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 examine path dependency in physician decisions in an emergency department setting, and find that physicians’ treatment decisions for the current and previous patients are positively correlated. We show that the positive autocorrelation is higher when the current patient is of greater medical uncertainty or more similar to the previous patient in terms of observed characteristics and when the physician is less experienced or more fatigued.

We explore how business groups use internal labor markets (ILMs) in response to changing economic conditions. We show that following the exit of a large industry competitor, group-affiliated firms expand and gain market share by increasing their reliance on the ILM to ensure swift hiring, especially of technical managers and skilled blue collar workers.

Can taxes on consumption redistribute in developing countries? Contrary to consensus, we show that taxing consumption is progressive once we account for informal consumption. Using household expenditure surveys in 32 countries we proxy for informal consumption using the type of store where purchases occur.

This paper shows that individual-level heterogeneity in survival expectations derived from subjective survey information improves the out-of-sample predictions of a dynamic model of retirement and saving. We consider three approaches to modelling survival: life tables, average subjective expectations and individual-specific estimates based on reported survival probabilities.

We develop a new approach for estimating average treatment effects in observational studies with unobserved group-level heterogeneity. We consider a general model with group-level unconfoundedness and provide conditions under which aggregate balancing statistics – group-level averages of functions of treatments and covariates – are sufficient to eliminate differences between groups.

Economists have widely endorsed pricing CO2 emissions to internalize climate change-related externalities. Doing so would significantly affect coal, the most carbon-intensive energy source. However, U.S. coal markets exhibit an additional distortion: the railroads that transport coal to power plants can exert market power. This paper estimates how coal-by-rail markups respond to changes in coal demand. I identify markups in a major intermediate goods market using both reduced-form and structural methods.