National Bureau of Economic Research

While US biomedical research funding generally allows researchers considerable freedom in determining the most promising topics to study, there have been some programs, such as the War on Cancer in the 1970s and Operation Warp Speed during the COVID-19 pandemic, that target funding at particular technologies or health objectives.

In The Therapeutic Consequences of the War: World War II and the 20th-Century Expansion of Biomedicine (NBER Working Paper 33457), Daniel P. Gross and Bhaven N. Sampat examine a historical precedent for top-down, targeted biomedical research. During World War II, when the high...

At its meeting on April 28, the NBER Board of Directors elected two new members: Darrick Hamilton and Barry Melancon. Hamilton will represent the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). He is the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, as well as the Chief Economist of the AFL-CIO. His research focuses on the economics of stratification and on labor market and wealth inequality, with particular attention to racial disparities and policies that could reduce them. He has served as president of the National Economic Association, and as codirector of the American Economic Association Summer Training Program. Hamilton received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College…

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is a critical tool for responding to the opioid crisis. However, prior to the 2010s, two barriers hindered its widespread distribution and use in the United States. One was legal access: Naloxone required a prescription from a healthcare provider. Another was that naloxone was administered by injection and therefore required training for proper use. 

In 2010, Illinois became the first state to adopt a dispensing naloxone access law (NAL) that permitted individuals to obtain naloxone directly from pharmacists, eliminating the need for an individual prescription. By 2015, another 35 states had implemented dispensing NALs. These policy initiatives were complemented by the introduction of Narcan, the first FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, in 2016. This new…

The NBER Corporate Finance Program has been a leading research forum in the field since it was established in 1991. Corporate finance questions intersect with many areas of finance and economics, including macrofinance, asset pricing, financial intermediation, and organizational economics. This breadth of topics is reflected in the work presented at the Corporate Finance program meetings. The importance of the field has been widely recognized in academia and is evidenced by the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig’s work on banking and intermediation. In this report, we cannot do justice to the entire field, but we must select a few topics that have been addressed in a number of recent NBER Working Papers or in presentations at...

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...