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The Digest

Disaster Risk and Rising Home Insurance Premiums
Article
 Average property insurance premiums have risen by more than 30 percent since 2020, and there is wide variation by location. Premiums have risen the most for homeowners in areas with the highest risk of natural disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires.While premiums have always been higher in riskier locations, the relationship between disaster risk and premiums has grown stronger over time. If present trends in the incidence of natural disasters continue, premiums are...

Financial Incentives Can Increase Permanence for Foster Children
Article
 Protracted periods in foster care can lead to negative long-term outcomes for children. Many states have tried to shorten foster care stays by moving children into either permanent adoptive homes or kinship care. While foster parents receive financial support for the children in their care, adoptive parents or kin guardians often receive less — or no — support. In Financial Incentives for Adoption and Kin Guardianship Improve Achievement for Foster Children (NBER...

The Reporter

Lessons for Economists from the Pandemic
Article
Author(s): Cecilia E. Rouse
It is an honor to be here today; I owe my love of economics to the Bureau as well as my many friends and colleagues. Marty [Martin] Feldstein was one of the people who made it such a special place. I enjoyed seeing him around the Bureau, learning public finance from him, and briefly serving as his research assistant. I’d sit in his office, in awe of his incredible intellect and economic insights, and be completely distracted by the hilarious cartoons he had framed...

Understanding Early Childhood Development and Its Importance
Article
Author(s): Orazio Attanasio
In the process of human development, what happens in the early years — including the first thousand days after conception — is of key importance for determining life-cycle outcomes. Early outcomes, however, are not fixed at birth or determined exclusively by genetics; they are influenced by a variety of factors, including parental behaviors, the environments children live in, and policy interventions. Furthermore, human development is a multidimensional process, with...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Disability Insurance Benefits and Household Composition
Article
 Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) “family maximum” rules cap the benefits that can be paid to a disabled worker’s family at the lower of 85 percent of the worker’s average indexed monthly earnings and 150 percent of their primary insurance amount. The effect of these rules is that family payments are the same whether a DI beneficiary has one or many dependents, and when DI beneficiaries have low benefit determinations, there are no payments for dependents at...

Medicare vs Medicaid: Cost and Health Outcomes
Article
It costs the government more to cover the same beneficiary under Medicare than Medicaid, according to a study of disabled individuals who aged from one program into the other.In Medicaid vs Medicare: Evidence from Medicaid to Medicare Transitions at 65 (NBER RDRC Paper NB20-15), Timothy Layton, Nicole Maestas, Daniel Prinz, Mark Shepard, and Boris Vabson find that most of the difference stems from higher payment rates to providers rather than from...

The Bulletin on Health

Decision-Making by Medical Surrogates for End-of-Life Patients
Article
 As the population ages, the need for surrogate decision-makers for patients near the end of their lives is rising. When hospitalized older adults are unable to actively participate in decisions about their care, surrogates must make choices, often with limited information. Advance care planning with written directives may improve surrogate decision-making, but directives have limitations: preferences may change after completion, directions may not apply to the ultimate...

Effects of Insurance Coverage on Infertility Treatments, Childbearing, and Wellbeing
Article
 Between 1995 and 2010, the share of births in Sweden that involved assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rose from 2 to 10 percent. These treatments range from low-cost drugs to costly and invasive interventions, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (NBER Working Paper 32445), Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova provide new evidence on the...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

“Third Places” Boost Local Economic Activity
Article
 Sociologists have argued that “third places” like cafés, which provide opportunities for individuals to socialize and exchange ideas outside of home and work, improve neighborhood life. But what about the relationship between such places and economic activity? In Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés (NBER Working Paper 32604), researchers Jinkyong Choi, Jorge Guzman, and Mario L. Small use data on US business...

Stock Market Wealth and Entrepreneurship
Article
 In Stock Market Wealth and Entrepreneurship (NBER Working Paper 32643), Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Plamen T. Nenov, Vitor Santos, and Alp Simsek evaluate the relationship between the performance of a household’s stock market portfolio and the likelihood that someone in that household launches an entrepreneurial venture. They analyze administrative data from Norway’s shareholder register and compute the holdings of every Norwegian household in all...