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The Digest

Work from Home Likely to Remain Elevated Post Pandemic
Article
Fewer than 30 percent of workers surveyed say they will return fully to pre-COVID activities, while most remain wary of mass transit, crowded elevators, and indoor dining. After the COVID-19 pandemic ends, 20 percent of all labor in the United States may be satisfied by remote workers, up from 5 percent before the virus struck, according to Why Working from Home Will Stick (NBER Working Paper 28731) by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. The...

Workplace Worries Take a Toll on Chief Executive Officers
Article
CEOs of firms that are more subject to risk of hostile takeover and experience industry distress appear to age faster, and to die younger, than those in less stressful circumstances. How does work-related stress affect health outcomes? To explore this much-discussed issue, Mark Borgschulte, Marius Guenzel, Canyao Liu, and Ulrike Malmendier analyze the experiences of 1,605 CEOs who entered the C-suite between 1975 and 1991. The CEOs in the study — CEO Stress, Aging...

The Reporter

Economic Lessons from Natural Disasters
Article
Author(s): Tatyana Deryugina
Direct economic damage from extreme weather events has been growing faster than GDP for decades, and projections indicate that this trend will continue. The impacts of natural disasters clearly extend beyond the physical damage they cause. They can have both short- and long-term effects on income, health, family formation, and many other aspects of victims’ lives. In the aggregate, natural disasters could affect fiscal outcomes and the functioning of important services such...

The Economic Effects of Social Networks
Article
Author(s): Johannes Stroebel & Theresa Kuchler
Researchers have long understood that social interactions can shape many aspects of social and economic activity, including migration, trade, job-seeking, investment behavior, product adoption decisions, and social mobility.1 Traditionally, however, it has been challenging to analyze and quantify the economic effects of social interactions, in large part because of the absence of large-scale and representative data on social networks. Over the past years, we have worked...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Does the Timing of Disability Benefit Payments Affect Labor Supply?
Article
Individuals with a disabling health condition often experience lower income and higher medical expenses in the wake of disability onset, leading to reduced consumption and well-being. If these individuals are cash-constrained, the value of benefits may be particularly high at the beginning of benefit receipt. In this case, receiving a lump sum could improve beneficiary outcomes more than receiving smaller monthly payments. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)...

Late-Life Income and Assets as Measured in Tax and Survey Data
Article
To understand whether older Americans have adequate financial resources to fund their retirement years, it is necessary to have accurate information about late-life income and assets. Several recent studies have suggested that administrative data and more widely-used survey data do not always provide the same picture of retirement resources. In The Evolution of Late-Life Income and Assets: Measurement in IRS Tax Data and Three Household Surveys (NBER RDRC Working...

The Bulletin on Health

How Hospital Choice Contributes to Racial Disparities in Heart Attack Treatment
Article
Black Americans experience 20 percent higher mortality rates, after adjusting for age, than White Americans. One potential contributor to this disparity is the tendency for Black and White patients to receive treatment from health care providers with differing levels of performance. Among heart attack patients in the late 1990s, for example, Black patients were treated in hospitals where the typical patient had a 1 percentage point lower survival rate after 30 days...

Treatment That Follows Guidelines Improves Outcomes in Adolescent Mental Illness
Article
Do treatment guidelines encourage use of effective treatment or impede provision of personalized health care? In Rules vs. Discretion: Treatment of Mental Illness in US Adolescents (NBER Working Paper 27890), researchers Emily Cuddy and Janet Currie address this important issue in the context of mental illness among adolescents. They use claims data from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Alliance for Health Research to evaluate the effect of the initial treatment choice on...