National Bureau of Economic Research

The growth rate of labor productivity is a key determinant of the long-run level of earnings. The level and distribution of earnings are in turn key influences on the revenue collected by the payroll tax that finances the US Social Security program. At the July 2022 Economics of Social Security meeting hosted by the NBER, three panelists -- Francine Blau of Cornell University and NBER, Stephen Goss of the US Social Security Administration, and Charles Jones of Stanford University and NBER -- examined historical trends in the level and distribution of earnings as well as the potential impact of changes in the rate of economic growth, and the gender composition of the labor force, on future payroll tax revenues.

Measuring poverty is a long-standing challenge. The official US poverty rate is based on households’ before-tax-and-transfer income. Alternative measures, derived from household expenditures, have been proposed as more-informative indicators of well-being among disadvantaged households.

In The Supplemental Poverty Measure: A New Method for Measuring Poverty (NBER Working Paper 30056), John Fitzgerald and Robert A. Moffitt develop a new metric for identifying poor households. They use information...

Community health centers (CHCs) offer primary care services at discounted prices in economically disadvantaged communities. The first two CHCs were introduced, as part of the War on Poverty, in Massachusetts and Mississippi in 1965. Over the next 23 years, CHCs were gradually rolled out to medically underserved communities around the country and, by 1988, they were available in 733 counties. The CHC program continued after 1988, but under a new name (federally qualified health centers) and with some modified funding policies.

While CHCs provided all types of primary care, prenatal care was a common form of care. In 1988, CHCs served approximately 6 percent of all pregnant women. This prominent role in the provision of prenatal care raises the question of whether CHCs affected birth...

In recent decades, economists have studied how beliefs and preferences are formed and updated, and how cultural and social norms affect economic decisions. In a series of papers, together with our collaborators, we investigate how vertical and horizontal cultural transmission of preferences may affect educational outcomes.

In our work with Umut Özek, we study the relevance of one specific cultural value — long-term orientation, the ability to delay gratification and exert self-control. This trait has been associated with physical, emotional, and educational outcomes.

In recent years, many state and local governments have decreased the generosity of the benefits promised to plan participants due to rising fiscal burdens. In Reductions in the Generosity of State and Local Employee Pensions: Comparison of Plans with and without Social Security Coverage (NBER RDRC Working Paper NB21-09), researchers Nino Abashidze, Robert Clark, and Lee Craig offer a history of retirement plans for state and local workers in the US, with a focus on the decreases in generosity of those plans over the past 20 years.

Public school teachers were among the first state and local employees to receive pensions. As other categories of state workers gained access to pensions, many states maintained separate...

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…