National Bureau of Economic Research

Nicholas Z. Muller, Eli Fenichel, and Mary Bohman, editors.

While the importance of natural resources and the contributions of the environment to welfare are apparent, traditional national income and wealth accounting practices do not measure or value environmental public goods. 

This volume examines the conceptual and empirical basis for integrating natural capital — forests, oceans, and air — into the economic and environmental statistics that inform public policy. It offers innovative…

Property taxes represent the largest discretionary revenue source for local governments in the United States. Because these taxes are collected by applying a tax rate to an assessed value of a property, the effective tax rate on a property — computed as a percentage of its value — depends on the tax rate and on the relationship between the property’s assessed and market values. Although every state requires local governments to capture market fluctuations in their property assessments, they may not do so in a timely or effective fashion.

In Assessing Assessors (NBER Working Paper 33238), researchers Huaizhi Chen and Lauren Cohen analyze a comprehensive dataset of US property tax assessments and housing transactions between...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) may usher in the most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. For nearly a decade, as I witnessed the continuous progress in deep learning, I have been studying the economics of transformative AI — how our economy may be transformed as AI systems advance toward mastering all forms of cognitive work that can be performed by humans, including new tasks that don’t even exist yet. The prospect of understanding the strange new world we will inhabit when transformative AI is developed has felt both intellectually urgent and personally meaningful to me as a father of two young children.

Today, AI systems are approaching and exceeding human-level performance in many domains, and it looks increasingly like our world will be transformed before…

In How Do Economic Conditions Affect Earnings and Return to Disability Programs for Beneficiaries Whose Benefits Were Terminated? (NBER RDRC Paper NB22-03), Jeffrey Hemmeter, Kathleen Mullen, and Stephanie Rennane find that individuals whose benefits end due to medical improvement during an economic downturn earn less in the short run and are more likely to reapply for benefits within five years than those...

Tiny, inhalable particles known as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) are a primary component of wildfire smoke and are detrimental to human health. Since smoke can drift hundreds of miles from its source, exposure to these pollutants is widespread: wildfire smoke accounts for about 18 percent of the ambient PM2.5 concentrations affecting the US population. 

In The Nonlinear Effects of Air Pollution on Health: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke (NBER Working Paper 32924), Nolan H. Miller, David Molitor, and Eric Zou leverage variation in the location of wildfire smoke plumes across counties and over time to show that…

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...