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Gifted Education Boosts Achievement of Disadvantaged Boys
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Girls are more likely to go to college than boys. One explanation for this pattern is that boys have weaker noncognitive skills, such as self-discipline, than girls. In Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Boys from Disadvantaged Backgrounds? (NBER Working Paper 33282), David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Giuliano examine the impact of gifted education on boys from low-income or non-English-speaking families, focusing on noncognitive skill development and college...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
What Drives Fluctuations in Exchange Rates? An Asset Market Perspective
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From an asset market perspective, there are three main drivers of variation in the dollar exchange rate. First, foreign investors value dollars more if dollar investments pay out higher interest rates than abroad. This is the interest rate channel. Second, foreign investors value dollars more if the dollar appreciates when volatility in global financial markets spikes. In this case, the dollar offers protection against increases in global volatility, and foreign investors are willing to accept a negative excess return on dollar assets, the equivalent of paying an insurance premium to hold the dollar. This is the currency risk premium channel. Third, foreign investors value dollars because of the safety and liquidity of dollar-denominated safe assets, such as Treasury bonds. Foreign investors earn extra convenience yields from holding…
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Additional Educational Attainment Reduces Alzheimer’s Risk
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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...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the US
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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...
Featured Working Papers
A 10 percent increase in access to free school meals reduces the amount of food that local food banks distribute by roughly one percent, with most of the decline in areas where few students previously qualified for government aid, Krista J. Ruffini, Orgul Ozturk, and Pelin Pekgun find.
A 60,000 household experiment in rural India, evaluated by Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan, finds that smaller, localized systems of water treatment and delivery, an alternative to large, centralized plants, achieve take-up of more than 90 percent and improve self-reported health measures.
Real labor productivity at US restaurants increased by over 15 percent during COVID and has persisted since. The rise is strongly correlated with reductions in the time customers spend in establishments, according to Austan Goolsbee, Chad Syverson, Rebecca Goldgof, and Joe Tatarka.
Brazil's post-1983 campaign to eliminate the transmission of Chagas disease is associated with an average increase in Brazilian municipalities’ GDP per capita of 11.1 percent and reduction in their Gini coefficients of 1.1 percent, Jon Denton-Schneider and Eduardo Montero find.
Although emergency department data in the US indicate that reported suicidal behavior in children rose 233 percent from 2006 to 2021, Han Choi, Adriana Corredor-Waldron, Janet Currie, and Chris Felton note that these data have been affected by changing conventions about screening, defining, and coding of mental illness. They estimate that the rise in mental health disorders is between 30 and 50 percent.
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