The NBER appointed 58 new research associates and 45 new faculty research fellows in 2018. New appointees must be faculty members at North American colleges and universities, and are recommended by program directors in the culmination of a highly competitive process.

Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people and displaced more than one million residents of the Gulf Coast region. Research summarized in the most recent issue of the NBER's Bulletin on Aging and Health finds that elderly Medicare beneficiaries, who make up one-fifth of those displaced by the storm, generally moved to areas that have lower mortality rates than New Orleans and are benefitting from longer lives because of it. Also in this edition: A study of how doctors' race affects their patients' utilization of preventative medical treatments and how fragmentation of the kidney exchange market affects hospitals' ability to match donors to recipients.

African-American and Hispanic homebuyers were hurt most by the avalanche of mortgage foreclosures when the housing market collapsed, but not because they were holding subprime mortgages. Research discussed in the current edition of the NBER Reporter finds that a general expansion of credit fueled speculation and that minorities paid higher mortgage costs whether they used prime or subprime loans. Also in this edition of the quarterly Reporter, NBER affiliates write about their explorations of the role of liquidity in the 2007–09 financial crisis, the sometimes unforeseen consequences of energy and environmental policies, the effects of taxation on innovation, and the changing process of pharmaceutical development.

As health-care costs continue to rise, workplace wellness programs have become popular with employers looking for ways to cut costs. Damon Jones of the University of Chicago and the NBER is a leader of a large-scale study of wellness programs' effectiveness at cutting costs and enrolling targeted populations.