{"title":"AI and task efficiency","authors":"Boyan Jovanovic , Peter L. Rousseau","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103877","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103877","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We model several ways in which AI may improve decisions, raise the productivity of firms, and raise human capital growth. Each focuses on activities that involve problem solving, with solutions being guided by signals. If AI raises the accuracy of the signals, humans will then make better decisions — individually and in groups.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 103877"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Artificial intelligence and cognitive inequality","authors":"Indira Puri , Laura Veldkamp","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103884","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103884","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We combine insights from the medical and artificial intelligence (AI) literatures to propose a novel model, which suggests that the expansion of AI may exacerbate cognitive inequality. Information providers maximize profit by tailoring the complexity of content, offering less cognition-enhancing content to less able customers. While individuals with high cognitive abilities may benefit from this increased within-cognitive-group homogeneity, those with lower cognitive abilities – and even children – may suffer adverse effects. Anecdotal data from political discourse and cognitive skills scores are consistent with the model predictions. The findings introduce a new consideration to the debate on financial literacy and AI regulation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 103884"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145883931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is it AI or data that drives firm market power?","authors":"Roxana Mihet , Kumar Rishabh , Orlando Gomes","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103878","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103878","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The technology revolution is transforming firm and industry dynamics, yet the roots of firm dominance in the modern economy remain unclear. Is industry dynamism driven by compute capabilities (AI), access to data, or the interaction between them? We develop a dynamic model in which firms gain knowledge from raw data using AI, but face <em>“informational entropy”</em>: without sufficient AI, more raw data leads to information overload and has negative returns. The model has two key predictions: (1) improvements in AI (compute) disproportionately benefit data-rich firms; and (2) access to processed data substitutes for compute, increasing industry dynamism and reducing market concentration. We confirm these predictions using novel data from 2000–2023 and two exogenous shocks: the 2006 launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the 2017 introduction of transformer-based architectures. Our findings suggest that regulating data usability, not just AI models, is essential to preserving competition in the modern economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 103878"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145737780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jonathan J. Adams , Min Fang , Zheng Liu , Yajie Wang
{"title":"The rise of AI pricing: Trends, driving forces, and implications for firm performance","authors":"Jonathan J. Adams , Min Fang , Zheng Liu , Yajie Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103875","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103875","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We document key stylized facts about the time-series trends and cross-sectional distributions of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered pricing and study its implications for firm performance, both on average and in response to monetary policy shocks. We use the online job postings data from Lightcast to measure the adoption of AI pricing. We infer that a firm is adopting AI pricing if it posts a job that requires AI-related skills and contains the keyword “pricing.” At the aggregate level, the share of AI pricing jobs in all pricing jobs has increased more than tenfold since 2010. The rise of AI pricing jobs has been broad-based, spreading across more industries than other types of AI jobs. At the firm level, larger and more productive firms are more likely to adopt AI pricing. Firms that adopted AI pricing experienced faster growth in sales, employment, assets, and markups, and their stock returns are also more responsive to high-frequency monetary policy surprises than non-adopters. We show that these empirical observations can be rationalized by a simple model where a monopolist firm with incomplete information about its demand function invests in AI pricing to acquire information.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 103875"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145694222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multinational production and global shock propagation during the great recession","authors":"Haishi Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103879","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103879","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using a new database on global multinational production (MP), I document that world multinational enterprise (MNE) sales declined as sharply as trade during the Great Recession (2008–2009). This collapse was driven by MNEs from a few key headquarters countries and associated with steeper GDP declines in MP-intensive countries. MNEs amplified the trade collapse because their overall sales fell while they maintained higher trade intensity than domestic firms. In a calibrated quantitative model with flexible vertical and horizontal MNE structures, international trade, and input–output linkages, I show that productivity shocks, which disproportionately affected trade-intensive MNEs, contributed more to the trade collapse than demand shocks. MNEs’ productivity shocks accounted for over half of the global GDP decline during the Great Recession. MP linkages significantly amplified the transmission of headquarters-country productivity shocks to global GDP, MP, and trade.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 103879"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145737779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oil price fluctuations, US banks, and macroprudential policy","authors":"Paolo Gelain , Marco Lorusso","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103848","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103848","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using US micro-level data on banks, we document a negative effect of high oil prices on US banks’ balance sheets, more negative for highly leveraged banks. We set and estimate a general equilibrium model with banking and oil sectors that rationalizes those findings through the financial accelerator mechanism. This mechanism amplifies the effect of oil price shocks, making them non-negligible drivers of the dynamics of US banks’ intermediation activity and of the US real economy. Macroprudential policy, in the form of a countercyclical capital buffer, can meaningfully address oil price fluctuations and reduce the volatility they cause in the US economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103848"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Effrosyni Adamopoulou , Luis Díez-Catalán , Ernesto Villanueva
{"title":"Staggered contracts and unemployment during recessions","authors":"Effrosyni Adamopoulou , Luis Díez-Catalán , Ernesto Villanueva","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103830","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103830","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We analyze the impact of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) due to collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on wage and employment dynamics during two major recessions in Spain: the low-inflation recession of 2009, which included both short- and long-term CBAs, and the high-inflation recession of 1993, characterized by short-term CBAs. By exploiting variation in the timing of CBA renewals, we find that CBAs signed before recessions result in 1pp higher negotiated wage growth than those signed afterward. We leverage balance sheet data on firms and Social Security data on workers to document that CBA-induced DNWR accounted for 12% of job losses in 2009 due to higher wage growth, mainly among workers near the minimum wage floors. These workers experienced persistent non-employment, particularly if they were covered by long-term CBAs, and reallocation was limited. We find no real impacts in 1993, thus identifying conditions under which CBA-induced DNWR can amplify aggregate shocks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103830"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ex ante heterogeneity, separations, and labor market dynamics","authors":"César Barreto , Christian Merkl","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103845","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103845","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Our paper documents the importance of ex ante worker heterogeneity for labor market dynamics and for the composition of the unemployment pool over the business cycle. In recessions, the unemployment pool shifts toward workers with higher wages in their previous jobs. Based on administrative data for Germany and two-way worker and firm wage fixed effects, we show that this shift is mainly connected to worker heterogeneity, not to firm heterogeneity. We calibrate a search and matching model with ex ante worker heterogeneity to the estimated relative residual wage dispersion across worker fixed-effect groups. We show that a lower idiosyncratic match-specific shock dispersion for high-wage workers is key for the larger relative fluctuations of their separation rate as well as for the positive comovement between prior wages and fixed effects of unemployed workers with aggregate unemployment. We argue that firm-based explanations, such as cyclical financial frictions, are unlikely to be key drivers for the documented empirical patterns.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103845"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aggregate demand externality and self-fulfilling default cycles","authors":"Jess Benhabib , Feng Dong , Pengfei Wang , Zhenyang Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103827","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103827","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recurrent clustered episodes of corporate default are a long-standing puzzle that standard models driven by observable fundamentals struggle to explain. We develop a general equilibrium model where demand externality generates such default cycles endogenously through a self-fulfilling mechanism. In our framework, a decline in aggregate output reduces individual firm revenues and values, raising default risk. The subsequent exit of defaulting firms further depresses aggregate output, creating a positive feedback loop and pessimistic expectations about defaults can become self-fulfilling. This mechanism generates multiple equilibria and features endogenous, sentiment-driven default cycles. A global dynamic analysis using Bogdanov–Takens bifurcation reveals a rich set of dynamics, including periodic orbits, that are overlooked by standard local analysis. Our framework thus provides a microfounded explanation for business cycle patterns driven by internal economic forces, as emphasized by the empirical literature of endogenous business cycles.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103827"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Long-lag VARs","authors":"Ferre De Graeve , Andreas Westermark","doi":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103831","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jmoneco.2025.103831","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Macroeconomic research often relies on structural vector autoregressions, (S)VARs, to uncover empirical regularities. Critics argue the method goes awry due to lag truncation: short lag lengths imply a poor approximation to important data-generating processes (e.g. DSGE models). Empirically, short lag length is deemed necessary as increased parametrization induces excessive uncertainty. The paper shows that this argument is incomplete. Longer lag length simultaneously reduces misspecification, which in turn reduces variance. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the trivial solution to the critique actually works. For data generated by frontier DSGE models long-lag VARs are feasible, reduce bias and variance, and have better mean-squared error. Long-lag VARs are also viable in common macroeconomic data and significantly change structural conclusions about the impact of technology and monetary policy shocks on the economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48407,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Monetary Economics","volume":"156 ","pages":"Article 103831"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}