(Forthcoming Article) - In <i>Unforgiving Places</i>, Jens Ludwig makes a strong claim for the behavioral economics of crime, scoring it a knockout when pitted against conventional wisdom. Focusing on gun violence, he proposes a unifying explanation that draws on disciplines beyond economics, especially sociology, criminology, and psychology. Although the intended audience is mainly policymakers and the general public, scholars will benefit from reading Ludwig’s thought-provoking book. In this essay, I evaluate the book’s evidence and elaborate on the research needed to resolve unsettled hypotheses. I focus on several key issues, including linking self-control theory to cognitive processes; informal neighborhood social control; legitimacy in community policing; toxic environmental effects on cognition; the limits of administrative data; age-specific pathways of gun carrying; and the impact of social change. In the spirit of consilience that <i>Unforgiving Places</i> calls for, I argue that further engagement of the book’s framework with these issues yields a promising research agenda.

(Forthcoming Article) - 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%, while women's earnings decline by 3% 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%) likely due to the loss of informal childcare.

(Forthcoming Article) - Proponents of labor mobility restrictions argue that innovation incentives more than offset harm to workers. Yet the causal effect of such policies on innovation is an open empirical question. Leveraging plausibly exogenous state-level changes in the enforceability of noncompete agreements, we find a significant negative effect on innovation. This effect is even larger for the most novel and innovative patents and firms. Further analysis shows that these negative effects on innovation cannot be explained by entry alone and instead likely result from reduced knowledge flows. Our findings suggest that labor mobility plays a crucial role in spreading knowledge across firms.

(Forthcoming Article) - 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.

(Forthcoming Article) - How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted advertising enables the challenger to persuade voters with opposing preferences and swing elections decided by such voters. Ex-ante commitment power is unnecessary---the challenger succeeds by strategically revealing different pieces of verifiable information to different voters. Publicizing all political ads would mitigate the negative effects of targeted advertising and help voters collectively make the right choice.

(Forthcoming Article) - We provide a model to explain how the interaction between the spot and lending markets for stocks can lead to abrupt changes in short selling activity. Furthermore, rational short sellers may choose to abandon the market even as mispricing widens. We document empirically that the dynamics of short selling are fat-tailed and subject to abrupt changes, especially for the stocks that the model identifies as susceptible to such dynamics.

Vol. 116 No. 2 February 2026

(Forthcoming Article) - This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the long-term effects of work-study programs, leveraging a randomized lottery design from a national program in Uruguay. Participation leads to a persistent 11 percent increase in formal labor earnings seven years after the program, driven by a 4 percent increase in the monthly probability of being employed and a 6 percent increase in monthly wages. Effects are significantly larger for men, while remaining positive for women. The program is highly cost-effective, outperforming most job training programs and reaching levels comparable to early childhood investments.

(Forthcoming Article) - 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 sufficientstatistics test. The test fails whenever elasticities of taxable income are too heterogeneous within some income level, as we argue is empirically likely.

(Forthcoming Article) - We propose a model of dynamic spatial competition over a rugged technological landscape where product quality is revealed only after market introduction. Firms enter sequentially, deciding whether and how to innovate—either beyond the frontier or within a niche between incumbents. Uncertainty about quality depends on the innovation type and increases with horizontal differentiation. Innovation is irregular, featuring frequent directional shifts and cycles between frontier and niche strategies. Ruggedness in the technological landscape deters innovation, leading to reduced entry, less product differentiation, narrower markets, and more intense competition compared to a world of certainty.

(Forthcoming Article) - We embed diagnostic expectations in a workhorse neoclassical model with heterogeneous firms and risky debt. A realistic degree of overreaction estimated from US firms’ earnings forecasts generates realistic credit cycles. Good times produce economic and financial fragility, predicting future disappointment of expectations, low bond returns, and investment declines. To generate the size of spread increases observed during 2007-9, the model requires only moderate negative shocks. Diagnostic expectations offer a realistic, parsimonious way to produce financial reversals in business cycle models.

(Forthcoming Article) - Recurring auctions are ubiquitous for selling durable assets such as artwork and homes, with follow-up auctions held for unsold items. We investigate such auctions theoretically and empirically. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that recurring auctions outperform single-round auctions when buyers face entry costs, enhancing efficiency and revenue due to sorted entry of potential buyers. Optimal reserve price sequences are characterized. Empirical findings from home foreclosure auctions in China reveal significant annual gains in efficiency (3.40 billion USD, 16.60%) and revenue (2.97 billion USD, 15.92%) using recurring auctions compared with single-round auctions. Implementing optimal reserve prices can further improve efficiency (3.35%) and revenue (3.06%).

Vol. 18 No. 1 February 2026

The role of faith-based government policies in reshaping Americans’ beliefs and values.

Vol. 18 No. 1 February 2026

(Forthcoming Article) - We analyze data from one elite institution and find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under test optional policies, these applicants submit test scores at too low a rate; they more than double their admissions probability (from 2.9 percent to 7.2 percent) by reporting scores. Our findings suggest that, more than commonly understood, elite institutions interpret test scores in the context of an applicant’s background. Thus, availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility.

(Forthcoming Article) - We develop a method for delineating prime locations—ultra-dense clusters of economic activity—within cities and apply it to comprehensive establishment data covering all US metropolitan areas. We further use big data to extend the analysis to a global context where administrative data are sparse. Many cities in the US and around the world are dominated by a small number of prime locations that can concentrate up to one-half of tradable services jobs on tiny shares of land and are dominant centers of economic gravity. In cities with fewer prime locations, a larger tradable services share concentrates in them.

(Forthcoming Article) - Public programs that provide benefits through private markets contend with strategic firm behavior. We study this dynamic in Medicare Part D. The Affordable Care Act closed a coverage gap in Part D by mandating drug manufacturers cover 50% of branded drug costs in the gap. Beneficiaries became 5 percentage points less likely to forgo prescriptions upon reaching the gap. However, manufacturers' response led to 21% higher drug prices, partially offsetting the insurance expansion. The closure was intended to be a $100 transfer to beneficiaries financed by manufacturers, but instead resulted in a $55 transfer to beneficiaries financed by the government.

(Forthcoming Article) - We develop a simple multilayer network model in which agents allocate effort across layers with heterogeneous structures, subject to an aggregate effort constraint. Incentives are shaped by agents’ network positions within each layer, and equilibrium behavior reflects both within- and cross-layer interactions. We analyze how shocks propagate through the network and characterize optimal targeting interventions. Our results show that effective policy design must account for effort allocation across layers. We also demonstrate that predictions from monolayer models can diverge sharply from those of multilayer models, underscoring the importance of accounting for network complexity in both empirical and policy analyses.

(Forthcoming Article) - Digitization reforms have been hailed as an effective way of strengthening state capacity. However, digitization can also fundamentally reshape the organization of bureaucracies. Using a unique administrative dataset on agricultural taxation and surveys of local bureaucrats from Punjab, Pakistan, we show that digitization reforms can have unintended consequences for state capacity. We exploit the staggered rollout of the digitization of land records in Punjab to show that digitization had a negative effect on tax collection. The fall in taxes was not due to a decrease in the tax base. Instead, digitization affected the bureaucracy's capacity to collect taxes.

(Forthcoming Article) - Governments increasingly use changes in tax rules to combat evasion. We develop a general approach to point-identify tax compliance along with supply and demand elasticities. Identification requires data on prices and quantities, variation in tax policy, and a demand or supply shifter. We illustrate our approach using data on Airbnb collection agreements, where taxes are enforced by shifting the statutory burden away from hosts and onto renters via the platform. We find that taxes are paid on roughly zero to 1.6 percent of Airbnb transactions prior to enforcement.

The adoption of milking machines in Norway.

(Forthcoming Article) - We provide a general framework to analyze competition between oligopolistic platforms in competitive bottleneck settings, allowing for pricing and non-price design choices by platforms, and postparticipation buyer-seller decisions. We show that equilibrium choices by platforms are distorted against sellers’ interests in a way harmful to welfare (e.g., setting excessive commission fees), and that an increase in the number of competing platforms can exacerbate this distortion. We also characterize how buyer-side heterogeneity in interaction benefits, partial market coverage, platform asymmetry, and cross-platform spillovers further amplify or mitigate welfare distortions. Based on our findings, we discuss policy implications for mobile app platforms.

(Forthcoming Article) - We review the flourishing literature on the automobile industry since the seminal work of Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995), or briefly BLP. Their work provides a structural equilibrium framework that forms a basis for conducting policy counterfactuals in several key areas of interest: competition policy and antitrust, trade policy, and taxation and environmental policy. The demand side of the ‘BLP framework’ is micro-founded and allows for rich consumer heterogeneity to generate flexible substitution patterns between products. The supply side specifies marginal costs and accounts for imperfect competition. Our analysis focuses on two main questions. First, how has the framework been tailored to specific situations and how convincingly has it been evaluated to generate trust in the empirical findings and policy conclusions? Second, what has been learned about policy issues relevant in the automotive industry using the BLP equilibrium framework?

(Forthcoming Article) - We examine women’s household power in low- and middle-income countries, synthesizing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence on its measurement, determinants, and consequ...