BibLaTeX-AER

This is a bit of LaTeX code that formats the bibliography and citations following the aer.bst file used by The American Economic Review (see here) but uses the more recent BibLaTeX and Biber packages which do not use the old BibTex bst files. See here for reasons why you might want to use BibLaTeX/Biber over BibTex and here for how to transition away from BibTex.

This file is not a standalone Latex package, but rather some boilerplate preamble code that builds on biblatex-chicago. It builds on the stock biblatex-chicago package in three ways:

1. Sets biblatex-chicago options to match aer.bst.
2. Bolds author names in the bibliography.
3. Extends hyperlinks in in-text citations to the entire citation, name and year, not just the year.

Installation

The file biblatex-aer.tex must be in a folder where the LaTeX compiler can find it, e.g., in the same directory as your main document. If you're using TexLive, you can put it in ~/texmf/tex/latex/local/biblatex-aer and it will be available for use in any document (see here).

Usage

Use biblatex-aer by adding the following to the preamble of your document:

\input{biblatex-aer}

Do not use usepackage instead of input, because biblatex-aer isn't a package. It uses \usepackage{biblatex-chicago} and then makes various changes from there.

If you want to pass additional options to biblatex-chicago, like natbib, you can use

\PassOptionsToPackage{natbib}{biblatex-chicago}  % Or other options
\input{biblatex-aer}

instead.

For everything else (adding bib files, citations, etc.), you just follow standard BibLaTeX or biblatex-chicago conventions.

Requirements

1. biblatex-chicago >= 0.9.9h (based on biblatex >= 3.3)
2. biber >= 2.4

The formatting syntax for biblatex changed with version 3.3. If you really need to use an earlier version of biblatex, you can try biblatex-aer version 0.0.1, which uses the old syntax.