AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 9, September 2005
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
"The evidence points toward a man-made scarcity of housing in the sense that the housing supply has been constrained by government regulation as opposed to fundamental geographic limitations, especially in the last two or three decades."
House prices in many communities, especially in urban areas on the East and West coasts, have soared in recent decades. Across the nation, real housing prices have risen relatively modestly since 1950, by less than 2 percent a year....
Article
Schools that are under financial pressure are more likely to make junk food available to their students.
Researchers and public health officials are currently at a loss to explain the rapid rise in weight problems among children and adolescents that began in the 1980s. Concerns about the long-term health consequences of overweight have ignited a debate about school policies that make junk food available to students in school. While the revenues generated by in-school...
Article
Shocks to U.S. short-term interest rates exert a substantial influence on euro area bond yields and equity markets, and in fact explain as much as 10 percent of overall euro area bond market movements.
One of the hallmarks of economic globalization is the growing integration of financial markets, both within and across countries. Yet, while it has become a truism that what happens in markets abroad matters for markets at home, and vice versa, the extent and complexity...
Article
The average, major teaching hospital experiences an increase in risk-adjusted mortality of roughly 4 percent in the July-August period.
Nearly all managers must deal with the consequences of employee turnover within their organizations. Turnover appears in multiple forms. Many firms face a continuous stream of individual turnover in which employees leave and are replaced by new workers at various points throughout the year. In such settings, there is no one particular...
Article
The results provide evidence that strengthening IPR protection results in real increases in technology transfer within multinational corporations.
The promotion of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection that has occurred over the past two decades has had its critics. Some economists maintain that this trend is economically harmful to developing countries, which must transfer rents to multinational patent holders in the more advanced countries,...