National Bureau of Economic Research

New evidence from a study of a school spending equalization program adopted by Mississippi in 1920 reveals the extent to which segregation disproportionately benefited White students. In School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi circa 1940 (NBER Working Paper 32496), David Card, Leah Clark, Ciprian Domnisoru, and Lowell Taylor analyze racial disparities in per-student spending during the interwar years.

Prior to the launch of the equalization program, schools were funded by local property taxes and per capita state grants based on the number of people aged 5 to 21 in a district. With Black students disenfranchised and attending...

More than 2,700 researchers, hailing from 40 countries, traveled to Cambridge for the 47th annual NBER Summer Institute, which was held over the three week period July 8–26. Nearly 490 additional researchers registered to participate virtually. The Summer Institute consisted of 49 distinct meetings and workshops arranged by 143 organizers. Most of the meetings also were streamed on the NBER’s YouTube channel.

The in-person participants represented 455 universities, central banks, think tanks, businesses, and government agencies. Only about one third were NBER affiliates, and nearly 500 were first-time Summer Institute...

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…