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.

Trade wars and financial sanctions are again becoming an increasingly common part of the international economic landscape, and the dynamics of the exchange rate are often used in real time to evaluate the effectiveness of sanctions and policy responses. We show that sanctions limiting a country’s exports or freezing its assets depreciate the exchange rate, while sanctions limiting imports appreciate it, even when both types of policies have exactly the same effect on real allocations, including household welfare and government fiscal revenues.

We exploit information in patent applications to construct an instrumental variable for the identification of technology news shocks that relaxes all the identifying assumptions traditionally used in the literature. The instrument recovers news shocks that have no effect on aggregate productivity in the short-run, but are a significant driver of its trend component. The shock prompts a broad-based expansion in anticipation of the future increase in TFP, with output, consumption, and investment all rising well before any material increase in TFP is recorded.

Firms are allowed to use aggregate data on market salaries to set pay, a practice known as salary benchmarking. Using national payroll data, we study firms that gain access to a tool that reveals market benchmarks for each job title. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the benchmark information reduces salary dispersion by 25%. Thus, salary dispersion must stem partly from aggregate uncertainty about the salaries offered by other firms.

Human decision-makers frequently override the recommendations generated by predictive algorithms, but it is unclear whether these discretionary overrides add valuable private information or reintroduce human biases and mistakes. We develop new quasi-experimental tools to measure the impact of human discretion over an algorithm on the accuracy of decisions, even when the outcome of interest is only selectively observed, in the context of bail decisions.

We study repurchase options (repo contracts) in a competitive asset market with adverse selection. Gains from trade emerge from a liquidity need, but private information about asset quality prevents the full realization of trades. In equilibrium, a single repo contract pools all assets. The embedded repurchase option mitigates adverse selection by improving the volume of trades relative to outright sales.

How do localized conflicts disrupt supply chains and prompt firms to reorganize them? How do these forces affect firm-level and aggregate economic activity? Using firm-to-firm Ukrainian railway-shipment data before and during the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict, we document that firms with prior supplier and buyer exposure to the conflict areas substantially decreased their output. Simultaneously, firms reorganized their production linkages away from partners directly or indirectly exposed to the conflict shock.