Costs of basic cloud services fell at double-digit annual rates between 2014 and 2016, while revenue from web services grew by 70% in 2015 and 55% in 2016, research featured in the December edition of The NBER Digest finds. Also in this month's issue: an examination of the influence of immigrants' education levels on natives' nationalist sentiments, an analysis of student outcomes at for-profit colleges, a calculation of impacts of Philadelphia's tax on sweetened beverages, an exploration of an unintended consequence of regulations on foreign exchange borrowing by banks, and a look at why women's STEM PhD completion rates are lower than men's.

African-American and Hispanic homebuyers were hurt most by the avalanche of mortgage foreclosures when the housing market collapsed, but not because they were holding subprime mortgages. Research discussed in the current edition of the NBER Reporter finds that a general expansion of credit fueled speculation and that minorities paid higher mortgage costs whether they used prime or subprime loans. Also in this edition of the quarterly Reporter, NBER affiliates write about their explorations of the role of liquidity in the 2007–09 financial crisis, the sometimes unforeseen consequences of energy and environmental policies, the effects of taxation on innovation, and the changing process of pharmaceutical development.

Disability Insurance is a central component of the Social Security program in the United States. The number of disability insurance recipients rose from under 5 million in 2000 to nearly 9 million in 2014, before beginning a gradual decline to just over 8.5 million today. During the 2018 NBER Summer Institute, NBER researchers Jeffrey Liebman and Nicole Maestas of Harvard University, along with Social Security Administration actuaries Stephen Goss and Karen Glenn, examined recent trends in disability insurance applications and awards, and potential explanations for those trends.