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The Digest

Social Distancing Desires Keep Some Out of the Labor Force
Article
Many Americans plan to continue social distancing even after the COVID pandemic ends, according to data from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, and people with such plans are less likely to participate in the labor force. The effect is to reduce the size of the national workforce and potential GDP, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis find in Long Social Distancing (NBER Working Paper 30568). To reach their conclusions, the...

The Real Interest Rate Decline in Long Historical Perspective
Article
The real interest rate has dropped sharply in the twenty-first century. To what extent is this likely to be temporary, rather than persistent? In Long-Run Trends in Long-Maturity Real Rates 1311–2021 (NBER Working Paper 30475), Kenneth Rogoff, Barbara Rossi, and Paul Schmelzing examine a rich dataset on long-maturity sovereign debt over the past seven centuries and find that long-term global real interest rates have exhibited a persistent downward trend of about 1.6...

The Reporter

Managing a Turn in the Global Financial Cycle
Article
Author(s): Gita Gopinath
It is a tremendous honor for me to give the Martin Feldstein Lecture. Marty was an exceptional colleague at Harvard and inspired my journey from academia to the policy world. His influence in research went well beyond public finance. In fact, one of his most cited papers is a contribution to international economics, widely referred to as the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Marty showed empirically that most savings tended to be invested at home, which can be puzzling if...

Age Discrimination’s Challenge to the American Economy
Article
Author(s): Patrick Button & David Neumark
Age discrimination is an important problem and challenge in the United States and elsewhere, given that policymakers are trying to lengthen work lives of older people in response to population aging. We have been studying many dimensions of age discrimination, measuring its importance in the US economy, understanding the impact of policies intended to combat it, and exploring alternative ways that protections against age discrimination can be strengthened. Age...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

The 24th Annual Meeting of the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium
Article
The Social Security Administration (SSA) convened its 2022 Retirement and Disability Research Consortium (RDRC) Meeting virtually on August 4–5. The meeting was organized by the NBER RDRC and featured research funded through the NBER RDRC as well as through other RDRC centers based at Boston College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. Kilolo Kijakazi, Acting Commissioner of SSA, provided welcoming remarks. She pronounced, “the SSA is initiating a...

Gender Differences in Medical Examinations
Article
There is growing evidence of gender disparities in health care settings, where female patients receive less health care than male patients with similar medical conditions and are more likely to be told by providers that their symptoms are emotionally driven rather than arising from a physical impairment. Differences in doctors’ evaluations of medical issues for male and female patients may be a key factor contributing to observed differences in treatment. Medical...

The Bulletin on Health

Prenatal Insurance Coverage for Undocumented Immigrants Improves Birth Outcomes
Article
Medicaid coverage for prenatal care has expanded considerably in recent decades. But in many states, undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for this coverage. This exclusion is consequential because one in thirteen births in the United States is to an undocumented immigrant. In Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention (NBER Working Paper 30299), researchers Sarah Miller and Laura Wherry evaluate the effects of...

Nursing Home Quality Varies between and within Markets
Article
Following a hospitalization, about one-fifth of Medicare beneficiaries are discharged to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). These facilities provide short-term care for recovery from a procedure — such as a hip replacement — or a medical event — such as a stroke. The average length of stay is 45 days; at a cost to Medicare of about $470 per day, this care accounts for approximately 8 percent of Medicare’s spending. In Producing Health: Measuring Value Added of Nursing...

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...