AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 11, November 2005
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
More rapid productivity growth leads to higher rather than lower employment in manufacturing.
Productivity growth in the United States has rebounded sharply over the past decade, after the disappointingly sluggish growth in the prior two decades. But stronger productivity growth has coincided with sharply declining manufacturing employment, leading some analysts to suggest that the rise in U.S. productivity growth may have destroyed jobs, as companies need fewer...
Article
By 2000, a wage increase had only about half as much effect on women's decision about how many hours to work during the year than in 1980. Further, married women's work hours became less responsive to their husbands' wages as well.
Married women apparently are becoming accustomed to working outside the home. Maybe they like having their own careers. Or maybe they worry that, with a high divorce rate, they might split from their husband and need a separate income and...
Article
The data indicate that the bad beta of value stocks and the good beta of growth stocks are both primarily determined by the cash-flow news of those stocks.
Economists have long evaluated the risk of a given stock by its beta, or the sensitivity of the stock's return to the return on the market as a whole. More recently, a two-beta model has been developed in which the required return on a stock is determined not by its overall beta but rather by its "bad beta," with...
Article
There appears to be no evidence suggesting a causal role of alcohol use in determining the probability of having sex.
The consequences of risky sexual behavior fall heavily on teenagers and young adults. In 2002, the incidence rate for chlamydia was 297 per 100,000 population for persons of all ages, 1483 for teenagers, and 1610 for young adults. Similar age disparities are found for gonorrhea, with incidence rates per 100,000 population of 125, 476, and 593,...