{"title":"The Gender Pay Gap: Micro Sources and Macro Consequences","authors":"Iacopo Morchio Christian Moser","doi":"10.1257/aer.20231107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20231107","url":null,"abstract":"Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring. We provide a constructive proof of identification of all model parameters. The estimated model suggests that amenities are important for both men and women, and that compensating differentials account for half of the gender pay gap. Equal treatment policies partly close gender gaps but are not output- or welfare-improving.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kenan Huremović, Gabriel Jiménez, Enrique Moral-Benito, José-Luis Peydró, Fernando Vega-Redondo
{"title":"Production and Financial Networks in Interplay","authors":"Kenan Huremović, Gabriel Jiménez, Enrique Moral-Benito, José-Luis Peydró, Fernando Vega-Redondo","doi":"10.1257/aer.20201088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20201088","url":null,"abstract":"We show that bank shocks to firms propagate along the production network with stronger upstream than downstream effects. Our identification relies on (i) administrative datasets from Spain covering supplier-customer transactions and bank loans, (ii) bank credit supply shocks from the global financial crisis, and (iii) a general equilibrium model of a production network with financial frictions, estimated structurally. We find network propagation amplifies the impact of bank shocks on GDP growth by nearly 50 percent. Moreover, bank shocks to firms' distant suppliers and customers contribute similarly to this aggregate effect as bank shocks to firms' direct customers and suppliers.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Attention-Information Trade-Off","authors":"Marta Serra-Garcia","doi":"10.1257/aer.20240850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20240850","url":null,"abstract":"How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? This paper combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals' incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experiments that exogenously expose receivers to the content created. Attention incentives lead to significantly less information being transmitted, but not more factually inaccurate content. These incentives increase information demand and the knowledge of interested receivers. However, among the majority of receivers who do not demand more information, attention incentives lower knowledge and increase biases in beliefs, revealing a channel through which misperceptions can arise: missing information.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Efficiency Criteria, Income Taxation, and Heterogeneous Elasticities","authors":"John Sturm Becko André Sztutman","doi":"10.1257/aer.20240919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20240919","url":null,"abstract":"A common interpretation of Pareto-efficient policies is that, for some cardinal utility representations of preferences, they maximize utilitarian welfare. We show in the context of income taxation that such cardinalizations are often extreme, requiring unbounded curvature of utility with respect to consumption. Taxes can be justified as utilitarian without these extreme cardinalizations if and only if revenues are decreasing and concave in a class of narrowly targeted tax cuts. We reformulate this condition as a sufficient-statistics test. The test fails whenever elasticities of taxable income are too heterogeneous within some income level, as we argue is empirically likely.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Noor Kumar, Uyseok Lee, Matt Lowe, Olaitan Ogunnote
{"title":"Internal versus Institutional Barriers to Gender Equality: Evidence from British Politics","authors":"Noor Kumar, Uyseok Lee, Matt Lowe, Olaitan Ogunnote","doi":"10.1257/aer.20241127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20241127","url":null,"abstract":"Weekly lotteries determine which politicians ask the UK prime minister a question in front of a male-dominated, noisy chamber. Lottery winners receive 4 percent higher vote margin in the next election, but women are 12 percent less likely to submit questions than same-cohort men. The gender gap does not close with lottery-induced experience asking a question, but it closes after a format change, with questions asked to a smaller, quieter audience. The switch differentially draws in women with quieter voices. Our findings support institutional change, rather than experience, as a response to gender gaps in adversarial settings like the UK Parliament.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conservation Priorities and Environmental Offsets: Markets for Florida Wetlands","authors":"Daniel Aronoff Will Rafey","doi":"10.1257/aer.20231016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20231016","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce an empirical framework for valuing markets in environmental offsets. Using newly collected data on wetland conservation and offsets, we apply this framework to evaluate a set of decentralized markets in Florida, where land developers purchase offsets from long-lived producers who restore wetlands over time. We find offsets led to substantial private gains from trade, creating $2.4 billion of net surplus from 1995 to 2020 relative to direct conservation. Offset trading also generated new hydrological externalities. A locally differentiated Pigouvian tax would have prevented $1.6 billion of new flood damage while preserving more than two-thirds of the private gains from trade.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor Market Competition and the Assimilation of Immigrants","authors":"Christoph Albert, Albrecht Glitz, Joan Llull","doi":"10.1257/aer.20220865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20220865","url":null,"abstract":"This paper shows that the wage assimilation of immigrants is the result of the intricate interplay between individual skill accumulation and dynamic labor market equilibrium effects. When immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, rising immigrant inflows widen the wage gap between them. Using a production function framework in which workers supply both general and host-country-specific skills, we show that this labor market competition channel explains about one-fifth of the large increase in the average immigrant–native wage gap across arrival cohorts in the United States since the 1960s. The results further reveal substantial heterogeneity across different groups of immigrants.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Effects of Parental Death on Labor Market Outcomes","authors":"Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen Ning Zhang","doi":"10.1257/aer.20240432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20240432","url":null,"abstract":"We use Danish administrative data to examine the effects of parental death on labor market outcomes. Leveraging the timing of sudden, first parental deaths and a matched-control difference-in-differences strategy, we find that men's earnings decline by 2 percent, while women's earnings decline by 3 percent following a parental death. Both women and men experience mental health deterioration, leading to increased use of psychological assistance and prescriptions for mental health conditions and opioids. Women with young children experience a comparatively larger earnings decline (around 4 percent) likely due to the loss of informal childcare.","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":10.7,"publicationDate":"2026-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148538790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Bricks from Straw: Resources and Productivity in Health Care.","authors":"Edward N Okeke","doi":"10.1257/aer.20241459","DOIUrl":"10.1257/aer.20241459","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Why do health facilities in developing countries do so poorly? This paper examines the role of financial constraints. I describe an experiment in which we surprised health workers in randomly selected public health clinics in Nigeria with a N600,000 grant paid out in installments over one year. Its administration was left entirely to health workers. I show that the award led to large productivity gains. Using expenditure data combined with novel textual data I provide an explanation for these effects. I show that the award increased investments in physical and human capital, led to lower prices for patients and inspired health workers to do better.</p>","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"116 4","pages":"1499-1539"},"PeriodicalIF":9.5,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13042200/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147610219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol
{"title":"Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock.","authors":"Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol","doi":"10.1257/aer.20220296","DOIUrl":"10.1257/aer.20220296","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Poor entrepreneurs must frequently choose between business investment and children's education. To examine this trade-off, we exploit experimental variation in short-run microenterprise growth among a sample of Indian households and track children's education and business outcomes over eleven years. Treated households, who experience higher initial microenterprise growth, invest more in education and are one-third more likely to send children to college. However, only literate households experience child schooling gains and their enterprises stagnate in the long-run. In contrast, illiterate treatment households experience long-run business gains but declines in children's education. Our findings suggest that microenterprise growth has the potential to reduce relative intergenerational educational mobility.</p>","PeriodicalId":48472,"journal":{"name":"American Economic Review","volume":"114 9","pages":"2792-2824"},"PeriodicalIF":9.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13221210/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148139485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}