The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

For standard statistical problems, we provide new evidence documenting i) multi-modality and ii) instability in probability estimates, including from irrelevant changes in problem description. The evidence motivates a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending to its salient features while neglecting other, potentially more relevant, ones. Only the statistics associated with salient features are used.

We provide evidence for a causal link between the US economy and the global financial cycle. Using intraday data, we show that US macroeconomic news releases have large and significant effects on global risky asset prices. Stock price indexes of 27 countries, the VIX, and commodity prices all jump instantaneously upon news releases. The responses of stock indexes co-move across countries and are large—often comparable in size to the response of the S&P 500.

We study sequential experiments where sampling is costly and a decision-maker aims to determine the best treatment for full scale implementation by (1) adaptively allocating units between two possible treatments, and (2) stopping the experiment when the expected welfare (inclusive of sampling costs) from implementing the chosen treatment is maximized. Working under a continuous time limit, we characterize the optimal policies under the minimax regret criterion.

A key question in labor market research is how the unemployment insurance system affects unemployment rates and labor market dynamics. We provide new answers to this old question by studying one of the largest unemployment insurance reforms in recent decades, the German Hartz reforms. On average, lower separation rates into unemployment account for 76% of declining unemployment after the reform, a fact unexplained by existing research focusing on job-finding rates.

Not all barrels of oil are created equal: their extraction varies in both private cost and carbon intensity. Leveraging a comprehensive micro-dataset on world oil fields, alongside detailed estimates of carbon intensities and private extraction costs, this study quantifies the additional emissions and costs from having extracted the ’wrong’ deposits. We do so by comparing historical deposit-level supplies to counterfactuals that factor in pollution costs, while keeping annual global consumption unchanged.

How do global value chain (GVC) linkages modify countries’ incentives to impose import protection? Are these linkages important determinants of trade policy in practice? We develop a new approach to modeling tariff setting with GVCs, in which optimal policy depends on the nationality of value-added content embedded in home and foreign final goods.