National Bureau of Economic Research
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US-China, STEM Researchers, and Students
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Since 2015, geopolitical tensions between the US and China have risen. There has been an increase in anti-China rhetoric from US politicians and growing anti-China sentiment in the population. These developments have been manifested in trade barriers and FBI-DOJ investigations of Chinese American scientists under suspicion of espionage and intellectual property theft.
In Building a Wall around Science: The Effect of US-China Tensions on International Scientific Research (NBER Working Paper 32622), Robert Flynn, Britta Glennon, Raviv Murciano-Goroff, and Jiusi Xiao investigate the effects of China-US geopolitical tensions on science. The scientific communities in the two countries have historically been well...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Lessons for Economists from the Pandemic
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It is an honor to be here today; I owe my love of economics to the Bureau as well as my many friends and colleagues. Marty [Martin] Feldstein was one of the people who made it such a special place. I enjoyed seeing him around the Bureau, learning public finance from him, and briefly serving as his research assistant. I’d sit in his office, in awe of his incredible intellect and economic insights, and be completely distracted by the hilarious cartoons he had framed in his office. My favorite was the one in which Marty is depicted rowing in the wrong direction in a skiff while President Reagan yells “Feldstein!” They all reflected his steadfast willingness to speak his mind, to “speak truth to power,” even to the president of the United States...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
“Third Places” Boost Local Economic Activity
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Sociologists have argued that “third places” like cafés, which provide opportunities for individuals to socialize and exchange ideas outside of home and work, improve neighborhood life. But what about the relationship between such places and economic activity? In Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés (NBER Working Paper 32604), researchers Jinkyong Choi, Jorge Guzman, and Mario L. Small use data on US business registrations between 1990 and 2022 from the Startup Cartography Project to examine whether the opening of a Starbucks in a neighborhood with no previous cafés affects local entrepreneurship...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Effects of Insurance Coverage on Infertility Treatments, Childbearing, and Wellbeing
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Between 1995 and 2010, the share of births in Sweden that involved assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rose from 2 to 10 percent. These treatments range from low-cost drugs to costly and invasive interventions, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (NBER Working Paper 32445), Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova provide new evidence on the consequences of infertility and the role of insurance coverage in household decisions to initiate treatment. Using administrative, population-wide data for the period 2006–2019, the researchers estimate the use of infertility treatment. They find that over the course of their fertile years...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Disability Insurance Benefits and Household Composition
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Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) “family maximum” rules cap the benefits that can be paid to a disabled worker’s family at the lower of 85 percent of the worker’s average indexed monthly earnings and 150 percent of their primary insurance amount. The effect of these rules is that family payments are the same whether a DI beneficiary has one or many dependents, and when DI beneficiaries have low benefit determinations, there are no payments for dependents at all.
In Understanding the Disparate Impacts of the Social Security Disability Insurance Family Maximum Rules (NBER RDRC Paper NB23-07), Timothy J. Moore examines how the economic wellbeing of DI beneficiary...
Featured Working Papers
Analyzing World Bank debt data covering 146 countries and 53 years, Sebastian Horn, David Mihalyi, Philipp Nickol, and César Sosa-Padilla conclude that debt statistics are systematically underreported, that hidden debt accumulates in boom years and tends to be revealed in bad, and that higher hidden debt is associated with larger creditor losses in restructurings.
The stock market returns of firms that supply decarbonization services to other businesses are positively correlated with carbon prices, but negatively correlated with carbon price uncertainty, suggesting that firms may delay investments in decarbonization when faced with uncertainty about the future costs of emissions, Maximilian Fuchs, Johannes Stroebel, and Julian Terstegge find.
A 1 percentage point increase in work from home (WFH) occupations increases full-time employment for individuals with a physical disability by 1.1 percent, according to Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl, and Dan-Olof Rooth, who report that the move to WFH increased the supply of workers with a disability.
Wildfire smoke accounts for 18 percent of US ambient PM2.5 concentrations, 0.42 percent of deaths, and 0.69 percent of emergency room visits among adults aged 65 and over, Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor, and Eric Zou find.
A nationally representative sample of homeowners from 1974-2021 shows that Black and Hispanic homeowners earn higher but more volatile rates of return on owner-occupied housing than White homeowners, according to a study by Rebecca Diamond and William F. Diamond.
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