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Impacts of Transporting Students to Public Schools of Choice

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In the 1970s, court orders to integrate schools led many US cities to bus students far from home. Though court-mandated busing has disappeared, many urban districts now have voluntary school choice programs that allow students to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods when space permits. In many of these systems, students are assigned to seats using school-matching algorithms that take account of applicant preferences and school priorities, randomizing seats when schools are oversubscribed. Choice systems aim to decouple school assignment from residential segregation, and ideally increase both integration and student achievement. At the same time, school transportation in large urban districts is increasingly expensive, so districts face a trade-off.

In Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York (NBER Working Paper 30308) Joshua Angrist, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Clémence Idoux, and Parag Pathak ask whether...

2022 Summer Institute Methods Lectures

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Large data sets that include observations on many workers at a given firm, multiple decisions by individual judges, auditors, and social insurance examiners, large numbers of students in the classrooms of specific teachers, and on many other settings with a similar structure, have generated substantial interest in estimating unit-specific parameters. Empirical Bayes methods make it possible to estimate these parameters, characterize their heterogeneity, and make decisions based on them. The 2022 Methods Lectures, presented by Jiayang Gu of the University of Toronto and Christopher Walters of the University of California, Berkeley, provide an introduction to the theory and application of these methods. A video recording of the two-part lecture series may be found above. The NBER also maintains an archive of Methods Lectures from the past 15 years.

From the NBER Bulletin on Health

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Heterogeneous Mental Health Effects of Shocks to Housing Prices

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US house prices fell by 34 percent between 2006 and 2012. But the downturn was more severe in some parts of the country than in others. For example, home values in Phoenix and Las Vegas dropped by 46 and 60 percent, respectively. In contrast, house prices in Pittsburgh and Buffalo didn’t fall at all, instead increasing by 5 and 6 percent over this time period.  

How did the overall housing downturn, and the associated Great Recession, affect mental health among older adults? In Economic Crises and Mental Health: Effects of the Great Recession on Older Americans (NBER Working Paper 29817), David M. Cutler and Noémie Sportiche show that consequences varied with financial stability and race. To…

From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries

Figure 1 2022 number 2 Eriksson summary

The Promise of Linked Historical Census Data

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Individual records from the 1950 US Census were publicly released on April 1, 2022. Economic historians had been waiting for this day for 10 years. This data source, like the individual-level data from earlier censuses, makes it possible to locate the information reported by a specific person.

I found the records for my grandparents along with those for my mother, who was born in December 1949. They lived in rural Lincoln County, Kentucky. My grandfather, Bernard Camenisch, born in Kentucky to a Swiss father, worked 92 hours the previous week as a dairy farmer. A decade earlier, in the 1940 Census, he was living with his father, also a farmer; he worked 60 hours the week prior to answering that census survey. My grandmother Dorothy was a “sample line respondent,” and so…

From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability

NBER RDRC Working Paper 21-10 Figure

How Short-Term Private Disability Insurance Affects Public Disability Benefits

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Forty percent of US workers have access to employer-provided short-term disability insurance (STDI). This insurance generally pays benefits to disabled workers during the five-month waiting period between disability onset and when Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits can commence. By providing income during the waiting period, STDI may encourage more disabled workers to apply for SSDI, leading to more SSDI awards. However, employers who offer STDI have a stronger financial incentive to offer accommodations to disabled workers to help them to remain on the job instead of taking up STDI benefits, which could reduce SSDI applications and awards.

Examining the effect of STDI access on SSDI applications and awards is challenging, since workers with and without STDI access may differ in ways that affect…

From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

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The Rise of Private Financing for Entrepreneurs

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In Private or Public Equity? The Evolving Entrepreneurial Finance Landscape (NBER Working Paper 29532), Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa survey the changes in the US entrepreneurial finance market over the last two decades. Their study begins by describing the differences between publicly listed and private firms, and then explores how several regulatory, technological, and competitive changes affecting both startups and investors have affected the costs and benefits of going public. The paper emphasizes the growing costs of the disclosures required of public firms, and also observes that major technological changes have reduced the initial capital investment…

Featured Working Papers

Life insurance policyholders, especially the young and those in poor health, are more likely to allow their policies to lapse during economic downturns, Ralph S. J. Koijen, Hae Kang Lee, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh show.

Common stocks are a better hedge against headline inflation, which includes food and energy costs, than against core inflation, which excludes them, in part because higher energy prices are associated with higher stock prices in the energy sector, Xiang Fang, Yang Liu, Nikolai Roussanov find.

 

A model that predicts the risk of being shot in the next 18 months, developed using data on over 600,000 records from the Chicago Police Department, has a 13 percent accuracy rate for the 500 individuals with the highest predicted probabilities, according to Sara B. Heller, Benjamin Jakubowski, Zubin Jelveh, and Max Kapustin.

The four major federal COVID-19 response programs enacted in 2020 and 2021 spent at least $433,000 for each state or local government job-year that was preserved through September 2021, according to estimates from Jeffrey Clemens, Philip G. Hoxie, and Stan Veuger.

Longer participation in Canada’s Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy program raised earnings two years after program participation for Métis and non-Status First Nations groups, but had no impact on Status First Nations individuals, according to Donn. L. Feir, Kelly Foley, and Maggie E.C. Jones.

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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.

Research Spotlights

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.
Life expectancy vs hh income percentile figure
Research Spotlight
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected different subgroups of the population, based on race, ethnicity, and income, in...
COVID sectoral revenue decline figure 03032022
Research Spotlight
The COVID-19 pandemic affected businesses in different industries in disparate ways.  Those in customer contact...
PPP racial disparity figure final 02222022
Research Spotlight
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was one of the central elements of the pandemic stimulus program. It was designed...
substance deaths figure 02042022
Research Spotlight
The number of deaths from drug overdoses and alcohol abuse rose during the first 16 months of the COVID-19 pandemic....
married women's employment figure 01202022
Research Spotlight
Employment in the US declined early in the pandemic, and has remained below its pre-pandemic level as the number of...
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