National Bureau of Economic Research

Each year, the NBER provides dissertation fellowships for a number of doctoral students in economics and finance, in each case after a widely-disseminated call for applications.

Fellowships for dissertation writers in aging and health economics, supported by the National Institute on Aging and the NBER, have been awarded to Michael B. Briskin, of Boston University; Marema Gaye and Graeme P. Peterson of Harvard University; and Theodore L. Caputi, Rebekah A. Dix, Dean Li, Kelsey Moran, and James C. Okun of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Briskin is studying the widespread adoption of private health insurance in the 1940s and 1950s and its effects on physician labor markets and health outcomes in the US. Caputi’s research focuses on behavioral aspects of public health, such as drug use, violence, and crime,…

In People’s Understanding of Inflation (NBER Working Paper 32497), Alberto Binetti, Francesco Nuzzi, and Stefanie Stantcheva present new survey results on the American public’s views on inflation. The survey collected information about individuals’ demographics, income, news sources, and voting habits as well as their opinions on the causes and distributional results of inflation. The survey was conducted between March and May 2024 using the Lucid internet platform. The sample was constructed to mirror the US population in 2022.

On average, respondents categorized inflation’s effects as unambiguously negative, saying it was worse than unemployment and ranking it as a more important policy priority than healthcare, growth, and unemployment. They did not view managing inflation as requiring trade-offs such as reduced economic activity or increased unemployment. They identified government...

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) “family maximum” rules cap the benefits that can be paid to a disabled worker’s family at the lower of 85 percent of the worker’s average indexed monthly earnings and 150 percent of their primary insurance amount. The effect of these rules is that family payments are the same whether a DI beneficiary has one or many dependents, and when DI beneficiaries have low benefit determinations, there are no payments for dependents at all. 

In Understanding the Disparate Impacts of the Social Security Disability Insurance Family Maximum Rules (NBER RDRC Paper NB23-07), Timothy J. Moore examines how the economic wellbeing of DI beneficiary...

Negotiations between workers and firm management are a defining feature of labor markets around the world. By many measures, labor relations have deteriorated substantially in recent years, often leading to strikes. In the United States, there were nearly 350 labor actions last year, the most in two decades, followed by 124 in the early months of 2024. Most of these actions are related to differences over worker compensation, benefits, and amenities.

Organizational economics is premised on the notion that firms are not monoliths but rather groups of individuals attempting to coordinate actions towards a set of common goals. Firm performance, then, depends critically on the preferences, incentives, and constraints of individuals, and the nature of their interaction within the organization. Understanding these many factors can…

Adults who live in more educated communities have lower mortality rates. In 2010, every 10 percentage point increase in an area’s share of adults with a college degree — equivalent to moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of area education — was associated with 97 (8 percent) fewer deaths per 100,000 people. In Human Capital Spillovers and Health: Does Living around College Graduates Lengthen Life? (NBER Working Paper 32346), researchers Jacob H. Bor, David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Ljubica Ristovska explore this relationship...

Immigrants play a significant role in the entrepreneurial landscape. In the United States, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. More than half of America's billion-dollar startup companies trace their roots to immigrant founders. There is limited research, however, on the factors that influence immigrants' decisions about where to locate their startup businesses. 

In The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program (NBER Working Paper 31634), Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon investigate the impact of Canada's Start-up Visa Program on US-based…