National Bureau of Economic Research

Wildfires have ravaged California in recent decades, often destroying homes and displacing residents. Building codes that require fire resistance in new construction have been one of the responses to this devastation. In Mandated vs. Voluntary Adaptation to Natural Disasters: The Case of US Wildfires (NBER Working Paper 29621), Patrick W. Baylis and Judson Boomhower examine the impact of mandatory statewide regulations on new residences. They find that newer homes, built under these rules, are much more likely to survive a wildfire.

More than 540 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 Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed.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.

Research Associates Mark Aguiar and Linda Tesar will become the codirectors of the NBER’s International Finance and Macroeconomics Program effective April 4.  

Aguiar is the Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University. His research spans both open- and closed-economy macroeconomics, including sovereign debt, business cycles in emerging markets, capital taxation, growth, and the microfoundations of consumption and labor supply. 

Tesar is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Her research has examined cross-country business cycle linkages, capital flows, especially to emerging markets, the consequences of exchange rate exposure, and global risk-sharing.

The new codirectors will succeed Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, a professor of economics and the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Gourinchas will be going on leave from the university and the NBER to become economic counsellor and head of the research department at the International Monetary Fund.

Climate change is an unintended consequence of the industrialization of the world economy. The evidence that human activity has released large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, leading to rising global temperatures, is by now uncontroversial. However, so far, the scientific and political recognition of this reality has not translated into a commitment to emissions reductions sufficient to stop further global warming. As a result, economists are tasked with evaluating the economic costs of climate change and designing policies to address them. These evaluations are essential: the world cannot embark on ambitious attempts to reduce carbon emissions if we are not reasonably confident that the benefits of these actions will outweigh their costs.

Evaluating the economic impact of climate…

The 45th annual NBER Summer Institute will be held from Monday, July 11 to Friday, July 29, 2022. It will 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. Meetings will hopefully include an in-person as well as a virtual component.  To be considered for presentation, papers must be submitted by 11:59pm Eastern time on Wednesday, March 23, here.

In 2019, Americans with a four-year college degree had six years greater life expectancy at age 25 than those without a degree. These educational differences in mortality have been growing in recent decades and are apparent across demographic groups. In Mortality Rates by College Degree before and during COVID-19 (NBER Working Paper 29328), Anne Case and Angus Deaton explore the evolution of these differences during the pandemic.

If every American faced an equal threat of infection and death from COVID-19, then the mortality gap between more and less educated individuals would have narrowed during the pandemic. However, the risks from COVID-19 were plausibly greater…

Many cities and states search for policy levers that could enable them to develop a startup culture. In "More than an Ivory Tower: The Impact of Research Institutions on the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship" (NBER Working Paper 28846), Valentina Tartari and Scott Stern conclude that research universities, particularly those in urban areas and near high-income zip codes, provide the most fecund ground for high-quality local entrepreneurship.

The researchers analyze information from the Startup Cartography Project, which provides zip-code-level measures of both the…

The process of applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits is complex. Applicants must complete a long application documenting their employment history, medical conditions, and medical treatments, obtain relevant medical records, understand the relevance of certain administrative rules and requirements, and in case of those who are denied benefits, navigate a lengthy appeals process.

Legal representatives have long played a role in SSDI cases at the appellate level, as cases reaching this level must be argued at a hearing before an administrative law judge. Disability representatives – primarily attorneys but also registered non-attorneys – work on a contingency-fee basis, receiving 25 percent of the claimant’s past-due benefits up to a maximum of $6,000. In 2019, fees to…