National Bureau of Economic Research

Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) represent a growing global health crisis, with cases projected to reach 131.5 million by 2050. The economic burden is substantial: In 2020, ADRD cost the United States $305 billion, with forecasts suggesting a threefold increase over the next 35 years in the absence of effective interventions. While previous research has associated lower educational attainment with increased ADRD risk, establishing causality has proved challenging due to potential confounding factors including childhood circumstances, socioeconomic background, and genetic predisposition.

In Education and Dementia Risk (NBER Working Paper 33430), researchers Silvia H. Barcellos, Leandro Carvalho, Kenneth Langa, Sneha Nimmagadda, and Patrick Turley leverage a natural experiment to investigate...

Nicholas Z. Muller, Eli Fenichel, and Mary Bohman, editors.

While the importance of natural resources and the contributions of the environment to welfare are apparent, traditional national income and wealth accounting practices do not measure or value environmental public goods. 

This volume examines the conceptual and empirical basis for integrating natural capital — forests, oceans, and air — into the economic and environmental statistics that inform public policy. It offers innovative…

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, policymakers have increasingly turned to unconventional stabilization policies when confronting large macroeconomic shocks. When the COVID-19 shock hit in 2020 and capital flows retrenched, such tools took center stage, especially across emerging markets with limited fiscal space.

In Firm Financing During Sudden Stops: Can Governments Substitute Markets? (NBER Working Paper 33283), Miguel Acosta-Henao, Andrés Fernández, Patricia Gomez-Gonzalez, and Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan study the effectiveness of new...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) may usher in the most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. For nearly a decade, as I witnessed the continuous progress in deep learning, I have been studying the economics of transformative AI — how our economy may be transformed as AI systems advance toward mastering all forms of cognitive work that can be performed by humans, including new tasks that don’t even exist yet. The prospect of understanding the strange new world we will inhabit when transformative AI is developed has felt both intellectually urgent and personally meaningful to me as a father of two young children.

Today, AI systems are approaching and exceeding human-level performance in many domains, and it looks increasingly like our world will be transformed before…

In How Do Economic Conditions Affect Earnings and Return to Disability Programs for Beneficiaries Whose Benefits Were Terminated? (NBER RDRC Paper NB22-03), Jeffrey Hemmeter, Kathleen Mullen, and Stephanie Rennane find that individuals whose benefits end due to medical improvement during an economic downturn earn less in the short run and are more likely to reapply for benefits within five years than those...

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...