National Bureau of Economic Research

Research associate Eric Budish, an affiliate of the Industrial Organization program whose research has applied the tools and insights of market design to a range of settings including financial market, patents and innovation policy, the allocation of scarce resources during pandemics and other emergencies, and blockchains, will become a codirector of the Market Design working group in January 2026. He is the Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Budish will succeed working group Parag Pathak, the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT, who launched the group in 2008 along with research associate Susan Athey. Budish will codirect the working group with Michael…

NBER Research Associates John Leahy and Casey Mulligan have been tapped for new roles in the Federal Reserve System and at the Small Business Administration, respectively. Leahy has been named the Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, a post he will take up at the start of 2026. He is the Allen Sinai Professor of Macroeconomics and Public Policy, and current Department Chair, at the University of Michigan. He is a research associate in the Economic Fluctuations and Growth (EFG) and Monetary Economics (ME) programs at the NBER and has served as co-editor of the Macroeconomics Annual. Mulligan, who is currently on leave from the NBER, is serving as the…

Housing costs represent about 35 percent of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), making shelter inflation a critical factor in overall inflation dynamics. The relationship between market rents—what new tenants pay when moving into a dwelling—and CPI shelter inflation has become particularly important as housing costs have significantly influenced inflation trends in recent years.

In Market Rents and CPI Shelter Inflation (NBER Working Paper 34113), researchers Laurence M. Ball and Kyung Woong Koh investigate why CPI shelter inflation responds with substantial lags to changes in market rents. They find three…

N. Gregory Mankiw

It is a great honor and delight to deliver this year’s Feldstein Lecture. I was never one of Marty’s students—I was educated not at Harvard, but at Princeton and MIT. Yet Marty nonetheless had a profound influence on my life and career.

As a freshman at Princeton in 1977, I took introductory microeconomics from the superb teacher Harvey Rosen, who later hired me to be his research assistant. Harvey was a recent PhD student of Marty’s, so even though I did not know it at the time, I entered the economics profession as Marty’s grandstudent.

Four years later, as a first-year student in MIT’s PhD program, I took a couple of courses from a promising, young assistant professor named Larry Summers, making me Marty’s grandstudent…

Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…

The US Surgeon General has called the child mental health crisis “the defining public health crisis of our time.” In 2020, 13 percent of US children aged 3 to 17 had a diagnosed mental or behavioral condition. In 2021, mental health services for children cost $31 billion—47 percent of pediatric medical spending. Childhood mental health issues are linked to lower educational attainment, reduced employment, and increased use of welfare programs. Also, youth suicide rates are especially high in the US; males aged 15 to 19 have a rate four times higher than in France. In Investing in Children to Address the Child Mental Health Crisis (NBER Working Paper 33632), Janet Currie explores three common misconceptions about this youth mental health...