National Bureau of Economic Research

Four new working papers distributed in the last two weeks report on the economic, health, and related consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and public policies that respond to it. Two focus on labor market issues, one documenting the pandemic's impact on employment of disabled individuals (30640), the other projecting the pandemic's potential effect on the future earnings of women without college degrees (30647).  One study explores how the 1918 influenza epidemic affected investments in health care infrastructure (30643), while another describes the heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on both employment and mortality (30658).

More than 610 NBER working papers have addressed various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. View the papers in reverse chronological order or filter by topic area. 

As the US population grows older, supporting employment at older ages can be an important contributor to economic growth. In The Rise of Age-Friendly Jobs (NBER Working Paper 30463), Daron Acemoglu, Nicolaj Søndergaard Mühlbach, and Andrew J. Scott build an index to assess whether occupations in the US economy have become more accommodating to older workers. Their resulting Age-Friendliness Index (AFI), aggregated across all jobs, increased by 8 percent…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into focus the potential value of innovation in a crisis: big, new, urgent problems may demand novel solutions. Early on in the pandemic, there were calls from both scientists and policymakers for a focused R&D effort to combat the disease, many invoking past R&D efforts like the Manhattan Project as strategic metaphors for a wartime approach to the pandemic response.

Over the past several years, we have been immersed in studying crisis innovation, primarily through the lens of World War II, when the United States mobilized the country’s fledgling innovation system to tackle dozens of urgent wartime R&D needs, resulting in outputs as varied as radar, mass-produced penicillin, malaria treatments, and atomic fission. This effort was…

The Social Security Administration (SSA) convened its 2022 Retirement and Disability Research Consortium (RDRC) Meeting virtually on August 4–5. The meeting was organized by the NBER RDRC and featured research funded through the NBER RDRC as well as through other RDRC centers based at Boston College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin.

Kilolo Kijakazi, Acting Commissioner of SSA, provided welcoming remarks. She pronounced, “the SSA is initiating a systems approach to research. … A systems approach examines the effects of structural barriers on economic and social well-being. These barriers include policies, programs, and institutional practices that facilitate the security and mobility of some groups while impeding that of others.” She added, “research plays an…

Medicaid coverage for prenatal care has expanded considerably in recent decades. But in many states, undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for this coverage. This exclusion is consequential because one in thirteen births in the United States is to an undocumented immigrant. In Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention (NBER Working Paper 30299), researchers Sarah Miller and Laura Wherry evaluate the effects of California’s decision to expand prenatal Medicaid coverage to undocumented immigrants in...

Startups located in coworking hubs can benefit from knowledge spillovers from their startup neighbors.  In (Co-)Working in Close Proximity: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions (NBER Working Paper 30120), Maria P. Roche, Alexander Oettl,  and Christian Catalini find that knowledge spillovers are greatest among startup workers who socialize but are in moderately dissimilar enterprises.

The researchers studied one of the five largest technological coworking hubs in the nation, where 251 startups were randomly assigned office space in a five…