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The Digest

Rise of Pass-Throughs Understates Labor’s Share of Income
Article
Accounting for growth in pass-through businesses attenuates the decline in labor’s share of corporate value-added by nearly a third. Over the last 40 years, labor’s share of corporate value-added in the US national income accounts has declined from about 63 to about 58 percent. In The Rise of Pass-Throughs and the Decline of the Labor Share (NBER Working Paper 29400), Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick find that about a third of this decline...

How Knowledge of Salary History Affects Wage Offers and Hiring
Article
In 21 states, employers cannot ask job candidates about their salary histories, but employers can nonetheless make inferences based on whether candidates voluntarily disclose them. In response to claims that historical salary differences related to race, gender, or ethnicity may be perpetuated when job applicants are asked to disclose their salary histories, 21 US states have made it illegal for employers to ask prospective employees about their prior compensation...

The Reporter

Inflation Dynamics during COVID-19
Article
Author(s): Alberto Cavallo
For over a decade, my research has explored the use of high-frequency microdata to measure inflation and other economic statistics in real time in an effort to make academic macroeconomic research more timely and useful for policymakers. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to test this methodology, particularly around the topic of inflation. After the crisis started, the United States experienced a relatively small decline in inflation in 2020, followed...

Public Health Efforts and the US Mortality Transition
Article
Author(s): D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles & Daniel I. Rees
In the mid-1800s, mortality rates in US and Western European cities were much higher than those in rural areas. Since then, urban mortality rates have fallen dramatically. Driven by reductions in infectious diseases and diseases of infancy and childhood, this phenomenon is often referred to as the mortality transition and has been recognized as one of the most significant developments in the history of human welfare.1 By the 1940s, the mortality “penalty” from living in a...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Legal Representation in Social Security Disability Insurance Claims
Article
The process of applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits is complex. Applicants must complete a long application documenting their employment history, medical conditions, and medical treatments, obtain relevant medical records, understand the relevance of certain administrative rules and requirements, and in case of those who are denied benefits, navigate a lengthy appeals process. Legal representatives have long played a role in SSDI cases at...

Do Disability Benefits and Work Incentives Affect Disability Claiming?
Article
Increases in the share of the working age population receiving Disability Insurance (DI) benefits in the US and other industrialized countries in recent decades have sparked discussions on the long-term financial stability of DI programs. Various policy instruments have been discussed as a means of limiting the expansion of DI programs, including reducing incentives to seek benefits, providing incentives to return to work, and adopting more rigorous eligibility standards...

The Bulletin on Health

Medicaid Managed Care Outcomes Vary with Patient Health
Article
In 2016, 80 percent of Medicaid enrollees received their insurance through private managed care plans. These private plans take responsibility for providing medical care for Medicaid recipients in exchange for a fixed per-enrollee payment from the state. These arrangements could restrain Medicaid spending if private firms had a greater incentive to control costs than the government does. However, such cost savings could have implications for patient health. Outcomes...

Urgent Care Centers Raise Medicare Costs
Article
Urgent care centers (UCCs) have proliferated in recent years: the share of zip codes served by a UCC rose from 28 percent in 2006 to 91 percent in 2019.  The implications of this market expansion for overall health care costs are not obvious. If UCCs divert patients from costly emergency departments (EDs), then UCC access could reduce costs. But, if UCCs initiate demand for additional services, they could raise costs. Researchers Janet Currie, Anastasia Karpova, and...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

Exploring the Chemistry of Entrepreneurial Teams
Article
Teams with more women performed better when they had a female section leader. Ethnically diverse teams performed worse than homogenous teams, especially when diversity was assigned by algorithm. In "Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams" (NBER Working Paper 28684), Sophie Calder-Wang, Paul Gompers, and Kevin Huang analyze data from an entrepreneurship course at Harvard Business School (HBS) to explore the links between team diversity and...

Universities Catalyze Entrepreneurial Culture
Article
Areas near a national laboratory or a research university exhibit more startup activity, but increased federal research support only spurs entrepreneurship near universities. Many cities and states search for policy levers that could enable them to develop a startup culture. In "More than an Ivory Tower: The Impact of Research Institutions on the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship" (NBER Working Paper 28846), Valentina Tartari and Scott Stern conclude...