets, and quantify uncertainty based on the quasi-experimental design. buff.ly/BFRhcFW

Gravity models usually make distance a shipping cost. What if distance also makes encounters between buyers and suppliers less likely? A new firm-to-firm matching model fits granular customs data and helps resolve trade and labor-market puzzles. buff.ly/XURqW3P

When are causal parameters identified in instrumental variables models? This paper shows many such models share a common necessary and sufficient condition for identification that is constructive and suggests a simple sample-analogue estimator. buff.ly/4uw9gj0

People underreact when inferring states, yet overreact when forecasting from the same signals. Fan, Liang & Peng show the question type triggers different heuristics—similarity between available and elicited statistics determines which shortcut dominates. buff.ly/ampbeNm

Why do richer economies have more very large firms? This paper shows that the upper tail of the firm size distribution thickens as economies grow. A model of idea search explains why, showing how growth itself can produce rising concentration. buff.ly/cpStCuc

Econometrica Volume 94, Issue 3 (May 2026) is now online www.econometricsociety.org/publications...

Local projections are surprisingly robust to misspecification. By contrast, VAR confidence intervals with short-to-moderate lag length can severely undercover for misspecification that is small, difficult to detect, and cannot be ruled out a priori. buff.ly/c2obho2

When a Bayesian parametric model can be embedded in an encompassing semiparametric framework, likelihood augmentation via efficient scores delivers robustness to local misspecification and semiparametrically efficient inference. buff.ly/lEoRpmD

How do anti-misinformation policies work? RCT & structural estimation on Twitter/𝕏 in the US: priming outperforms fact-checking by raising salience of reputation at low cost, curbing false news & preserving true news. Veracity updating matters less. buff.ly/Nr9JbFO

A job ladder model with incomplete markets links wealth to job search over the life cycle. It provides a new microfoundation for all three inputs in F(K, AL) and offers novel insights into how redistributive policies affect aggregate output and welfare. @leokaas.bsky.social buff.ly/IqpiGoa

Econometrica is pleased to announce the 2026 Haavelmo Prize for the best econometrics paper, awarded to Ulrich K. Müller and Mark W. Watson for “Spatial Unit Roots and Spurious Regression.” www.econometricsociety.org/society/news...

Econometrica is pleased to announce the 2026 Frisch Medal for the best applied paper, awarded to Adrien Bilal, Niklas Engbom, Simon Mongey, and Giovanni L. Violante for “Firm and Worker Dynamics in a Frictional Labor Market.” www.econometricsociety.org/society/news...

Econometrica is pleased to announce the 2026 Arrow Prize for the best economic theory paper, awarded to Weijie Zhong for “Optimal Dynamic Information Acquisition.” www.econometricsociety.org/society/news...

After Citizens United, Super PAC spending surged. I estimate a multistage model of U.S. congressional elections and find that offsetting spending responses limit net equilibrium effects. Still, amplified donor influence can reshape the electoral landscape. buff.ly/MJ48u5H

Econometrica Volume 94, Issue 2 (March 2026) is now online www.econometricsociety.org/publications...

How does agricultural policy shape climate damages? @allanhsiao.bsky.social, Jacob Moscona, and Karthik Sastry show that governments move to protect consumers when extreme heat causes food shortages, redistributing damages within and across countries. buff.ly/QqnRwi0

What happens when workers with specific skills change fields? This paper shows that many workers with apprenticeships work outside their training occupation and face sizable mismatch penalties. Retraining can help mitigate costs under imperfect information.https://buff.ly/WvOTnDU

Argmax is subtle. When is its cdf continuous? New paper gives conditions for multivariate argmax over Gaussian processes based on the Cameron-Martin theorem. Useful for inference in maximum score, empirical risk minimization & threshold regression examples. buff.ly/E6Y96gu

Communicating uncertainty about our conclusions is an important scientific task. Is reporting a point estimate and standard error good enough? We propose a practical recipe for checking whether it is, and for improving our report when it is not. buff.ly/1RmUW1F

Spatial models calibrated to observed flows suffer overfitting problems in granular settings. @tradediversion.bsky.social & Felix Tintelnot diagnose the problem, show data smoothing performs better, and introduce a finite model to quantify counterfactual uncertainty. buff.ly/rJ8EE0J

Can cities in developing countries create enough good jobs for climate migrants? @gulyssea.bsky.social and @clementimbert.bsky.social show that, over a decade, drought-induced immigration decreases informality and increases the number of formal firms and jobs in Brazil. buff.ly/d3h4E6p

One of the strengths of the Generalized Method of Moments is its ability to test model validity using overidentification tests. But what if the test fails? This paper provides a way to interpret misspecified models through the lens of optimal transport. buff.ly/uUSROOr