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 study monopolistic certification in markets where sellers possess partial private information about product quality. A certifier can provide information through two channels: screening sellers’ private information (soft information) and acquiring new quality data (hard information). We prove that any certification menu achieving less than maximal screening is Pareto dominated by one with full screening.

We estimate the impact of public pension incentives on labor supply far from the normal retirement age by exploiting Poland’s switch from a Defined Benefit to a Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) scheme. This reform created a sharp cohort-based discontinuity in the link between current pension contributions and future benefits.

Motivated by a secular increase in the concentration of the U.S. banking industry, I develop a new macroeconomic model with oligopolistic financial intermediaries and heterogeneous firms. Market power allows banks to price discriminate and charge firm-specific markups, exerting greater market power over productive and more financially constrained firms.

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as protected areas, limiting economic development for biodiversity. We use the staggered introduction of protected areas between 1985 and 2019 to study the selection of protected land and the causal effect of protection on vegetation cover and nightlights. We find no meaningful impacts on either outcome across four decades, countries, protection cohorts, or land characteristics.

We study the impact of large, successful manufacturing plants on other local producers in China, focusing on “Million-Rouble Plants” built in the 1950s during a brief alliance with the U.S.S.R. The ephemeral geopolitical situation and the locations of allied and enemy airbases provide exogenous variation in plant siting.

Racial covenants in housing deeds were widely used in the United States during the early 20th century to segregate neighborhoods. In 1948, the Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer made racial covenants unenforceable in court, stopping short of prohibiting them entirely. We surmise that even after losing their judicial enforceability, such covenants could have shaped segregation if they served as a focal point for coordination on an initial equilibrium in neighborhood formation, a context characterized by investment durability and path dependency.