National Bureau of Economic Research
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Cecilia Rouse Confirmed as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Cecilia Rouse, an active member of the NBER community for the past three decades, as chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Rouse was an NBER Research Associate from 1992 until 2014 and a member of the NBER Board of Directors from 2014 until her resignation this week. Her nomination won overwhelming bipartisan support, passing by a vote of 95-4.
At the time of her nomination by the President, Rouse was dean of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and the Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education at the university. She served previously as a member of the CEA and on the staff of the National Economic Council.
Rouse is the 15th current or former NBER Research Associate to serve as CEA chair.
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Excess All-Cause Mortality from COVID-19
The burden of COVID-19 infections and deaths has not fallen equally on members of different racial or ethnic groups. A new study of all-cause excess mortality in one of the early months of the pandemic by NBER affiliates Amy Finkelstein of MIT and Maria Polyakova of Stanford, along with their collaborators, finds that excess mortality was nearly four times greater for Blacks, and three times greater for Hispanics and Native Americans, than for non-Hispanic Whites. To compare mortality rates across groups, the researchers link Census data on race and geography to the Social Security Administration’s Numident data on dates of birth and death. They measure excess mortality in April 2020 relative to mortality for the same groups in the previous nine years. Polyakova summarizes these results in the video below. An archive of NBER videos on pandemic-related topics may be found here.
Three NBER working papers distributed this week report on the economic, health, and related consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, or on the impact of public policies that are designed to respond to it. One studies the pandemic’s effect on the research productivity and the time use of academics in the field of finance (28493). The second reports on the differential impact of COVID-19 on the labor market experience of men and women (28505). The third exploits the pandemic-related disruption of higher education to estimate students’ willingness-to-pay for in-person rather than on-line instruction (28511).
More than 365 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 them in reverse chronological order or by topic area.
From the NBER Digest
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2021 NBER Summer Institute
The 44th annual NBER Summer Institute will be held on-line between Monday, July 12 and Friday, July 30, 2021. It consists of nearly 50 distinct meetings, each focusing on a topic or a sub-field in economics. The schedule of meetings can be found here. To be considered for presentation, papers must be submitted by Monday, April 5 here.
From the NBER Reporter
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From the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
...a free quarterly summarizing research in the NBER's Retirement and Disability Research Center
From the Bulletin on Health
...a free summary of recent NBER Working Papers on health topics, distributed three times a year
Featured Working Papers
A field experiment by Amanda Y. Agan and Sonja B. Starr finds that employers who are far from Black neighborhoods are more likely to discriminate against Black applicants.
Port development, particularly after the rise of containerization, does not increase the population of a city, as the rise in the attractiveness of the location for businesses and workers is offset by the land demands of port expansion that crowd out of other forms of economic activity, César Ducruet, Réka Juhász, Dávid Krisztián Nagy, and Claudia Steinwender find.
The revenues of small businesses and the consumption spending of their owners both fell by roughly 40 percent following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, but the decline in consumption was only slightly larger for business owners with large rather than small revenue losses, according to Olivia S. Kim, Jonathan A. Parker, and Antoinette Schoar find.
Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion find that over the last 40 years, China has greatly reduced income poverty even as income inequality has increased.
Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the signature trade policy event of the 19th century, did not make the British economy better off, as the efficiency gains from comparative advantage were largely offset by adverse terms-of-trade effects of the tariff reduction, according to Douglas A. Irwin and Maksym G. Chepeliev.
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