National Bureau of Economic Research

In the 1970s, court orders to integrate schools led many US cities to bus students far from home. Though court-mandated busing has disappeared, many urban districts now have voluntary school choice programs that allow students to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods when space permits. In many of these systems, students are assigned to seats using school-matching algorithms that take account of applicant preferences and school priorities, randomizing seats when schools are oversubscribed. Choice systems aim to decouple school assignment from residential segregation, and ideally increase both integration and student achievement. At the same time, school transportation in large urban districts is increasingly expensive, so districts face a trade-off.

In Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York (NBER Working Paper 30308) Joshua Angrist, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Clémence Idoux, and Parag Pathak ask whether...

Large data sets that include observations on many workers at a given firm, multiple decisions by individual judges, auditors, and social insurance examiners, large numbers of students in the classrooms of specific teachers, and on many other settings with a similar structure, have generated substantial interest in estimating unit-specific parameters. Empirical Bayes methods make it possible to estimate these parameters, characterize their heterogeneity, and make decisions based on them. The 2022 Methods Lectures, presented by Jiayang Gu of the University of Toronto and Christopher Walters of the University of California, Berkeley, provide an introduction to the theory and application of these methods. A video recording of the two-part lecture series may be found above. The NBER also maintains an archive of Methods Lectures from the past 15 years.

US house prices fell by 34 percent between 2006 and 2012. But the downturn was more severe in some parts of the country than in others. For example, home values in Phoenix and Las Vegas dropped by 46 and 60 percent, respectively. In contrast, house prices in Pittsburgh and Buffalo didn’t fall at all, instead increasing by 5 and 6 percent over this time period.  

How did the overall housing downturn, and the associated Great Recession, affect mental health among older adults? In Economic Crises and Mental Health: Effects of the Great Recession on Older Americans (NBER Working Paper 29817), David M. Cutler and Noémie Sportiche show that consequences varied with financial stability and race. To…

Individual records from the 1950 US Census were publicly released on April 1, 2022. Economic historians had been waiting for this day for 10 years. This data source, like the individual-level data from earlier censuses, makes it possible to locate the information reported by a specific person.

I found the records for my grandparents along with those for my mother, who was born in December 1949. They lived in rural Lincoln County, Kentucky. My grandfather, Bernard Camenisch, born in Kentucky to a Swiss father, worked 92 hours the previous week as a dairy farmer. A decade earlier, in the 1940 Census, he was living with his father, also a farmer; he worked 60 hours the week prior to answering that census survey. My grandmother Dorothy was a “sample line respondent,” and so…

Forty percent of US workers have access to employer-provided short-term disability insurance (STDI). This insurance generally pays benefits to disabled workers during the five-month waiting period between disability onset and when Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits can commence. By providing income during the waiting period, STDI may encourage more disabled workers to apply for SSDI, leading to more SSDI awards. However, employers who offer STDI have a stronger financial incentive to offer accommodations to disabled workers to help them to remain on the job instead of taking up STDI benefits, which could reduce SSDI applications and awards.

Examining the effect of STDI access on SSDI applications and awards is challenging, since workers with and without STDI access may differ in ways that affect…

In Private or Public Equity? The Evolving Entrepreneurial Finance Landscape (NBER Working Paper 29532), Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa survey the changes in the US entrepreneurial finance market over the last two decades. Their study begins by describing the differences between publicly listed and private firms, and then explores how several regulatory, technological, and competitive changes affecting both startups and investors have affected the costs and benefits of going public. The paper emphasizes the growing costs of the disclosures required of public firms, and also observes that major technological changes have reduced the initial capital investment…