AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 3, March 2023
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest

Immigrant inventors are key contributors to innovation in the United States, both through their direct productivity and through the spillover effects of their work with native-born collaborators. While accounting for just 16 percent of all US-based inventors, immigrant inventors produce nearly a quarter of total innovation output as gauged by the number of patents and patent citations and the economic value of the patents.
Those are among the findings Shai...

Article
Tax havens are increasingly the avenue for emerging market countries, particularly China, to raise money from foreign investors. Many Chinese companies use financing subsidiaries and shell companies located in the tax havens, which makes them hard to trace. The firms involved range from Chinese tech giants to state-owned enterprises.
In China in Tax Havens (NBER Working Paper 30865), Christopher Clayton, Antonio Coppola, Amanda Dos Santos,...

Article
The lifetime incidence of intimate partner violence is 24 percent in the United Kingdom and slightly higher, 26 percent, in the United States. Two studies of policing in England conclude that taking legal action against the perpetrator reduces the likelihood of repeated abuse, refuting concerns that arrests and prosecutions boomerang by triggering retaliation and discouraging future calls for help.
In Deterrence or Backlash? Arrests and the Dynamics of...
Article
Fewer than 30 percent of new CEOs at S&P 500 companies over the last few decades were hired externally and only 20 percent were complete outsiders. Some have concluded that this suggests a limited market for CEOs. Little research, however, has studied the market for CEOs of private equity funded companies. In The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity (NBER Working Paper 30899), Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan, and Vladimir...
Article
Some businesses maintain an online presence, and some do not. In Getting on the Map: The Impact of Online Listings on Business Performance (NBER Working Paper 30810), Michael Luca, Abhishek Nagaraj, and Gauri Subramani study a sample of restaurants in Texas to examine the revenue effects of establishing an online listing. They estimate that revenues increased by approximately 5 percent after a restaurant was listed on Yelp. Yet over 30...
Article
Between 1880 and 1940, the United States experienced two profound changes: a wave of industrialization that reallocated employment away from agriculture and toward manufacturing, and a wave of urbanization. These transformations were closely intertwined: because rural dwellers had high agricultural employment shares and urban dwellers had high manufacturing employment shares during this period, population flows from rural to urban areas accounted for much of the change...
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