AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 8, August 2014
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
...80 percent of all cross-listed foreign firms opt out of at least one exchange governance rule.
Although many investors may assume that foreign companies that cross-list on U.S. stock exchanges adhere to those exchanges' corporate governance rules, in Opting Out of Good Governance, (NBER Working Paper No. 19953), C. Fritz Foley, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jonathan Greenstein, and Eric Zwick show that 80 percent of all cross-listed foreign firms opt out of at least one...
Article
...papers written by ethnically similar co-authors are cited less frequently and are likely to be published in lower-impact journals...
Scientific researchers based in the United States are more likely to co-author papers with people of similar ethnicity, according to Richard Freeman and Wei Huang in Collaborating With People Like Me: Ethnic Co-Authorship Within the U.S. (NBER Working Paper No. 19905). In addition to discovering ethnic patterns of collaboration, the...
Article
Patenting in the United States rose 31 percent after 1933 in the fields the émigré chemists were working in...
Whether and how high-skill immigrants affect productivity and innovation in their adopted country is a subject of long-running debate. In German-Jewish Émigrés and U.S. Invention (NBER Working Paper No. 19962), Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger find that the German Jewish chemists who fled Nazi Germany and Austria dramatically boosted...
Article
Both norm-based and public-good messages increased the likelihood of individuals paying their taxes due...
Governments lose billions of dollars in tax revenue each year simply because prospective taxpayers are late in making their payments. Finding ways to accelerate tax payments is the focus of The Behavioralist as Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance (NBER Working Paper No. 20007), by Michael Hallsworth, John List, Robert Metcalfe...
Article
...there are large differences across industries in top earners' cyclical variability.
Are the earnings of top earners sensitive to business cycles? How does this sensitivity vary by industry? In How Risky Are Recessions for Top Earners? (NBER Working Paper No. 19864), authors Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song address these questions using a confidential dataset from the Social Security Administration. The dataset includes information on the earnings and...
Article
...information contained in job-related tweets provides new economic indicators.
Social media provide an enormous amount of high-frequency, real-time information which can potentially be used to complement or even substitute for traditional sources of economic data. In Using Social Media to Measure Labor Market Flows (NBER Working Paper No. 20010), Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret Levenstein, Christopher Ré, and Matthew Shapiro create indexes of job loss,...