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The Digest

Shifting Employment and Earnings, and US Earnings Inequality
Article
Most of the growth in earnings inequality in the United States over the last several decades can be explained by employment growth and changes in earnings differentials in about 10 percent of all industries, at both the top and bottom of the earnings distribution, rather than by rising inequality of earnings within firms or between firms within industries. Many of these industries, which include software publishing, a high-earnings industry, and restaurants, a low-...

Estimating the Long-Term Fiscal Capacity of the US
Article
Responsible long-term fiscal planning requires an understanding of national fiscal capacity and the extent to which it is affected by economic circumstances, including the term structure of real interest rates and the projected future path of budget deficits or surpluses. In Measuring US Fiscal Capacity Using Discounted Cash Flow Analysis (NBER Working Paper 29902), Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Z. Xiaolan estimate...

The Reporter

Program Report: Law and Economics
Article
Author(s): Christine Jolls
The Law and Economics Program emphasizes economic analysis of processes within courts, legislatures, and government agencies, as well as of the effects and causes of substantive legal rules in the foundational legal subjects of property law, criminal law, contract law, and tort law. Program members meet twice annually, once at a midyear program meeting and again at the NBER Summer Institute. This article first describes recent research on legal processes and in the...

New Frontiers in Occupational Licensing Research
Article
Author(s): Peter Q. Blair
When an occupation is licensed by the state, a worker must have a license to legally work for pay. For some occupations, obtaining a license can be as simple as filling out a form and paying a few hundred dollars. In other cases, obtaining a license could require passing an exam, completing years of training, or having a clean criminal record. In the United States and Europe, close to a quarter of the workforce is subject to occupational licensing requirements; by contrast...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Opioid Use by SSDI Beneficiaries and the Effect of Opioid Prescribing on SSDI Claiming
Article
Chronic pain is a leading cause of work disability and a primary reason for receipt of SSDI benefits. Prescription opioids are frequently prescribed for chronic pain, but their use has been scrutinized in recent years due to concerns about addiction and overdose. Understanding how common prescription opioid use is among SSDI beneficiaries and how opioid use affects employment and SSDI applications is critical to the SSDI program. Researchers Nicole Maestas, Tisamarie...

Improving Understanding of the Retirement Earnings Test
Article
The decisions that prospective retirees make about when to stop working and when to claim Social Security benefits can have profound impacts on their financial well-being in retirement. Yet many older workers have an incomplete understanding of relevant Social Security policies, including the Retirement Earnings Test (RET). Under the RET, retirees who claim before the Full Retirement Age (FRA) and have earnings above a specified (relatively low) threshold receive...

The Bulletin on Health

The Persistent Mortality Advantage of a College Degree
Article
In 2019, Americans with a four-year college degree had six years greater life expectancy at age 25 than those without a degree. These educational differences in mortality have been growing in recent decades and are apparent across demographic groups. In Mortality Rates by College Degree before and during COVID-19 (NBER Working Paper 29328), Anne Case and Angus Deaton explore the evolution of these differences during the pandemic. If every American faced an equal...

Excess Mortality during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Article
An estimated 646,514 excess deaths occurred in the United States during the first 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a 22 percent increase over the number of deaths that would have been expected if the pandemic had not occurred. Among these excess fatalities, an estimated 83 percent were directly attributable to COVID-19, while others were from causes ranging from strokes to homicides. These new estimates of the mortality consequences of the pandemic are...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

The Rise of Private Financing for Entrepreneurs
Article
In Private or Public Equity? The Evolving Entrepreneurial Finance Landscape (NBER Working Paper 29532), Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa survey the changes in the US entrepreneurial finance market over the last two decades. Their study begins by describing the differences between publicly listed and private firms, and then explores how several regulatory, technological, and competitive changes affecting both startups and investors have affected the costs and...

Inventors and Innovation Respond to Tax Incentives
Article
Income taxes raise government revenue, finance government spending programs, and redistribute income from high to low earners. These taxes can also induce taxpayers to work less, evade taxes, or move to lower-tax locations. The economic theory of optimal tax design tries to set tax rates to balance these trade-offs. In The Effects of Taxes on Innovation: Theory and Empirical Evidence (NBER Working Paper 29359), Stefanie Stantcheva investigates whether income...