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The Digest

The Outsize Role of Immigrants in US Innovation
Article
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...

Chinese Firms Access Foreign Capital in International Tax Havens
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,...

The Reporter

Program Report: Political Economy
Article
By Francesco Trebbi and Ebonya Washington* 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...

The Changing Structure of American Innovation
Article
Author(s): Ashish Arora & Sharon Belenzon
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....

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Work and Benefit Applications through the Second Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Article
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers ages 50 to 70 were about 10 percent less likely to be working relative to pre-pandemic levels. Unlike in previous recessions, when older workers turned to Social Security disability insurance or retirement benefits, the drop in employment in the pandemic’s first year was accompanied by a decline in applications for disability insurance and no significant change in retirement applications. As the pandemic...

Comparing Behavioral Approaches to Increasing Savings
Article
Many older American households approaching retirement age have accumulated little in the way of retirement savings. Over the past two decades, behavioral researchers have explored a variety of potential “nudges” designed to increase retirement savings. Many of these interventions have been shown to have substantial impacts on retirement savings behavior. However, validating, comparing, and selecting from different approaches can be difficult. Existing studies differ in...

The Bulletin on Health

Costs and Consequences of COVID’s Impact on Nonurgent Care
Article
A new study of COVID-19-related disruptions in health care sheds light on the value of nonurgent medical care. In Mortality Effects of Healthcare Supply Shocks: Evidence Using Linked Deaths and Electronic Health Records (NBER Working Paper 30553), Engy Ziedan, Kosali I. Simon, and Coady Wing compare people who had outpatient appointments scheduled in the 30 days immediately before the March 13, 2020, pandemic declaration with those who had appointments scheduled in the...

Racial Concordance and the Take-Up of Preventive Care
Article
Providing preventive care for chronic health conditions has the potential to deliver a rare “win-win” situation in which total costs fall and health care outcomes improve. One of the barriers to such care is mistrust between provider and patient. Such mistrust is one of the factors that can limit the effectiveness of care delivered to Black patients by White doctors rather than their Black counterparts. In Racial Concordance and the Quality of Medical Care: Evidence...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

Startup Chemistry and the Coworking Environment
Article
Startups located in coworking hubs can benefit from knowledge spillovers from their startup neighbors.  In (Co-)Working in Close Proximity: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions (NBER Working Paper 30120), Maria P. Roche, Alexander Oettl,  and Christian Catalini find that knowledge spillovers are greatest among startup workers who socialize but are in moderately dissimilar enterprises. The researchers studied one of the five largest technological...

Track Record of Startups’ Investors Draws Potential Workers
Article
Job seekers are more interested in working for startups funded by successful venture capitalists than for those whose investors lack positive track records, holding startup quality constant, Shai Bernstein, Kunal Mehta, Richard R. Townsend, and Ting Xu find in Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors’ Reputation? (NBER Working Paper 29847). If a highly successful investor had a stake in a startup that was posting a job on the AngelList Talent job search platform, job...