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The Digest

Product Quality Improvement and US Manufacturing Productivity
Article
Conventional measures suggest that US manufacturing productivity has stagnated over the past 15 years. In Why Is Manufacturing Productivity Growth So Low? (NBER Working Paper 34264) Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortaçsu, Nicole Kimmel, and Chad Syverson challenge this finding and suggest changes to the calculation methodology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) total factor productivity index for manufacturing increased by 1.2 percent per year between 1987 and...

Overlap in Corporate Leadership Increases Collusion
Article
Firms are more likely to agree not to recruit each other's employees if they share the same senior executives or members of their boards. In Collusion Through Common Leadership (NBER Working Paper 33866), Alejandro Herrera-Caicedo, Jessica Jeffers, and Elena Prager analyze information and records that became available in connection with “the largest known case of modern US labor market collusion.” The records came to light as the result of a court case...

The Reporter

Program Report: Industrial Organization
Article
Author(s): Liran Einav
Researchers in the Industrial Organization (IO) program study consumer and firm behavior, competition, innovation, and government regulation. This report begins with a brief summary of general developments in the last four decades in the range and focus of program members’ research, then discusses specific examples of recent work.When the program was launched in the early 1990s, two developments had profoundly shaped IO research. One was the development of game-theoretic...

The Risks and Rewards of Homeownership
Article
Author(s): Patrick Bayer, Fernando V. Ferreira & Stephen Ross
The US government has long promoted homeownership through subsidies and tax incentives, viewing it as both socially beneficial and a primary pathway to individual wealth accumulation. For the middle class—those in roughly the middle three-fifths of the wealth distribution—housing wealth remains the most important source of financial security and net worth. Homeownership is also widely believed to provide access to better neighborhoods and higher-quality schools. Yet despite...

The Bulletin on Health

Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic
Article
 Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted for three decades. The health consequences have been stark, with annual deaths exceeding 100,000 since 2021.In Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices (NBER Working Paper 34265), William N. Evans and Ethan M. J. Lieber examine characteristics of counties in 1990—prior to the surge—that predict the county...

Spousal Following and Medicare Part D Plan Choice
Article
 When Medicare beneficiaries enroll in Part D, they typically choose from a menu of approximately three dozen private insurance plans that feature different combinations of premiums, copayments, and drug coverage. The optimal plan choice varies across beneficiaries, depending on their prescription drug purchases. Yet, despite the wide array of options, 73 percent of married enrollees choose the same plan as their spouse. Even among couples with observable differences in...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

Underwriting Based on Cash Flow Helps Younger Entrepreneurs Access Credit
Article
Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that...

The Gig Economy and Entrepreneurship
Article
The rise of platform-based work has transformed labor markets. Nearly 10 million Americans have participated in the gig economy over the past decade. This transformation may have important effects on entrepreneurship by allowing individuals to gain industry experience, encouraging experimentation, and lowering downside risks faced by founders.In Entrepreneurship and the Gig Economy: Evidence from US Tax Returns (NBER Working Paper 33347), researchers Matthew R. Denes, ...