National Bureau of Economic Research

Conducting and disseminating non-partisan economic research

Coronavirus Pandemic Research

COVID-19 Mortality Lower in Higher-Ranked Nursing Homes

Nursing home residents account for more than 35 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. NBER Research Associate William Evans and Christopher Cronin, both of the University of Notre Dame, report substantial differences across nursing homes in the mortality rate from the virus. Their new working paper (28012) finds that facilities that achieved a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported substantially lower COVID-19 death rates than lower-ranked nursing homes. This differential was largely offset, however, by increased rates of non-COVID-19 mortality in highly ranked nursing homes. Evans describes these results in the video below. An archive of NBER videos on pandemic-related topics may be found here.

 

Two NBER working papers distributed this week investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and policies associated with it. One analyzes how pandemic-related restrictions on elective medical procedures, including surgical abortions, affected visits to abortion clinics (28058). The other explores the impact of COVID-19 and associated lockdown policies on domestic violence in Los Angeles (28068).

More than 290 NBER working papers have presented pandemic-related research. 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-reviewedThey may be viewed in reverse chronological order or by topic area.


From the NBER Digest

...a free monthly publication of non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest

w27793.jpg
After the war, those who had subscribed to Liberty Bonds were more likely to invest in stocks and bonds, advancing the development of US capital markets. In 1910, fewer than a million individuals owned corporate stock in the United States; by the 1930s that number had increased more than tenfold. What induced so many to move their savings, which were previously held largely in banks, to the security markets? In When Uncle Sam Introduced Main Street to Wall...

From the Bulletin on Health

...a free summary of recent NBER Working Papers on health topics, distributed three times a year

w27760
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive disease of the brain that is the leading cause of dementia in the United States, afflicting an estimated five million Americans. As shown in the figure, the prevalence, costs, and human toll of this disease are vast, and expected to increase over time. Given these sobering statistics, Alzheimer’s disease is a critical priority for research and public policy in the United States. In order to encourage new economic research on this...

From the NBER Reporter

...a presentation of the 2020 Martin S. Feldstein Lecture

20203figure1
Author(s): Claudia Goldin
My talk will take us on a Journey across a Century of Women — a 120-year odyssey of generations of college-graduate women from a time when they were only able to have either a family or a career (sometimes a job), to now, when they anticipate having both a family and a career. More women than ever before are within striking distance of these goals. Fully 45 percent of young American women today will eventually have a BA degree, and more than 20 percent of them will obtain...

New Officers, Directors, and Affiliates Named

new board members homepage promo image

At its meeting in September, the NBER Board of Directors elected John Lipsky chair and Peter Blair Henry vice chair of the NBER. Four new directors joined the board and 44 researchers were named NBER research associates or faculty research fellows research associates.


From the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability

...a free quarterly summarizing research in the NBER's Retirement and Disability Research Center

The 2020 NBER Summer Institute's Economics of Social Security meeting featured a panel discussion on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for Social Security in the US. NBER President James Poterba introduced the panel by noting that COVID-19 may affect Social Security in many ways, including effects on the economy, health, and mortality, while also acknowledging the current early state of research with respect to the pandemic and its long-term effects. James Stock (...
w27534.jpg
Facing rising life expectancies and falling birth rates, many countries have raised retirement ages in their public pension programs to ameliorate long-run fiscal deficits. In the US, the normal retirement age has gradually been rising from age 65 and will reach age 67 for those born in 1960 or later. Public pension retirement ages — including the early retirement age (ERA) when benefits are first available and the normal retirement age (NRA) around which the benefit...

Featured Working Papers

Immigrants act more as "job creators" than "job takers," and non-US-born founders play outsized roles in US high-growth entrepreneurship, according to a study by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda.

Matching natural gas shale royalty payments with credit bureau data for 215,639 consumers, J. Anthony Cookson, Erik P. Gilje, and Rawley Z. Heimer estimate that those who receive such payments repay about 33 cents of debt per dollar of windfall.

The average lag between publication of scientific findings and the incorporation of those findings in clean energy patents has risen from about five to about eight years since the 1980s, Robert K. Perrons, Adam B. Jaffe, and Trinh Le find

The pricing of stock market risk varied widely in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic,  and was driven more by sentiment than substance, according to a study by Josue Cox, Daniel L. Greenwald, and Sydney C. Ludvigson.

While removal of a bankruptcy flag on a credit report results in a sharp increase in access to traditional credit, Sarah Miller and Cindy K. Soo  find that many borrowers continue to use high cost “payday loans.”

In the News

Recent citations of NBER research in the media
_______________________________________

View more

Books & Chapters

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.

Interviews

NBER researchers discuss their work on subjects of wide interest to economists, policymakers, and the general public. Recordings of more-detailed presentations, keynote addresses, and panel discussions at NBER conferences are available on the Lectures page.
Interview
Nursing home residents account for more than 35 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. NBER Research...
Interview
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented fiscal actions in many nations, as governments have increased spending...
Interview
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a particularly heavy toll on the elderly in the United States and other nations,...
Interview
The speed and geographic variation of the COVID-19 economic decline has placed a premium on higher-frequency...
Interview
The COVID-19 pandemic led primary and secondary schools across the US to close their doors and shift to on-line...
Sign up for New This Week: The Weekly Announcement of New NBER Working Papers
Learn More about NBER Research Activities