National Bureau of Economic Research

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...

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...

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...

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…

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…