National Bureau of Economic Research
Coronavirus Pandemic Research
COVID-19 Mortality Lower in Higher-Ranked Nursing Homes
Nursing home residents account for more than 35 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. NBER Research Associate William Evans and Christopher Cronin, both of the University of Notre Dame, report substantial differences across nursing homes in the mortality rate from the virus. Their new working paper (28012) finds that facilities that achieved a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported substantially lower COVID-19 death rates than lower-ranked nursing homes. This differential was largely offset, however, by increased rates of non-COVID-19 mortality in highly ranked nursing homes. Evans describes these results in the video below. An archive of NBER videos on pandemic-related topics may be found here.
Two NBER working papers distributed this week investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and policies associated with it. One analyzes how pandemic-related restrictions on elective medical procedures, including surgical abortions, affected visits to abortion clinics (28058). The other explores the impact of COVID-19 and associated lockdown policies on domestic violence in Los Angeles (28068).
More than 290 NBER working papers have presented pandemic-related research. These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. They may be viewed in reverse chronological order or by topic area.
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New Officers, Directors, and Affiliates Named
At its meeting in September, the NBER Board of Directors elected John Lipsky chair and Peter Blair Henry vice chair of the NBER. Four new directors joined the board and 44 researchers were named NBER research associates or faculty research fellows research associates.
From the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
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Featured Working Papers
Immigrants act more as "job creators" than "job takers," and non-US-born founders play outsized roles in US high-growth entrepreneurship, according to a study by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda.
Matching natural gas shale royalty payments with credit bureau data for 215,639 consumers, J. Anthony Cookson, Erik P. Gilje, and Rawley Z. Heimer estimate that those who receive such payments repay about 33 cents of debt per dollar of windfall.
The average lag between publication of scientific findings and the incorporation of those findings in clean energy patents has risen from about five to about eight years since the 1980s, Robert K. Perrons, Adam B. Jaffe, and Trinh Le find
The pricing of stock market risk varied widely in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, and was driven more by sentiment than substance, according to a study by Josue Cox, Daniel L. Greenwald, and Sydney C. Ludvigson.
While removal of a bankruptcy flag on a credit report results in a sharp increase in access to traditional credit, Sarah Miller and Cindy K. Soo find that many borrowers continue to use high cost “payday loans.”
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