National Bureau of Economic Research
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Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy, volume 7
news article
Matthew J. Kotchen, Tatyana Deryugina, and Catherine D. Wolfram, editors.
This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy.
Judson Boomhower and Meredith Fowlie illustrate the distributional consequences of improving risk pricing efficiency in wildfire insurance markets.
Claire Brunel and Arik Levinson develop a conceptual framework for understanding the economic and environmental consequences of taxes on imports of goods based on their carbon content...
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest
Impact of Minimum Pay Rules on Gig Delivery Drivers
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Platform-based delivery work has expanded dramatically over the past decade, creating millions of work opportunities for independent contractors who operate outside traditional employment protections. Because gig workers are not covered by standard minimum wage laws, several jurisdictions have implemented minimum pay standards specifically for them. In Delivering Higher Pay? The Impacts of a Task-Level Pay Standard in the Gig Economy (NBER Working Paper 34545), Yuan An, Andrew Garin, and Brian K. Kovak examine Seattle's App-Based Worker Minimum Payment Ordinance...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Immunotherapy Increases the Cost of Cancer Care but Reduces Mortality
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Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are immunotherapy drugs that mobilize the patient’s immune system to detect and attack cancer cells. They are considered a breakthrough development in cancer care, but are very expensive, with a full course of treatment costing more than $150,000 per patient. In The Impact of Immunotherapy on Reductions in Cancer Mortality: Evidence from Medicare (NBER Working Paper 34317), Danea Horn, Abby E. Alpert, Mark Duggan, and Mireille Jacobson use Medicare claims data to evaluate the impact of the first ICIs on healthcare use, costs, and mortality among beneficiaries diagnosed with...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Quantitative Trade Policy in a Changing World
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Over the past three decades trade policy has profoundly shaped the structure of production, employment, and welfare across countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the recent resurgence of tariff protectionism illustrate how deeply globalization and policy choices are intertwined. Evaluating their effects requires quantitative frameworks that capture how shocks to both technology and policy propagate through supply chains, labor markets, and international linkages.
Our research develops tractable general equilibrium models to quantify how shocks such as tariffs affect economies—both in the aggregate and across workers, regions, and sectors. These frameworks extend the Ricardian model of trade to include…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Underwriting Based on Cash Flow Helps Younger Entrepreneurs Access Credit
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Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…
Featured Working Papers
A doubling of oil prices reduces long-run economic output by up to 8.6 percent, roughly three times the loss from an equivalent mineral price increase, because oil raises operating costs immediately while critical minerals affect the economy more gradually through investment and the external balance sheet, according to Adrien Concordel, Phuong Ho, and Christopher R. Knittel.
In a survey of expected expenses and taxes, Edward Freeland, Andrew Garin, and Dmitri K. Koustas find that on average, workers expected to take home 4.2 percent more as freelancers than as W-2 employees with the same gross pay, but after receiving personalized estimates of higher expenses and taxes faced by the self-employed, they revised their expectations to take home 13.4 percent less.
Hamid Noghanibehambari and Jason Fletcher find that areas more exposed to import competition from NAFTA experienced a 2.1 percent rise in mortality among adults aged 25–55, with a 7.3 percent increase for workers who lost their jobs due to the trade agreement.
Exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Indonesia caused an immediate 45 percent drop in business profits and a 17 percent decline in business ownership. Agricultural entrepreneurship remained depressed a decade and a half later, but non-agricultural businesses recovered within two years, according to Richard Lombardo, Elizabeth Frankenberg, and Duncan Thomas.
Surveying US adults aged 60–74, Susann Rohwedder, Michael D. Hurd, and Axel H. Börsch-Supan find that saving regret is driven primarily by exposure to adverse economic shocks rather than procrastination, with 54 percent wishing they had saved more.
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