National Bureau of Economic Research

Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted for three decades. The health consequences have been stark, with annual deaths exceeding 100,000 since 2021.

In Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices (NBER Working Paper 34265), William N. Evans and Ethan M. J. Lieber examine characteristics of counties in 1990—prior to the surge—that predict the county-level severity of opioid deaths after 2000. After considering a wide range of potential determinants, they focus on one factor: the percentage of the working-age population...

In The Extraordinary Rise in the Wealth of Older American Households (NBER Working Paper 34131), Edward N. Wolff documents changes in age-wealth profiles in the US between 1983 and 2022. Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), he computes the relative wealth changes for different age groups, focusing primarily on the youngest (under 35) and oldest (75 and over) households.

The wealth of households aged 75 and over increased from 5 percent above the overall average in 1983 to 16 percent above it in 2007, then continued to rise to 55 percent above by 2022. Correspondingly, the relative wealth of all other age groups declined during this period. For example, the…

Global value chains have come under severe scrutiny in the past few years. Pandemic-era shortages, geopolitical concerns, and new industrial strategies have all revived an old worry: have firms become too dependent on a handful of foreign suppliers and assembly hubs? Should governments use policy tools such as tariffs or subsidies to promote domestic manufacturing employment and capabilities?

The heart of this debate centers around a firm’s decisions about whether and how to participate in global value chains: which countries will supply its components, where should it open assembly plants, and what foreign markets shall it enter to sell its goods?

Our research starts from the premise that the right unit of analysis for understanding this system is not the country or the industry, but the firm…

Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…