A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

• Acharya, S., Challe, E., & Dogra, K. (2023). Optimal Monetary Policy According to HANK. American Economic Review, 113, 1741–1782.

  We study optimal monetary policy in an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with rich cross-sectional heterogeneity. Optimal policy differs from a representative agent benchmark because monetary policy can affect consumption inequality, by stabilizing consumption risk arising from both idiosyncratic shocks and unequal exposures to aggregate shocks. The trade-off between consumption inequality, productive efficiency, and price stability is summarized in a simple linear-quadratic problem yielding interpretable target criteria. Stabilizing consumption inequality requires putting some weight on stabilizing the level of output, and correspondingly reducing the weights on the output gap and price level relative to the representative agent benchmark.

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• Bach, L., Bozio, A., Guillouzouic, A., & Malgouyres, C. (2023). Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital: Comment. American Economic Review, 113, 2048–2052.

  Boissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing this alteration, we find differential pre-trends between treated and control firms. We also establish that the controls referred to as "size growth," used in all the difference-in-difference specifications, effectively are controls for lagged investment, i.e., the main outcome variable. Removing such controls attenuates differential pre-trends but leaves no clear event study evidence of a positive effect of dividend taxation on investment.

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• Boissel, C., & Matray, A. (2023). Retraction of “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital.” American Economic Review, 113, 2053–2054.
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• Cagé, J., Dagorret, A., Grosjean, P., & Jha, S. (2023). Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France. American Economic Review, 113, 1888–1932.

  We measure how a network of heroes can legitimize and diffuse extreme political behaviors. We exploit newly declassified intelligence files, novel voting data, and regimental histories to show that home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated under Philippe Petain's generalship through the heroic World War I battlefield of Verdun diverge politically thereafter, particularly following Petain's own overt espousal of authoritarian views. Further, under Petain's collaborationist Vichy regime (1940–1944), they raise 7 percent more active Nazi collaborators per capita. These effects extend across all forms of Nazi collaboration and diffuse beyond the veterans themselves.

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• Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2023). The Old Boys’ Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap. American Economic Review, 113, 1703–1740.

  Offices are social places. Employees and managers take breaks together and talk about family and hobbies. In this study, we show that employees' social interactions with their managers can be advantageous for their careers, and that this phenomenon contributes to the gender pay gap. We use administrative and survey data from a large financial institution and exploit quasi-random variation induced by the rotation of managers. We provide evidence that when employees have more face-to-face interactions with their managers, they are promoted at a higher rate. This mechanism could explain a third of the gender gap in promotions at this firm.

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• Dávila, E., & Walther, A. (2023). Prudential Policy with Distorted Beliefs. American Economic Review, 113, 1967–2006.

  This paper studies leverage regulation when equity investors and/or creditors have distorted beliefs relative to a planner. We characterize how the optimal regulation responds to arbitrary changes in investors'/creditors' beliefs, relating our results to practical scenarios. We show that the optimal regulation depends on the type and magnitude of such changes. Optimism by investors calls for looser leverage regulation, while optimism by creditors, or jointly by both investors/creditors, calls for tighter leverage regulation. Our results apply to environments with (i) planners with imperfect knowledge of investors'/creditors' beliefs, (ii) monetary policy, (iii) bailouts and pecuniary externalities, and (iv) endogenous beliefs.

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• Dillender, M. (2023). Evidence and Lessons on the Health Impacts of Public Health Funding from the Fight against HIV/AIDS. American Economic Review, 113, 1825–1887.

  HIV/AIDS has been one of the largest public health crises in recent history, and the US federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the disease. This study examines the impact of the large amounts of federal funding allocated to US cities to combat HIV/AIDS through the Ryan White CARE Act's first title. The findings indicate that the cost to avoid an HIV/AIDS death through the program is roughly $334,000, that the program has saved approximately 57,000 lives through 2018, and that funding disparities are responsible for the uneven progress in combating HIV/AIDS across the United States.

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• Egorov, K., & Mukhin, D. (2023). Optimal Policy under Dollar Pricing. American Economic Review, 113, 1783–1824.

  Empirical evidence shows that most international prices are sticky in dollars. This paper studies the policy implications of this fact in the context of an open economy model with general preferences, technologies, asset markets, nominal rigidities, and a rich set of shocks. We show that although monetary policy is less efficient and cannot implement the flexible-price allocation, inflation targeting and a floating exchange rate remain robustly optimal in non-US economies. The capital controls cannot unilaterally improve the allocation and are useful only when coordinated across countries. International cooperation benefits other economies, but is not in the self-interest of the United States.

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• Enke, B., Graeber, T., & Oprea, R. (2023). Confidence, Self-Selection, and Bias in the Aggregate. American Economic Review, 113, 1933–1966.

  The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. In betting market, auction and committee experiments, we document that some errors are strongly reduced through self-selection, while others are not affected at all or even amplified. A large part of this variation is explained by differences in the relationship between confidence and performance. In some tasks, they are positively correlated, such that self-selection attenuates errors. In other tasks, rational and biased people are equally confident, such that self-selection has no effects on aggregate quantities.

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• Maestas, N., Mullen, K. J., Powell, D., Wenger, J. B., & von Wachter, T. (2023). The Value of Working Conditions in the United States and the Implications for the Structure of Wages. American Economic Review, 113, 2007–2047.

  We document variation in working conditions in the United States, present estimates of how workers value these conditions, and assess the impact of working conditions on estimates of wage inequality. We conduct a series of stated-preference experiments to estimate workers' willingness to pay for a broad set of working conditions, which we validate with actual job choices. We find that working conditions vary substantially, play a significant role in job choice, and are central components of the compensation received by workers. We find that accounting for differences in preferences for working conditions often exacerbates wage differentials and intensifies measures of wage inequality.

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