AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 3, October 2022
The Reporter
A free quarterly publication featuring program updates, several summaries of affiliates' research, and news about the NBER
Author(s):
It is a tremendous honor for me to give the Martin Feldstein Lecture. Marty was an exceptional colleague at Harvard and inspired my journey from academia to the policy world. His influence in research went well beyond public finance. In fact, one of his most cited papers is a contribution to international economics, widely referred to as the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Marty showed empirically that most savings tended to be invested at home, which can be puzzling if...
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Age discrimination is an important problem and challenge in the United States and elsewhere, given that policymakers are trying to lengthen work lives of older people in response to population aging. We have been studying many dimensions of age discrimination, measuring its importance in the US economy, understanding the impact of policies intended to combat it, and exploring alternative ways that protections against age discrimination can be strengthened.
Age...
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into focus the potential value of innovation in a crisis: big, new, urgent problems may demand novel solutions. Early on in the pandemic, there were calls from both scientists and policymakers for a focused R&D effort to combat the disease, many invoking past R&D efforts like the Manhattan Project as strategic metaphors for a wartime approach to the pandemic response.1
Over the past several years, we have been immersed in studying...
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Intangible capital has become a large and increasingly important part of firms’ capital stocks and assets, especially over the last three decades. Intangibles include data, patents, copyrights, software, audio and video material, brands, and organization capital. Shares of these assets have risen while the share of physical capital, such as plants and equipment, has fallen, despite an increase in profitability and the return to business capital. This shift has occurred in...
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A body of work documents profit-shifting behavior by multinational corporations. According to recent estimates, close to 40 percent of multinational profits — profits booked by firms outside of their headquarters’ country — are shifted to tax havens.1 US multinational companies appear to book a particularly large fraction of their foreign income in low-tax places.2
This phenomenon has attracted attention from economists and policymakers. In 2015, the Organisation for...
News
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Peter Hancock, Constance Hunter, Karin Kimbrough, Anne McCants, Andrew Racine, and Ann Huff Stevens were elected to the NBER Board of Directors at the board’s September 2022 meeting.
Hancock is the former president and chief executive officer of American International Group, Inc. (AIG). His long career in the financial services industry focused on the measurement and management of risk in various market settings. Prior to joining AIG, he served as the chief financial...
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The NBER Board of Directors appointed 38 research associates, 36 of whom were promoted from faculty research fellows, at its September 2022 meeting. Research associates must be tenured faculty members at North American colleges or universities; their appointments are recommended to the board by directors of the NBER’s 20 research programs, typically after consultation with a steering committee of leading scholars. The new research associates are affiliated with 24...
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Two NBER research associates have been tapped for leadership positions in the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice.
Susan Athey, an affiliate of the Industrial Organization Program, is serving as chief economist, and Ioana Marinescu, a Labor Studies Program affiliate, is principal economist.
Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at the Graduate School of Business, and a professor of economics, at Stanford University. Marinescu is an associate...
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Elizabeth Bailey, who joined the NBER board of directors in 1993, served as vice-chair of the board in 2002–05 and as chair in 2005–08, and became an emeritus member in 2020, passed away August 19 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 83.
An expert on regulatory economics and industrial organization, Bailey was a pioneer on many dimensions. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she worked as a technical programmer at Bell Laboratories for more than a...
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Brent Nieman, a research associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics (IFM) and International Trade and Investment programs, has been nominated for the position of Deputy Under Secretary for International Finance and Development, and Jay Shambaugh, also an affiliate of the IFM program, has been nominated to be Under Secretary for International Affairs, at the US Department of the Treasury.
Nieman is the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and William...
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Kevin Stange and Lesley Turner, both affiliates of the Economics of Education Program, have joined the newly created Office of the Chief Economist at the US Department of Education. This office is tasked with “conducting rigorous research to further key elements of the Department’s learning agenda.”
Stange, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan‘s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Turner, an associate professor of economics at...
Conferences and Meetings
Conferences
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ArticleInternational Seminar on Macroeconomics The International Seminar on Macroeconomics took place June 20–21 in Athens, Greece. Research Associate Kristin Forbes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Associate (on leave) Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas of the University of California, Berkeley and the International Monetary Fund, and Ricardo Reis of the London School of Economics organized the meeting. These researchers’ papers were presented and discussed...
Meeting
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ArticleEconomic Fluctuations and Growth Members of the NBER’s Economic Fluctuations and Growth Program met July 16 in Cambridge and online. Program Directors Mark Gertler of New York University and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford University organized the meeting. These researchers’ papers were presented and discussed: Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Market Concentration and the Productivity Slowdown” Christian K. Wolf, Massachusetts...
Book
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Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell, editors
Economic research is increasingly focused on inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes. One aspect of inequality is mobility: are individuals locked into their respective places in this distribution? To what extent do circumstances change, either over the lifecycle or across generations? Research not only measures inequality and mobility, but also analyzes...
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