National Bureau of Economic Research

The US has an estimated 2.1 million abandoned and unplugged oil and gas wells, as well as nearly 1 million still-producing wells. At the end of their productive lives, wells must be sealed through a process known as “plugging” to prevent groundwater contamination, methane emissions, and other environmental hazards. These environmental hazards impose social costs; one federal study valued the social cost of methane emissions from orphaned wells at $1.0 to $2.2 billion per year. Typical plugging costs range from $20,000 to $180,000 per well.

In Cutting Costs or Cutting Corners: Asset Reallocation in Oil and Gas Production (NBER Working Paper 34961), Sarah C. Armitage, Judson Boomhower, and Catherine Hausman investigate how...

What happens when workers get a formal seat at the table in corporate governance? In many European countries, laws require that worker representatives serve on company boards and participate in management decisions, a shared governance system known as codetermination. Germany's version, dating to the postwar era in its current form, is perhaps the most prominent: workers elect representatives to corporate supervisory boards, and establishment-level works councils participate in day-to-day workplace decisions. During its long history, codetermination has regularly attracted attention in countries that typically exclusively rely on shareholder control, such as the United States or the United Kingdom. The central question for economists is whether giving workers formal representation in firm governance meaningfully affects wages,…

Roughly one-quarter of new employer businesses in the United States are started by immigrants. Immigrant inventors have been responsible for approximately 23 percent of US patents produced since 1976 despite making up only 16 percent of the total US-based inventor population. Yet immigrant entrepreneurs usually do not build companies in isolation—many cofound startups alongside US-born entrepreneurs. In Native-Immigrant Entrepreneurial Synergies (NBER Working Paper 33804), Zhao Jin, Amir Kermani, and Timothy McQuade examine whether startups cofounded by immigrant and native entrepreneurs outperform those with founders from exclusively one...

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...