EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA23049
Johannes Hörner, Anna Sanktjohanser
{"title":"Dynamic Screening of Buyers With Heterogeneous Purchase Frequency","authors":"Johannes Hörner, Anna Sanktjohanser","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We consider a dynamic buyer–seller interaction. Instead of the buyer's valuation, it is the frequency with which he needs to trade that is the buyer's private information. The difference matters. With commitment, full surplus extraction is possible, for instance via limited-time offers. Without commitment, ratcheting is mitigated, as not buying is not necessarily a sign of strength. Because time is informative, the seller learns and may adjust her behavior over time. When finding a suitable alternative seller is easy, she starts with a pooling offer before permanently switching to a screening offer. When finding a suitable alternative seller takes time, she starts with a pooling offer before occasionally experimenting with separating offers.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1245-1278"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616655","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA23334
Tony Q. Fan, Yucheng Liang, Cameron Peng
{"title":"The Inference-Forecast Gap in Belief Updating","authors":"Tony Q. Fan, Yucheng Liang, Cameron Peng","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23334","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Evidence from the laboratory and the field has uncovered both underreaction and overreaction to new information. We provide new experimental evidence on the underlying mechanisms of under- and overreaction by comparing how people make inferences <i>and</i> revise forecasts in the same information environment. Participants underreact to signals when inferring about underlying states, but overreact to the same signals when revising forecasts about future outcomes—a phenomenon we term “the inference-forecast gap.” We show that this gap is largely driven by different simplifying heuristics used in the two tasks. Additional treatments suggest that the choice of heuristics is affected by the similarity between statistics in the information environment and the statistic elicited by the belief-updating problem.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1279-1312"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA23334","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616656","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA23174
Manu Navjeevan, Rodrigo Pinto, Andres Santos
{"title":"Identification in Instrumental Variables Models: The Central Role of Abadie's Kappa","authors":"Manu Navjeevan, Rodrigo Pinto, Andres Santos","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23174","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We study instrumental variables models characterized by: (i) Unobserved heterogeneity consisting of potential outcomes and response types that describe how the instrument determines treatment choice; (ii) Conditional independence of the instrument and the unobserved heterogeneity; and (iii) Convex restrictions on the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. We show certain causal parameters are identified in these models if and only if a version of the kappa of Abadie (2003) exists. Our identification results are constructive in yielding estimating moment conditions. Focusing on a leading special case, we develop asymptotically normal estimators based on a doubly robust version of these moment conditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1095-1133"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA23174","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616619","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA20506
Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, Francis Kramarz
{"title":"Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market","authors":"Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, Francis Kramarz","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20506","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Customs data reveal the heterogeneity and granularity of relationships among buyers and sellers, showing how more exports to a destination break down into more firms selling there and more buyers per exporter. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of firm-to-firm matching that builds on this insight to separate the roles of iceberg costs and matching frictions in gravity. In the cross section, we find matching frictions as important as iceberg costs in impeding trade, and more sensitive to distance. Because domestic and imported intermediates compete directly with labor in performing production tasks, our model also fits the heterogeneity of labor shares across French producers. Applying the framework to the 2004 expansion of the European Union, reduced iceberg costs and reduced matching frictions contributed equally to the increase in French exports to the new members. While workers benefited overall, those competing most directly with imports gained less, even losing in some countries entering the EU.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1135-1170"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20506","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616651","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21926
Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Ariel Zucker
{"title":"Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise","authors":"Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Ariel Zucker","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21926","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer an “incentive-compatible” menu of policy choices designed to induce participants to select the variant intended for their type. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive-compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing incentive costs relative to a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Offering choice achieves similar performance to personalizing with an extensive set of observable variables, but without the same data requirements.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1409-1448"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21926","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616617","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22451
John Hassler, Per Krusell, Conny Olovsson
{"title":"Walras–Bowley Lecture: Climate Policy in the Wide World","authors":"John Hassler, Per Krusell, Conny Olovsson","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22451","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We construct a dynamic integrated assessment model of climate and the economy with very high geographic resolution. Migration is free within, but not allowed across, countries. The model parameterization uses a wealth of data, including the distribution of output, population, energy sources and use, and estimates of the local damages from climate change. It implies very large geographic dispersion in damages from warming. We conduct three kinds of policy experiments. In one, we note that a modest, uniform carbon tax limits global warming and damages around the world substantially. In a second experiment, we let the poorest countries not tax carbon, while the rest compensate by setting higher taxes; the efficiency losses are large. In a final experiment, we find that fast green technology growth alone is a poor substitute for carbon taxes, whether globally available or not.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1061-1093"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22451","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616659","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22979
Christian Cox
{"title":"The Equilibrium Effects of Campaign Finance Deregulation on U.S. Elections","authors":"Christian Cox","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22979","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in <i>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</i> deregulated campaign finance, enabling the rise of a new political action committee (the Super PAC) with broad freedom to raise and spend money. This led to an unprecedented surge in spending in primary and general elections. To evaluate the impact of Super PACs, I estimate a multistage model of political competition using data from U.S. Congressional elections between 2010 and 2020. I find that Super PAC spending by both sides prompts offsetting responses, resulting in limited net equilibrium effects. However, by amplifying the role of donors, Super PACs still have the potential to reshape the electoral landscape.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1209-1243"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616654","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA23358
Anna Stansbury, Kyra Rodriguez
{"title":"The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence From U.S. Academia","authors":"Anna Stansbury, Kyra Rodriguez","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23358","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Unlike gender or race, class background is rarely a focus of research on career progression, or of DEI efforts in elite occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one occupation—U.S. tenure-track academia—using parental education to proxy for class background. First-generation college graduates are 10% less likely to be tenured at an R1, are tenured at institutions ranked 11% lower, earn 3% less, and report 5% lower job satisfaction, than their former PhD classmates (from the same institution and field) with a parent with a non-PhD graduate degree. Neither selection out of academia nor different preferences explain this gap; differential research productivity also plays little role. Instead, likely drivers are differences in cultural and social capital. We also find a class gap in career progression for PhDs who work in industry, suggesting this phenomenon generalizes outside academia.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1345-1373"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA23358","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616618","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-07-29DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22542
Leo Kaas, Etienne Lalé, Nawid Siassi
{"title":"Job Ladder and Wealth Dynamics in General Equilibrium","authors":"Leo Kaas, Etienne Lalé, Nawid Siassi","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22542","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper develops a macroeconomic model that combines an incomplete-markets overlapping-generations economy with a job ladder featuring sequential wage bargaining, endogenous search effort of employed and non-employed workers, and differences in match quality. With these ingredients, our model provides a joint microfoundation for the three main inputs in aggregate production: capital, employment, and labor efficiency. The calibrated model offers a good fit to the empirical age profiles of search activity, job-finding rates, wages, and savings. We use the model to analyze the impact of tax and transfer policies for labor market dynamics and aggregate economic activity via capital, employment, and labor efficiency channels. Lower unemployment benefits and a less progressive tax schedule bring about welfare losses for a newborn worker which are mainly driven by higher consumption risk and costlier search effort; both policies have differential effects along the age, income, and wealth dimensions.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 4","pages":"1449-1485"},"PeriodicalIF":6.2,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22542","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616657","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}
EconometricaPub Date : 2026-06-08DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22022
Jack Fanning
{"title":"Outside Options, Reputations, and the Partial Success of the Coase Conjecture","authors":"Jack Fanning","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22022","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A buyer and seller bargain in continuous time over a good. Bargainers can be rational or committed to some fixed price. A rational buyer has a private value and outside option. If the set of buyer values and commitment types is rich and the probability of commitment vanishes, outcomes are partially consistent with the Coase conjecture: the seller chooses a price below the maximum of the lowest outside option and half the lowest value; the buyer immediately accepts or takes his outside option.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"94 3","pages":"877-910"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148193884","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}