AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 5, May 2015
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Two studies use variation in Medicaid eligibility across birth cohorts and states to estimate the program's long-run effects on participants.
Medicaid today covers more Americans than any other public health insurance program. Introduced in 1965, its coverage was expanded substantially, particularly to low-income children, during the 1980s and the early 1990s.
Throughout Medicaid's history, there has been debate over whether the program improves...
Article
An additional $10 million in NIH funding generates 3.1 additional private-sector patents in the research area that receives the funding.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of biomedical research in the United States. A perennial question about the NIH, and other government bodies that fund research, is what are the societal and medical benefits of all this government-funded research? Pierre Azoulay, Joshua S. Graff Zivin,...
Article
Employment growth at low-paying firms is less sensitive to the business cycle than employment growth at higher-paying firms.
Lisa B. Kahn and Erika McEntarfer analyze the effects of the business cycle on employment at high- and low-paying firms. They find that low-paying firms are less cyclically sensitive, and as a result fare better in terms of employee retention and employment growth during economic downturns.
In NBER Working Paper No. 20698,...
Article
The likelihood of having opposite-race neighbors declined precipitously in every region of the United States.
In The National Rise in Residential Segregation (NBER Working Paper No. 20934), Trevon Logan and John Parman introduce a first-of-its-kind measure of residential segregation based upon the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. Using the complete manuscript pages of the federal census to identify the races of next-door neighbors for the period...
Article
The estimated relation between volatility and imbalances is statistically significant and economically important.
The more volatile a nation's economy relative to its partners, the more resources its residents choose to hold in foreign assets, according to research reported in Macroeconomic Volatility and External Imbalances (NBER Working Paper No. 20872). A 50 basis point (one-half of one percentage point) rise in the volatility of GDP over 10 years is positively...
Article
Even when the risk of a momentum 'crash' is high, managers still have incentives to commit other people's money to the momentum strategy.
Trading strategies that mechanically construct portfolios using the momentum strategy - which consists of buying recent winners and selling recent losers - have recently attracted growing attention.
In Momentum Trading, Return Chasing, and Predictable Crashes, (NBER Working Paper No. 20660), authors Benjamin Chabot...