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…

Research associate Eric Budish, an affiliate of the Industrial Organization program whose research has applied the tools and insights of market design to a range of settings including financial market, patents and innovation policy, the allocation of scarce resources during pandemics and other emergencies, and blockchains, will become a codirector of the Market Design working group in January 2026. He is the Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Budish will succeed working group Parag Pathak, the Class of 1922 Professor of Economics at MIT, who launched the group in 2008 along with research associate Susan Athey. Budish will codirect the working group with Michael…

N. Gregory Mankiw

It is a great honor and delight to deliver this year’s Feldstein Lecture. I was never one of Marty’s students—I was educated not at Harvard, but at Princeton and MIT. Yet Marty nonetheless had a profound influence on my life and career.

As a freshman at Princeton in 1977, I took introductory microeconomics from the superb teacher Harvey Rosen, who later hired me to be his research assistant. Harvey was a recent PhD student of Marty’s, so even though I did not know it at the time, I entered the economics profession as Marty’s grandstudent.

Four years later, as a first-year student in MIT’s PhD program, I took a couple of courses from a promising, young assistant professor named Larry Summers, making me Marty’s grandstudent…

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…