National Bureau of Economic Research

Research Associate Gianluca Violante, the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University and an affiliate of the NBER Economic Fluctuations and Growth and Monetary Economics programs, has joined John Leahy and Valerie Ramey as an organizer of the Macroeconomics Annual conference and an editor of the subsequent volume. Violante’s research ranges widely across macroeconomics, labor economics, and public finance. He is also a past co-editor of Econometrica and a past editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics.

Firms that export make strategic choices about the prices and quantities of the goods they sell as well as the currency in which they invoice their buyers. Unlike firms in other advanced countries, firms in Japan are less likely to invoice their exports in their own currency than in US dollars. Between 2014 and 2023, more than half of Japanese exports were sold in dollars, while exports priced in yen accounted for just over one-third of the total despite Japanese government initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s to internationalize the yen and promote its use in trade invoicing. 

In The Myth of US Dollar Dominance in Japanese Exports: New Evidence from Japanese Customs Level Data (NBER Working Paper 33748), researchers Uraku Yoshimoto, Kiyotaka Sato, Takatoshi Ito, Junko Shimizu, Yushi Yoshida, and Taiyo Yoshimi used...

This is the final issue of the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, coinciding with the closure of the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC). The RDRC was a vibrant hub of research activity from 2003 to 2025 and had a significant impact on stimulating analytic work on Social Security and the wellbeing of Social Security beneficiaries across a wide community of investigators at universities across the United States. 

Over 22 years, from the launch of the NBER Retirement Research Center in 2003, through the addition of the NBER Disability Research Center in 2012 and their consolidation into the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center in 2019, to the closing of the Centers program this year, the RDRC supported more than 400 research projects.

The RDRC was funded by the Social Security Administration (SSA) through a cooperative agreement...

Aggregation is a central problem for macroeconomics—how to reason about aggregate economic statistics that are composed of many heterogeneous and interacting parts. For example, how do energy shocks, like disruptions to the supply of Russian gas or Middle Eastern oil, affect real output and consumption in Europe and the United States? How do changes in consumer spending behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic affect employment and inflation? How do tariffs on Chinese goods affect real wages in the United States? How does churn in the supply chains of firms—additions and separations of suppliers—affect real output? The common element in these questions is their granularity: The economic shock is not aggregate in nature and affects different parts of the economy differently. The economist’s job is to sum up all…

Lower-income adults in the US are more likely to lack health insurance and to suffer worse health, a correlation that raises the long-standing question of whether health insurance affects health. In Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults (NBER Working Paper 33719), Angela Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer present new evidence on this question by evaluating the consequences of recent Medicaid expansions. 

To study the impact of Medicaid on mortality, the researchers exploit variation in the state-level adoption and timing of expansions of Medicaid eligibility to childless, nondisabled, non-elderly adults. Most, but…

The surge in remote work in recent years has transformed labor markets, with potentially important implications for the interaction between workplace flexibility and entrepreneurship. In Hustling from Home? Work from Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry (NBER Working Paper 33237), John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi explore whether the increased flexibility provided by work-from-home (WFH) arrangements has affected entrepreneurial decisions. They focus on the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment and analyze how the sudden shift to remote work affected new business creation. Guided…