We checked 17 economics journals on Friday, January 30, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period January 23 to January 29, we retrieved 22 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

Economic Journal

Gene-environment interactions with essential heterogeneity
Johannes Hollenbach, Hendrik Schmitz, Matthias Westphal
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We study how gene-environment interactions between education and genetic endowments affect cognition in old age and use this setting to show that – even with a valid instrument – two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates of interaction effects can be far away from the true effect. This is the case when treatment effects are heterogeneous and compliance to the instrument depends on the interaction variable. We suggest estimating marginal treatment effects to address this problem. Our estimation results show complementarities between education and genetic predisposition in determining later-life memory. The marginal treatment effect estimates suggest substantially larger gene-environment interactions than the 2SLS estimates.
Algorithmic and Human Collusion
Tobias Werner
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I study self-learning pricing algorithms and show that they are collusive in market simulations. To derive a counterfactual that resembles traditional tacit collusion, I conduct market experiments with humans in the same environment. Across different treatments, I vary the market size and the number of firms that use a pricing algorithm. I demonstrate that oligopoly markets can become more collusive if algorithms make pricing decisions instead of humans. In two-firm markets, prices are weakly increasing in the number of algorithms in the market. In three-firm markets, algorithms weaken competition if most firms use an algorithm and human sellers are inexperienced.
An App Call a Day Keeps the Patient Away? Substitution of Online and In-Person Doctor Consultations Among Young Adults
Lina Maria EllegĂĄrd, Gustav Kjellsson, Linn Mattisson
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The emergence of markets for on-demand online physician consultations —direct-to-consumer telemedicine (DCT) — is currently transforming many healthcare settings. DCT may be a cost-effective substitute for in-person consultations, but the convenience of seeking DCT may increase the demand for the service and consequently also the costs for health insurers. To causally assess the degree to which DCT consultations substitute for in-person primary care consultations, we exploit exogenous changes in patient fees in a fuzzy difference-in-discontinuities analysis of young adults in Sweden. We estimate that 45% of DCT consultations replace in-person visits; the rest represents new utilisation. We further estimate that the increase in volume could be close to cost neutral, and we find no evidence that quality deteriorates due to the increased use of online care.
A Macro Study of the Unequal Effects of Climate Change
Stephie Fried
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This paper develops a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the distributional impacts of higher temperatures from climate change in the US. Households adapt to temperature through two channels: an intensive margin– adjusting energy use for heating and cooling– and an extensive margin– deciding whether to purchase temperature-control equipment such as a heater, air conditioner or heat pump. I estimate the production functions for household heating and cooling from a unique product-level data set and calibrate the remaining parameters to match variation in energy expenditures and budget shares with income. I find that the welfare effects of climate change vary substantially with income and region. In colder areas, climate change increases inequality in lifetime welfare. While all households experience greater cooling needs, the costs are particularly acute for lower-income households, who purchase air conditioners that they did not previously need. In warmer areas, the opposite pattern reduces welfare inequality.
The Value of Rating Systems in Credence Goods Markets
Silvia Angerer, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, Wanda Mimra, Thomas Rittmannsberger, Christian Waibel
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In this paper, we experimentally investigate the effect of public consumer ratings on market outcomes in credence goods markets. Contrary to search or experience goods, consumers cannot evaluate all dimensions of trade for credence goods, which may inhibit the information and reputation-building value of public rating systems. We implement a market in which experts have an informational advantage over consumers with respect to the appropriate service level. The rating system takes the form of a five-star rating system as is common on online rating websites. The value of this rating system is compared in two different expert market settings: First, one in which consumers cannot rely on information from personal experience with the expert, reflecting markets in which consumer-expert interactions are often first-time and infrequent (e.g., specialist visits in healthcare markets). Second, one in which consumers have personal experience with the expert, reflecting markets in which consumer-expert interactions are frequent and repeated (e.g., general practitioner visits in healthcare markets). We find that the public rating system significantly improves market outcomes. Furthermore, a public rating system is a good substitute for personal experience information in terms of market efficiency and consumer surplus. Combined, however, we find no complementarity between public ratings and personal experience information, mainly due to the already high market efficiency in the presence of either one.
Creativity and AI
Gary Charness, Daniela Grieco
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We investigate whether AI systems outperform humans in creative tasks that vary in their degree of “openness.” To this end, we generated creative responses using three versions of ChatGPT and recruited 738 participants to blindly evaluate six creative answers randomly drawn from three pools—comprising 160 responses each—generated by both humans and AI. This process yielded 4,428 individual evaluations. Our results show that, regardless of the GPT version employed, human-generated responses achieve significantly and substantially higher average scores than machine-generated responses in open tasks. Conversely, AI-generated responses outperform human ones in closed tasks. Furthermore, we estimate that human imagination accounts for between 22% and 45% of the creative score in open tasks.
Zero-hours Contracts in a Frictional Labour Market
Juan J Dolado, Etienne Lalé, Hélène Turon
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We develop an equilibrium search model of the coexistence of regular and flexible work arrangements, calibrated to evaluate the U.K.’s zero-hours contract (ZHC). Our findings reveal mixed equilibrium and welfare effects. ZHCs stimulate job creation among firms facing highly volatile business conditions, increasing total employment but potentially reducing regular jobs. Simultaneously, ZHCs boost labour force participation by attracting individuals who prefer flexible work schedules, which may create more congestion for regular jobs in a random-search environment. Our calibration demonstrates that the macroeconomic consequences of alternative work arrangements depend crucially on the job creation margin and on workers’ valuation of flexibility.
Dispersion Over the Business Cycle: Passthrough, Productivity, and Demand
Mikael Carlsson, Alex Clymo, Knut-Eric Joslin
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We characterise the cyclical dispersion of firm-level (physical) productivity and demand shocks using Swedish microdata. Demand shock dispersion increases by more than productivity shock dispersion in recessions and explains most of the variation in sales growth dispersion. Productivity shocks pass through incompletely to prices and hence have a limited effect on sales dispersion. We directly estimate demand curves and reject the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) benchmark. We incorporate our non-CES demand curves into a heterogeneous-firm model, show it matches these micro facts, and study its implications for uncertainty shocks. Demand shock dispersion has unambiguously negative effects on output via a “wait and see channel”, while productivity shock dispersion instead affects output negatively by inducing markup dispersion.

European Economic Review

The Kindness of Strangers: Theory and Evidence on Spatial Distance and Giving
James Konow, Leonie KĂĽhl, Nora Szech
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Should banks create money?
Christian Wipf
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State capacity and identity: Assimilation vs resistance of tribal rimlands
Stergios Skaperdas, Patrick A. Testa
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Journal of Econometrics

Regularizing fairness in optimal policy learning with distributional targets
Anders Bredahl Kock, David Preinerstorfer
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Minimax rates of convergence for nonparametric location-Scale models
Bingxin Zhao, Yuhong Yang
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GMM inference in the matrix exponential spatial specification
Ye Yang, Wim P.M. Vijverberg
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Journal of Public Economics

Beyond lost earnings: Job displacement and the cost of commuting
Yige Duan, Oskar Jost, Ramona Jost, Holger Seibert
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Precautionary liquidity and worker decisions: Evidence from French employee saving plans
Marie Briere, James Poterba, Ariane Szafarz
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The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Acknowledgment of Referees
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The Review of Economic Studies

Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving
Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, Raymond Fisman, Francesco Trebbi, Eyub Yegen
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We examine how the rise of institutional ownership has influenced firms' political activities. We find that, after the acquisition of a large stake, a firm's political action committee giving mirrors more closely that of the acquiring investor. Consistent with a causal interpretation, this pattern is also observed for acquisitions driven by new index inclusions. The pattern is stronger when firms' management faces contentious proposals in shareholder meetings and may thus need institutional investors' support. We further show that firms' giving shifts away from business-relevant politicians and is strongly aligned with the individual campaign donations of the institutional investors' employees. These results, together with the finding that the effects are larger for more ``partisan" and privately owned investors, suggest that the influence we uncover is driven by institutional investors' own political views, rather than a profit-maximizing strategy for the portfolio firms.
Correction to: Tax Policy and Lumpy Investment Behaviour: Evidence from China's VAT Reform
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Destabilizing Capital Flows amid Global Inflation
Julien Bengui, Louphou Coulibaly
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Over the latest monetary policy tightening cycle, capital has been flowing from low-inflation countries to high-inflation countries. This pattern of capital flows is consistent with the predictions of an open-economy model with nominal rigidities where cost-push shocks generate an inflationary episode and capital flows freely across countries. Yet, by raising demand for domestic non-tradable goods and services, capital inflows cause unwelcome upward pressure on firms’ costs in countries most severely hit by these shocks. We find that a reverse pattern of capital flows would have improved the output-inflation trade-off globally, hence requiring a less aggressive monetary tightening in the most severely hit countries and delivering overall welfare gains.
Inference Based on Time-Varying SVARs Identified with Sign Restrictions
Jonas E Arias, Juan F Rubio RamĂ­rez, Minchul Shin, Daniel F Waggoner
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We propose an approach for Bayesian inference in TV structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified with sign restrictions. The linchpin of our approach is a class of rotation-invariant TV SVARs in which the prior and posterior densities of any sequence of structural parameters belonging to the class are invariant to {orthogonal transformations} of the sequence. Our methodology is new to the literature. In contrast to existing algorithms for inference based on sign restrictions, our algorithm is the first to draw from a uniform distribution over the sequences of orthogonal matrices given the reduced-form parameters. We illustrate our procedure for inference by analyzing the role played by monetary policy during the latest inflation surge.
Education and the Margins of Cyclical Adjustment in the Labour Market
Cynthia L Doniger
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Allocative wages—the labour costs considered when deciding to form or dissolve a long-term employment relationship—are more sensitive to cyclical conditions for more educated workers. Specifically, college-educated workers’ allocative wages are highly pro-cyclical, while high school dropouts’ wages exhibit only moderate cyclicality. Further, as education increases, an increasing share of the sensitivity of allocative wages is driven by the persistent scarring effects of the cyclical position at the time of hiring on the wages associated with higher levels of tenure, amounting to more than a third of the overall sensitivity for the college educated. The greater job stability of the more educated—and therefore the exposure to scarring—contributes to these differences. In addition, more significant scarring at each horizon of tenure amplifies the effect. In service of documenting these facts, I develop new methods for inferring the sensitivity of labour costs to shocks when agents are forward-looking and wages may be intertemporally smoothed.