National Bureau of Economic Research

Although Western nations have dominated global scientific research since the nineteenth century, recent decades have witnessed profound shifts in where research is conducted, what topics it addresses, and how widely its findings spread across borders. In The Geography of Science (NBER Working Paper 34694), Abhishek Nagaraj and Randol Yao provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of global science between 1980 and 2022. Using data on 44 million publications from nearly 12,000 journals, they track where science is produced, based on author affiliations, what science studies...

Benjamin Jones and Josh Lerner, editors.

This volume of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy series brings rigorous new economic research to bear on a number of current policy issues. 

Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens quantify the social returns to public R&D and find that federal investments have yielded extraordinarily high productivity payoffs. They argue that cuts to non-defense R&D…

The US capital gains tax is realization based, which means that taxes are due when appreciated assets are sold. Critics of this approach argue that it allows asset holders, such as corporate founders, to defer their tax obligations, sometimes indefinitely. An alternative approach, taxing gains on accrual, would require asset holders to value their assets periodically and to pay tax on the gain since the last valuation. Critics of this approach argue that it could force founders to surrender ownership stakes just to pay tax bills, potentially discouraging startup formation. In Dilution vs. Risk Taking: Capital Gains Taxes and Entrepreneurship (NBER Working Paper 34512), Eduardo M. Azevedo, Florian Scheuer, Kent Smetters, and Min Yang examine how shifting from realization-based to accrual-based capital gains...

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are immunotherapy drugs that mobilize the patient’s immune system to detect and attack cancer cells. They are considered a breakthrough development in cancer care, but are very expensive, with a full course of treatment costing more than $150,000 per patient. In The Impact of Immunotherapy on Reductions in Cancer Mortality: Evidence from Medicare (NBER Working Paper 34317), Danea Horn, Abby E. Alpert, Mark Duggan, and Mireille Jacobson use Medicare claims data to evaluate the impact of the first ICIs on healthcare use, costs, and mortality among beneficiaries diagnosed with...

Over the past three decades trade policy has profoundly shaped the structure of production, employment, and welfare across countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the recent resurgence of tariff protectionism illustrate how deeply globalization and policy choices are intertwined. Evaluating their effects requires quantitative frameworks that capture how shocks to both technology and policy propagate through supply chains, labor markets, and international linkages.

Our research develops tractable general equilibrium models to quantify how shocks such as tariffs affect economies—both in the aggregate and across workers, regions, and sectors. These frameworks extend the Ricardian model of trade to include…