National Bureau of Economic Research

Jonathan Gruber and Kathleen McGarry, editors.

The developed world is in the midst of a demographic transition caused by increasing life expectancy and falling fertility. It will bring new challenges associated with caring for a rapidly aging population. 

Long-Term Care around the World documents and compares long-term care programs in 10 developed countries of varying sizes and with different healthcare structures. 

Drawing on original analyses of survey data and government statistics, the researchers show that the costs of long-term care are beyond the…

Following a call for nominations in January, the NBER has appointed 63 new affiliates: 19 Research Associates and 44 Faculty Research Fellows. In addition, six Faculty Research Fellows have been promoted to Research Associates.

The directors of the NBER’s 19 research programs recommend appointments after consulting with steering committees made up of leading scholars. Research Associate appointments must be approved by the NBER Board of Directors, while Faculty Research Fellows are appointed by the NBER president. All new affiliates must hold primary academic appointments in North America; Research Associates must have tenure. 

The newly appointed researchers serve on the faculties of 39 different colleges and universities. They received their graduate training at 29 different institutions. The new appointments…

With more than 600,000 individuals in jails on any given day and more than 7 million passing through jail at some point during each year, the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. In a landmark 1976 decision, Estelle v. Gamble, the US Supreme Court ruled that deliberate indifference to the serious medical needs of incarcerated people violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Individuals who are in jail are the only group to have a constitutional right to “reasonably adequate” healthcare. There is little oversight or funding, however, of healthcare in short-term detention facilities.

In The Hidden Health Care Crisis Behind Bars: A Randomized Trial to Accredit US Jails (NBER Working Paper 33357), researchers Marcella Alsan and Crystal Yang study the effects of medical accreditation...

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is a critical tool for responding to the opioid crisis. However, prior to the 2010s, two barriers hindered its widespread distribution and use in the United States. One was legal access: Naloxone required a prescription from a healthcare provider. Another was that naloxone was administered by injection and therefore required training for proper use. 

In 2010, Illinois became the first state to adopt a dispensing naloxone access law (NAL) that permitted individuals to obtain naloxone directly from pharmacists, eliminating the need for an individual prescription. By 2015, another 35 states had implemented dispensing NALs. These policy initiatives were complemented by the introduction of Narcan, the first FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, in 2016. This new…

The NBER Corporate Finance Program has been a leading research forum in the field since it was established in 1991. Corporate finance questions intersect with many areas of finance and economics, including macrofinance, asset pricing, financial intermediation, and organizational economics. This breadth of topics is reflected in the work presented at the Corporate Finance program meetings. The importance of the field has been widely recognized in academia and is evidenced by the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig’s work on banking and intermediation. In this report, we cannot do justice to the entire field, but we must select a few topics that have been addressed in a number of recent NBER Working Papers or in presentations at...

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...