National Bureau of Economic Research
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Correcting for Quality Change When Measuring Inflation
article
One of the perennial challenges of constructing price indices like the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is that products change over time. This is often cited as a concern with regard to rapidly evolving products on the technological frontier, such as personal computers, cellphones, and automobiles. One standard approach to adjusting for quality change, the “hedonic method,” involves relating product prices to product characteristics, such as memory size and CPU speed for computers or horsepower and miles per gallon for cars, and estimating the amount that consumers are prepared to pay for improvements in these characteristics. These estimates can in turn be used to distinguish price changes over time that are due to changes in product characteristics from changes that are due to the price charged for a product with…
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Unemployment Insurance, Birth Rates, and Infant Health
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Falling birth rates in the US and other advanced economies have raised questions about the links between economic conditions, government safety nets, and fertility and infant health. In The Cyclicality of Births and Babies’ Health, Revisited: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance (NBER Working Paper 30937), Lisa Dettling and Melissa Kearney find that fertility rates and infant health are influenced by the mother’s financial circumstances during economic downturns. Unemployment insurance (UI), which provides liquidity following job loss, can mitigate financial stress and improve birth...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Longevity and the Well-Being of Populations
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Life expectancy has increased tremendously in the United States, from an average of roughly 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 2020. However, increases in longevity have not been equally distributed among all subgroups of the population. Longevity is an important component of well-being, possibly as important as income; people are willing to pay very large sums to protect and increase it. Understanding the evolution and distribution of lifespan is critical to understanding changes in population well-being. In this article...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Retirement Outcomes: Impacts of Outreach
article
Workers need to prepare for their future as retirees. This is a complex task that is influenced by workers’ retirement knowledge, financial literacy, preferences, expectations, and opportunities.
In Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Retirement Outcomes: Impacts of Outreach (NBER Working Paper 30456), researchers Angelino Viceisza, Amaia Calhoun, and Gabriella Lee review literature on disparities in retirement outcomes and the potential for outreach and service delivery by the Social Security Administration and other entities to help address such disparities.
Average retirement wealth in households near retirement age is…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Gender and Race Gaps on the Path to Startup Success
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Depending on the data source, 12 and 28 percent of high-growth startups are run by women, although women make up 45 percent of the overall labor force. Fewer than 10 percent of entrepreneurs are Black. In Race and Gender in Entrepreneurial Finance (NBER Working Paper 30444), Michael Ewens surveys available data and presents a framework for assessing gender and race gaps in startup founding, financing, and growth.
The startup path is complex: individual entrepreneurs must secure financing, grow, and successfully exit. In addition to the initial decision to launch a startup, decisions on firm type, scale, industry, location, and long-term…
Featured Working Papers
Moving a patient from a 10th to a 90th percentile hospital with respect to the efficiency of input resource allocation, holding spending constant, increases survival by 3.1 percentage points, Amitabh Chandra, Carrie H. Colla, and Jonathan S. Skinner calculate. Misallocation accounts for up to 25 percent of the variation in hospital productivity.
Caroline Fry and Megan MacGarvie find that when the COVID-19 pandemic raised use of preprint platforms for disseminating new scientific findings prior to peer review, preprints with authors from Chinese institutions received less, and those with authors from US institutions more, attention than those with authors from elsewhere.Â
Medicaid expansion reduced Supplemental Security Income take-up among White and Hispanic respondents by 10 percent and 21 percent, respectively, and increased Social Security Disability Insurance take-up among White and Black respondents by 9 percent and 11 percent, respectively, Becky Staiger, Madeline S. Helfer, and Jessica Van Parys find.
A program in Beijing that afforested an area roughly the size of Los Angeles  reduced average PM 2.5 concentration at downwind population hubs by 4.2 percent, but led to a 7.4 percent increase in pollen exposure, Jianwei Xing, Zhiren Hu, Fan Xia, Jintao Xu, and Eric Zou find.
Consumer inattention can raise retail revenues from goods and services sold by subscription by more than 200 percent, according to research by Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack, and Neale Mahoney.
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Through a partnership with the University of Chicago Press, the NBER publishes the proceedings of four annual conferences as well as other research studies associated with NBER-based research projects.
