Research
The NBER conducts and disseminates independent, cutting-edge, non-partisan research that advances economic knowledge and informs policy makers and the business community.
New NBER Papers
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Working Paper
How do venture capital investors react to social movements, including those that relate to historical...
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Working Paper
Macro data suggests a convex relationship between inflation and economic slack, but identifying causality is...
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Working Paper
Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of...
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Working Paper
A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging...
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Working Paper
We investigate the influence of the growing trend of work-from-home (WFH) on new business formation, with a particular...
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The Digest
The Digest is a free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest.
Article
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has recently emerged as a potentially transformative workplace technology. The ultimate impact of generative AI on the economy will depend on how many workers adopt the technology, how intensively they use it, and for which tasks. In The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI (NBER Working Paper 32966), researchers Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David J. Deming report on a nationally representative US survey of generative AI adoption...
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Affirmative action policies, which give preference in college admissions to students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups, have been a subject of debate and legal scrutiny in the US. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College barred explicit racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions as unconstitutional. Prior to this ruling, nine states had banned affirmative action in public university...
The Reporter
The Reporter is a free quarterly publication featuring program updates, affiliates writing about their research, and news about the NBER.
Article
Author(s):
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...
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Author(s):
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
The Bulletin on Retirement and Disability summarizes research in the NBER's Retirement and Disabiy Research Center. A quarterly, it is distributed digitally and is free.
Article
Social Security Disability (SSD) program beneficiaries, like other consumers, have been negatively affected by inflation over the past several years. In a survey from June of 2023, more than half (59 percent) of SSD program beneficiaries reported higher prices for the disability-related goods and services they need to purchase, and more than one-quarter reported reducing food spending to cover disability-related costs, Zachary Morris and Stephanie Rennane found in...
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Despite the US’s well-established banking system, a significant share of the population has limited access to basic financial services that facilitate saving, investing, and preparing for retirement. In Financial Inclusion, Inequality, and Retirement Trends among Older Workers (NBER RDRC Paper NB22-16), Isaac Marcelin and Wei Sun study how financial inclusion affects household wellbeing.The researchers use data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Health and...
The Bulletin on Health
The Bulletin on Health summarizes recent NBER Working Papers pertaining to health topics. It is distributed digitally three times a year and is free.
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In the Netherlands, there are striking socioeconomic differences in mortality among older adults, with a 4.4 percentage point (67 percent) higher five-year mortality rate for 70-year-old individuals with below-median income than for those with above-median income. To better understand the role of chronic disease in these health disparities, Kaveh Danesh, Jonathan T. Kolstad, William D. Parker, and Johannes Spinnewijn develop an index of chronic disease burden in The Chronic...
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Tiny, inhalable particles known as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) are a primary component of wildfire smoke and are detrimental to human health. Since smoke can drift hundreds of miles from its source, exposure to these pollutants is widespread: wildfire smoke accounts for about 18 percent of the ambient PM2.5 concentrations affecting the US population. In The Nonlinear Effects of Air Pollution on Health: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke (NBER Working Paper 32924), Nolan H...
The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Introducing recent NBER entrepreneurship research and the scholars who conduct it
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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...
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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...
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