AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 12, December 1997
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
For pregnant women other than high-school dropouts or teens, a 10 percentage point increase in Medicaid eligibility was associated with a 0.62 percentage point decline in Cesarean section and a 0.28 percentage point decline in the use of a fetal monitor.
Changes in federal regulations in the late 1980s made many pregnant women eligible for Medicaid who would not have been eligible under the previous rules. By 1992, all state governments were required to cover the...
Article
The volatility of year-to-year stock returns is so great that it's very hard to measure average returns with any sort of statistical certainty. The best that statistics can do is to say we are 95 percent certain that the true average excess return is between 3 percent and 13 percent.
It's become a staple of financial advice, dispensed by stockbrokers, securities analysts, and the media: Common stocks outperform other investments over time, and they outperform them by...
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... monetary policy matters most for those with the least liquid balance sheets.
How does monetary policy actually work? In What Do A Million Banks Have To Say About The Transmission Of Monetary Policy? (NBER Working Paper No. 6056), NBER Research Associates Anil Kashyap and Jeremy Stein tap into a massive database to examine how shifts in monetary policy have affected the lending behavior of individual banks over a period of nearly 20 years. Their main finding is...
Article
Inflation not only reduces the level of business investment, but also the efficiency with which productive factors are put to use.
Since 1984, inflation control has become the unquestioned mantra of economic policymakers worldwide. Even a whisper of "the I-word" by Alan Greenspan in the financial press creates havoc in global stock markets. Based in part on the 1973 to 1984 period of macroeconomic distress experienced by OECD countries, when inflation reached an...
Article
The study also finds that taking high school finance courses tends to boost the net worth (or wealth) of those individuals as adults.
Teach a youth to save, and he or she will save more as an adult. That's the key finding of an NBER study on the impact of courses that teach high school students about household financial decisionmaking, from budgeting, credit management, the adequacy of savings, and balancing checkbooks to compound interest, prudent portfolio...
Article
In 1963, per capita spending on infants was only 53 percent of per capita spending on 35-44 year olds. By 1987, per capita spending on infants was 2.3 times as high as spending on this group. ..in 1963, per capita medical spending on those aged 85 or more equaled per capita medical spending for 35-44 year olds... by 1987, spending per person aged 85 or more was 5.2 times spending per 35-44 year old.
In the United States, as in most high-income countries, annual...