AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 11, November 2013
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Workers bear substantial costs as a result of the "shock" of rising import competition.
In the past two decades, China's manufacturing exports have grown dramatically, and U.S. imports from China have surged. While there are many reports of plant closures and employment declines in sectors where import competition from China and elsewhere has been strongest, there is little evidence on the long-run effect on workers. In Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence (NBER...
Article
Poor physical functioning is being increasingly compressed into the period just before death.
Life expectancy in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades. Some scholars have worried that the extra years of life could be "low quality" if longer life span is accompanied by longer periods of disability. Fortunately, that does not seem to be the case. In Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity in the Elderly U.S. Population (NBER Working Paper No....
Article
When a company from the Russell 1000 just makes it into the Russell 2000, its share price rises compared to that of a company that narrowly missed making it in. The reverse move triggers a stock price decline.
The impact on companies' share prices of being included in a stock index, such as the Standard and Poor's (S&P) 500, has long been analyzed and debated. In Regression Discontinuity and the Price Effects of Stock Market Indexing (NBER Working Paper No. 19290...
Article
Migration by Mexican-born immigrants dramatically reduces the geographic variability of labor market outcomes among the entire low-skilled population.
In the last half-decade, when local labor demand has dried up, less-skilled Mexican-born immigrants have readily moved to find opportunity. They have been more mobile than low-skill native-born workers, according to Brian Cadena and Brian Kovak. In Immigrants Equilibrate Local Labor Markets: Evidence from the Great...
Article
Farmers respond more strongly to weather forecasts in regions where [they] tend to be more accurate.
Agricultural output in developing nations is strongly dependent on the weather, and as a result agricultural profits are heavily affected by the accuracy of weather forecasts. Farmers without access to good insurance markets act conservatively, investing less on their farms and choosing crop mixes and cultivation techniques that reduce the volatility of farm profits...
Article
When parents are awarded DI, the likelihood that one of their adult children will participate in DI rises by 12 percentage points over the next decade.
The extent to which welfare dependency is perpetuated from one generation to the next is a question of great social importance for which there is only limited empirical evidence. In Family Welfare Cultures (NBER Working Paper No. 19237), Gordon Dahl, Andreas Kostol, and Magne Mogstad analyze this question using data...