National Bureau of Economic Research

In a “rollup,” an outside investor consecutively acquires many of the small firms operating in a particular local market, consolidating them into a single large firm. Unlike mergers, which involve only two firms and trigger regulatory attention when the firms collectively exceed a certain size, rollups have flown under the antitrust radar until a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) case targeting a rollup of anesthesia practices in Texas. Rollups have become increasingly important, particularly in the healthcare industry.

In Painful Bargaining: Evidence from Anesthesia Rollups (NBER Working Paper 33217), Aslihan Asil, Paulo Ramos, Amanda Starc, and Thomas G. Wollmann study the competitive effects of the rollups...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) may usher in the most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. For nearly a decade, as I witnessed the continuous progress in deep learning, I have been studying the economics of transformative AI — how our economy may be transformed as AI systems advance toward mastering all forms of cognitive work that can be performed by humans, including new tasks that don’t even exist yet. The prospect of understanding the strange new world we will inhabit when transformative AI is developed has felt both intellectually urgent and personally meaningful to me as a father of two young children.

Today, AI systems are approaching and exceeding human-level performance in many domains, and it looks increasingly like our world will be transformed before…

In Health Inequality and Economic Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (NBER Working Paper 32971 an earlier version, NBER RDRC Paper NB23-11), Nicolò Russo, Rory McGee, Mariacristina De Nardi, Margherita Borella, and Ross Abram use data from the Health and Retirement Study over the period 1996–2018 to evaluate measures of health inequality in middle age and the consequences of such health disparities. 

They consider two health measures: self-reported health status, measured by the response to a survey question that asks individuals to rate their health as excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor, and...

Digital health technologies, such as remote monitoring devices and telemedicine services, have attracted considerable interest due to their potential to reduce healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes. These innovations could, however, exacerbate health disparities if adoption rates are lower among underserved communities.

In Equity and Efficiency in Technology Adoption: Evidence from Digital Health (NBER Working Paper 32992), researchers Itzik Fadlon, Parag Agnihotri, Christopher Longhurst, and Ming Tai-Seale analyze a remote...

Sociologists have argued that “third places” like cafés, which provide opportunities for individuals to socialize and exchange ideas outside of home and work, improve neighborhood life. But what about the relationship between such places and economic activity? In Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés (NBER Working Paper 32604), researchers Jinkyong Choi, Jorge Guzman, and Mario L. Small use data on US business registrations between 1990 and 2022 from the Startup Cartography Project to examine whether the opening of a Starbucks in a neighborhood with no previous cafés affects local entrepreneurship...