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

• Brzustowski, T., Georgiadis-Harris, A., & Szentes, B. (2023). Smart Contracts and the Coase Conjecture. American Economic Review, 113, 1334–1359.

  This paper reconsiders the problem of a durable-good monopolist who cannot make intertemporal commitments. The buyer's valuation is binary and his private information. The seller has access to dynamic contracts and, in each period, decides whether to deploy the previous period's contract or to replace it with a new one. The main result of the paper is that the Coase conjecture fails: the monopolist's payoff is bounded away from the low valuation irrespective of the discount factor.

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• Heining, J., Schmieder, J. F., & von Wachter, T. (2023). The Costs of Job Displacement over the Business Cycle and Its Sources: Evidence from Germany. American Economic Review, 113, 1208–1254.

  We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses and their cyclicality is driven by declines in wages. Key to these long-lasting wage declines and their cyclicality are changes in employer characteristics, as displaced workers switch to lower-paying firms. These losses increase with duration of nonemployment. Changes in characteristics of displaced workers or displacing firms, and other post-job loss career outcomes explain little of the cyclicality.

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• Lane, T., Nosenzo, D., & Sonderegger, S. (2023). Law and Norms: Empirical Evidence. American Economic Review, 113, 1255–1293.

  A large theoretical literature argues laws exert a causal effect on norms, but empirical evidence remains scant. Using a novel identification strategy, we provide a compelling empirical test of this proposition. We use incentivized vignette experiments to directly measure social norms relating to actions subject to legal thresholds. Our large-scale experiments (n = 7,000) run in the United Kingdom, United States, and China show that laws can causally influence social norms. Results are robust across different samples and methods of measuring norms, and are consistent with a model of social image concerns where individuals care about the inferences others make about their underlying prosociality.

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• Pomatto, L., Strack, P., & Tamuz, O. (2023). The Cost of Information: The Case of Constant Marginal Costs. American Economic Review, 113, 1360–1393.

  We develop an axiomatic theory of information acquisition that captures the idea of constant marginal costs in information production: the cost of generating two independent signals is the sum of their costs, and generating a signal with probability half costs half its original cost. Together with Blackwell monotonicity and a continuity condition, these axioms determine the cost of a signal up to a vector of parameters. These parameters have a clear economic interpretation and determine the difficulty of distinguishing states.

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• Ramos-Toro, D. (2023). Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia’s Leper Colony. American Economic Review, 113, 1294–1333.

  This paper explores the intergenerational consequences of social exclusion on prosociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia's leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic and extend such altruism to outsiders who have undergone similar circumstances. These individuals also display mistrust toward those who have, historically, been exclusionary—in this case, doctors. The content of historical narratives shared by ancestors who were excluded, which emphasize the endured mistreatment and doctors' historical misinformation, is one mechanism that partially explains the intergenerational patterns.

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• Ainsworth, R., Dehejia, R., Pop-Eleches, C., & Urquiola, M. (2023). Why Do Households Leave School Value Added on the Table? The Roles of Information and Preferences. American Economic Review, 113, 1049–1082.

  Romanian households could choose schools with one standard deviation worth of additional value added. Why do households leave value added "on the table"? We study two possibilities: (i) information and (ii) preferences for other school traits. In an experiment, we inform randomly selected households about schools' value added. These households choose schools with up to 0.2 standard deviations of additional value added. We then estimate a discrete choice model and show that households have preferences for a variety of school traits. As a result, fully correcting households' beliefs would eliminate at most a quarter of the value added that households leave unexploited.

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• Akbar, P., Couture, V., Duranton, G., & Storeygard, A. (2023). Mobility and Congestion in Urban India. American Economic Review, 113, 1083–1111.

  We develop a methodology to estimate robust city-level vehicular speed indices, exactly decomposable into uncongested speed and congestion. We apply it to 180 Indian cities using 57 million simulated trips measured by a web mapping service. We verify the reliability of our simulated trips using a number of alternative data sources, including data on actual trips. We find wide variation in speed across cities that is driven more by differences in uncongested speed than congestion. Denser and more populated cities are slower, only in part because of congestion. Urban economic development is correlated with faster speed despite worse congestion.

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• Boehm, C. E., Levchenko, A. A., & Pandalai-Nayar, N. (2023). The Long and Short (Run) of Trade Elasticities. American Economic Review, 113, 861–905.

  When countries change most favored nation (MFN) tariffs, partners that trade on MFN terms experience plausibly exogenous tariff changes. Using this variation, we estimate the trade elasticity at short and long horizons with local projections. We find that the elasticity of tariff-exclusive trade flows is −0.76 in the short run, and approximately −2 in the long run. Our long-run estimates are smaller than typical in the literature, and it takes 7 to10 years to converge to the long run, implying that (i) the welfare gains from trade are high and (ii) there are substantial convexities in the costs of adjusting exports.

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• Kashyap, A. K., Kovrijnykh, N., Li, J., & Pavlova, A. (2023). Is There Too Much Benchmarking in Asset Management? American Economic Review, 113, 1112–1141.

  We propose a tractable model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are not contractible and they incur private costs in running them. Incentive contracts for fund managers create a pecuniary externality through their effect on asset prices. Benchmarking inflates asset prices and creates crowded trades. The crowding reduces the effectiveness of benchmarking in incentive contracts for others, which fund investors fail to account for. A social planner, recognizing the crowding, opts for contracts with less benchmarking and less incentive provision. The planner also delivers lower asset management costs.

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• Kuhn, P., & Shen, K. (2023). What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads? American Economic Review, 113, 1013–1048.

  When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of callbacks to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 61 (146) percent. The removal "worked" in this sense because it generated a large increase in gender-mismatched applications, and because those applications were treated surprisingly well by employers, suggesting that employers' gender requests often represented relatively weak preferences or outdated stereotypes. The job titles that were integrated by the ban, however, were not the most gendered ones, and were disproportionately lower-wage jobs.

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