National Bureau of Economic Research

Karen Mills was elected Chair of the NBER’s Board of Directors, and Douglas Peterson was elected Vice Chair, at the board’s September 28 meeting.

Mills, who has served as Vice Chair for the last three years, is a leading authority on US competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and innovation. She is the president of Tootsie Roll Industries, an American manufacturer of confectionery products. From 2014 to 2025 she was a senior fellow on the entrepreneurship faculty at Harvard Business School. She served in President Barack Obama's Cabinet as Administrator of the US Small Business...

Many countries offer tax relief to investors in risky, young, innovative firms. Whether tax subsidies aimed at startup investing affect the level or direction of investment, or simply offer sophisticated investors a tax arbitrage opportunity that boosts returns without changing investment behavior, is a perennial question.

In Tax Incentives and Venture Capital Risk-Taking: Evidence from the QSBS Program (NBER Working Paper 35418), Murillo Campello and Guilherme Junqueira examine how investors respond to changes in the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) program. This US tax incentive, offered by…

In research conducted in collaboration with Arkey Barnett at the University of Michigan and Meghan Beal at the National Sheriffs’ Association, we investigate the effects of innovative investments in local jails that aim to improve health and rehabilitation outcomes for incarcerated individuals and their communities. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with nearly 2 million people detained in correctional facilities every year. While most people are held in state or federal prisons, local jails house 546,000 individuals across 3,116 facilities, the majority of whom are not convicted. Local jails serve as the front door to the criminal justice system, with more than 7.6 million admissions per year and a significant share of those released being rebooked within the same year, revealing a persistent…

Nursing homes certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to provide care and receive public reimbursement through Medicare and Medicaid are subject to mandatory annual inspections. While inspections are unannounced, they typically occur on an approximately yearly basis, as 74 percent of inspections take place between 40 and 60 weeks after the previous one. The average gap is around 53 weeks. Due to the cyclical nature of inspections, nursing home operators are able to anticipate when an inspection is likely and adjust their behavior accordingly. They appear to devote more effort to patient care when inspections are approaching.

In Predictably Unpredictable Inspections (NBER Working Paper 34491), Ashvin Gandhi, Andrew Olenski, and Maggie Shi study how the predictability of nursing home inspections shapes facility effort and patient...

Roughly one-quarter of new employer businesses in the United States are started by immigrants. Immigrant inventors have been responsible for approximately 23 percent of US patents produced since 1976 despite making up only 16 percent of the total US-based inventor population. Yet immigrant entrepreneurs usually do not build companies in isolation—many cofound startups alongside US-born entrepreneurs. In Native-Immigrant Entrepreneurial Synergies (NBER Working Paper 33804), Zhao Jin, Amir Kermani, and Timothy McQuade examine whether startups cofounded by immigrant and native entrepreneurs outperform those with founders from exclusively one...