National Bureau of Economic Research

Martin Eichenbaum, Erik Hurst, and Valerie Ramey, editors.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual features research by leading scholars on important issues in contemporary macroeconomics. 

David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, Andreas Kostol, and Simon Mongey consider the importance of market power in the labor market and develop a theory of monopsony that incorporates worker-firm-specific preference heterogeneity, search frictions, and firm granularity. They apply this theory to analyze the effects of monopsony on wages, job flows...

Increases in the prices of imported goods contributed to the overall rise in the US inflation rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mary Amiti, Oleg Itskhoki, and David Weinstein investigate the source of import price inflation, distinguishing global shocks from US-specific demand increases, in What Drives US Import Price Inflation? (NBER Working Paper 32133).

The researchers find that US import price inflation tracked worldwide trends from early 2020 until the middle of 2022. US import inflation peaked at 8.1 percent in the second quarter of 2021…

In the standard labor market model taught in introductory economics classes around the world, relationships between firms and workers are just another transaction, mediated by the impersonal market forces of supply and demand. From this perspective, the labor market is best described as being perfectly competitive, where wages are set by the market, with little room for any employer choice.

This “Econ 101” view of the market has a lot of explanatory power. But, as generations of “institutionalist” labor economists have pointed out, it is incomplete. It presumes that the “law of one price” — which postulates that identical commodities have the same price everywhere — holds for workers and their wages. As a result, the model emphasizes the supply of human capital and technology…

Immigrants play a significant role in the entrepreneurial landscape. In the United States, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. More than half of America's billion-dollar startup companies trace their roots to immigrant founders. There is limited research, however, on the factors that influence immigrants' decisions about where to locate their startup businesses. 

In The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program (NBER Working Paper 31634), Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon investigate the impact of Canada's Start-up Visa Program on US-based…

Cesarean section (C-section) is the most common surgical procedure performed in the United States. Sarah Robinson, Heather Royer, and David Silver report that C-section rates for first-time, singleton births increased from 24 percent to 32 percent between 1989 and 2017 alongside significant changes in medical practices during this period. In 2001, for example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists began recommending C-sections for breech births. The rising rate of C-sections has sparked a debate about whether this procedure is being overused. 

In Geographic Variation in Cesarean Sections in the United States: Trends, Correlates, and Other Interesting Facts (NBER Working Paper 31871), the researchers study how cross-county differences in C-section usage correlate with infant and maternal...

Over the past 25 years, labor force participation at older ages has increased dramatically. In the 12 countries that are part of the NBER’s International Social Security (ISS) project, participation among those aged 60 to 64 has risen by an average of over 20 percentage points for men and over 25 percentage points for women.

In The Effects of Reforms on Retirement Behavior: Introduction and Summary (NBER Working Paper 31979), authors Axel Börsch-Supan and Courtney Coile report on the most recent work of the ISS project. The current analysis builds on previous project phases which showed that changes in health and education could…