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.

We investigate a dynamic oligopoly model with two phases: a normal phase where an essential input is available, and a disruption phase where firms must rely on inventories. Disruptions create an overcutting pricing incentive arising from the option to forgo sales and monopolize the market once rivals stock out.

Pawn loans offer borrowers a substantial degree of repayment flexibility in exchange for a harsh penalty in case of default: forfeit of collateral worth more than the loan amount along with any payments made toward recovery. Using a large RCT conducted in Mexico City, we document key stylized facts about pawn lending and explore the merits of replacing flexibility with structured repayment contracts in this important but understudied form of credit.

In this paper I revisit the interpretation of the linear instrumental variables (IV) estimand as a weighted average of conditional local average treatment effects (LATEs). I focus on a situation in which additional covariates are required for identification while the reduced-form and first-stage regressions may be misspecified due to an implicit homogeneity restriction on the effects of the instrument.

Decisions are typically made by drawing on multiple sources of information, yet the correlation among these sources is often hard to assess. We study robustly optimal strategies — those that maximize the worst-case payoff guarantee across all correlation structures. With two states and two actions, the robustly optimal strategy is strikingly simple: use only the best information source and ignore the rest.

Economists and historians have long debated how open-access areas, frontier regions, and customary landholding regimes transformed into private property. This paper analyzes decentralized enclosure processes using the theory of aggregative games, examining how population density, enclosure costs, potential productivity gains, and local governance capacity, including the power to demand compensation, jointly determine the mix of property regimes.

Quality regulation seeks to ensure quality and foster competition by reducing vertical differentiation, but it may also have adverse effects on market structure. We study this trade-off in the context of pharmaceutical bioequivalence, which is the primary quality standard for generic drugs.