AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 1, March 2023
The Reporter
A free quarterly publication featuring program updates, several summaries of affiliates' research, and news about the NBER

Author(s):
The mission of the NBER’s Political Economy Program is to provide a forum for the discussion and distribution of theoretical and empirical research that identifies and addresses political constraints on economic problems. The program flourished under the vision and leadership of founding director Alberto Alesina from its launch in 2006 until his untimely death in 2020. As codirectors, we are grateful to him for shaping it into the active research hub it is today. The program...

Article
Author(s):
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was a result of the joint efforts of three types of organization. University of Pennsylvania researchers, notably Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, performed some of the foundational research. Startups, including BioNTech, Moderna, and Arbutus, among others, developed key elements of the technology required to safely deliver the vaccine. Established pharmaceutical firms, notably Pfizer, were responsible for testing, production, and distribution....

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Author(s):
CEOs have become a topic of increasing scrutiny in economic research. Early studies on this topic inferred the presence of differentiation in CEOs’ abilities and managerial styles indirectly, examining changes in firm performance after exogenous events such as deaths or movements of managers across different firms affected their ability to manage.1 This summary describes recent empirical work that I have conducted to generate direct evidence on what top...
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Author(s):
Young adults who enter the labor market during recessions can experience negative impacts to their economic, family, and health outcomes that endure into middle age and beyond. Those who join the workforce in a downturn have lower long-term earnings, higher rates of disability, fewer marriages, less successful spouses, and fewer children. In middle age they also have higher mortality due to lung, liver, and heart disease. The long-lasting effects of labor market shocks to...
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Author(s):
Economists have long recognized that when consuming a good produces externalities, welfare can be raised by imposing corrective taxes. More recently, there has been a growing belief that some goods should be taxed because of internalities — harms that people might impose on themselves due to limited attention, misunderstanding of financial instruments, systematically biased beliefs about themselves such as overconfidence, or lapses of self-control. One of the...
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Alberto Abadie, Sherry Glied, and Jón Steinsson were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
John M. Abowd received the inaugural Edward Lazear Prize from the Society of Labor Economists for excellence in research, service to the field, and contributions to civil society, as well as a 2022 Champions of Freedom Award from the Electronic Privacy Information Center for his role in modernizing the US Census Bureau's confidentiality protection systems....
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A listing of the NBER conferences and meetings that were held during the first three months of 2023.
Big Data and Securities Markets
Organizers: Itay Goldstein, Chester S. Spatt, and Mao Ye
January 13...
Big Data and Securities Markets
Organizers: Itay Goldstein, Chester S. Spatt, and Mao Ye
January 13...