National Bureau of Economic Research
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From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Effects of Insurance Coverage on Infertility Treatments, Childbearing, and Wellbeing
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Between 1995 and 2010, the share of births in Sweden that involved assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rose from 2 to 10 percent. These treatments range from low-cost drugs to costly and invasive interventions, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (NBER Working Paper 32445), Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova provide new evidence on the consequences of infertility and the role of insurance coverage in household decisions to initiate treatment. Using administrative, population-wide data for the period 2006–2019, the researchers estimate the use of infertility treatment. They find that over the course of their fertile years...
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest
Returns to School Spending on Black Students
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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...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Disability Insurance Benefits and Household Composition
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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...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Organizational Approaches to Increased Worker Wellbeing and Productivity
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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…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Immigration Policy and Entrepreneurs’ Choice of Startup Location
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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…
Featured Working Papers
The Inflation Reduction Act narrowed the range of possible future carbon emissions from the US electricity generation sector, largely by eliminating conditions in which it would have been optimal to invest in natural gas resources, James B. Bushnell and Aaron Smith find.
As average team size in a field of science increases, junior academic scientists become less likely to secure research funding or obtain tenure and are more likely to leave academia, relative to their older counterparts, according to a study by Mabel Andalón, Catherine de Fontenay, Donna K. Ginther, and Kwanghui Lim.
Analysis of 40 million repeat-sales transactions in the US housing market finds that Black and Hispanic homebuyers face ubiquitous price premiums. These premiums are systematically higher in neighborhoods with a larger share of non-White residents, according to Sebastien Box-Couillard and Peter Christensen.
When many countries accumulate reserves, the induced general equilibrium effects weaken financial and macroeconomic stability, especially for those countries which are not accumulating reserves, while issuance of public debt by advanced economies has the opposite effect, Enrique G. Mendoza and Vincenzo Quadrini show.
Investigating mid-twentieth century cutbacks in the British rail network, Steve Gibbons, Stephan Heblich, and Edward W. Pinchbeck estimate that a 10 percent loss in rail access to an area between 1950 and 1980 resulted in a 3 percent decline in population and a drop in the share of young people, as well as a smaller number of local jobs.
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