National Bureau of Economic Research
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Six New Directors Elected to NBER Board, Fall 2025
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Jason Abrevaya, Siwan Anderson, Stéphane Bonhomme, Gary Hansen, Bo Honoré, and Justin Muzinich were elected to the NBER Board of Directors at the Board’s September 29 meeting.
Abrevaya represents the University of Texas, Austin, where he is the Murray S. Johnson Professor of Economics and past department chair. He currently serves as Associate Dean for Graduate Education. His research combines econometric methodology and applied microeconomics; he has studied treatment effect estimation, birth outcomes, smoking, and vaccine mandates. He co-founded the Journal of Econometric Methods and is a director of the Western Economic Association International. Abrevaya received his AB in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard University and his PhD in Economics from MIT.
Anderson…
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest
Declining Fertility in Wealthy Nations
article
Birth rates have fallen to historically low levels across high-income countries, with many nations now well below the 2.1 total fertility rate needed to maintain population size. This demographic shift has raised concerns about workforce shrinkage, economic stagnation, and the sustainability of social insurance programs.
In Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER Working Paper 33989), researchers Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine document these trends across several countries and explore the reasons for the decline. Using cohort-level data on fertility, they track childbearing…
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…
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
The Economics of Counterfeiting
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Intellectual property (IP) rights and counterfeiting have permeated everyday lives as globalization, technological advancement, and AI flourish. Interbrand estimates that the brand value of Louis Vuitton was $26.3 billion in 2023, as an example of the IP value of brands. The values brands possess generate incentives for counterfeiting and imitation. Counterfeiting cuts across countries and industries. Notably, counterfeit footwear has topped the seizure list of the US customs service for four years, accounting for nearly 40 percent of total seizures.1 The origins, impacts, and remedies of counterfeits and the protection of IP are pertinent topics to ...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Addressing Common Misconceptions About the Child Mental Health Crisis
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The US Surgeon General has called the child mental health crisis “the defining public health crisis of our time.” In 2020, 13 percent of US children aged 3 to 17 had a diagnosed mental or behavioral condition. In 2021, mental health services for children cost $31 billion—47 percent of pediatric medical spending. Childhood mental health issues are linked to lower educational attainment, reduced employment, and increased use of welfare programs. Also, youth suicide rates are especially high in the US; males aged 15 to 19 have a rate four times higher than in France. In Investing in Children to Address the Child Mental Health Crisis (NBER Working Paper 33632), Janet Currie explores three common misconceptions about this youth mental health...
Featured Working Papers
US counties with higher Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) enrollment rates in 1990 experienced much larger post-1995 increases in drug overdose deaths than counties with lower initial SSDI rates. William N. Evans and Ethan M.J. Lieber estimate that drug-related deaths would have been 43 percent lower in 2015 if opioid prescribing practices for chronic pain patients had remained at pre-1996 levels.
US firms that are restricted from hiring skilled foreign workers through the H-1B visa program are more likely to engage in corporate acquisitions. They make about one additional acquisition for every 125 unfilled H-1B positions, Jens Friedmann, Britta Glennon, and Exequiel Hernandez find.
After Texas HB-2 clinic closures in 2013, counties experiencing travel distance increases of 100 or more miles to the nearest abortion provider saw a 14.9 percent increase in property crimes, mostly from financially motivated offenses like motor vehicle theft and burglary, according to Erkmen G. Aslim, Wei Fu, Caitlin K. Myers, Erdal Tekin, and Bingjin Xue.
Following major AI model releases in 2023–2024, long-term US Treasury yields declined by over 10 basis points and remained lower for weeks, a finding consistent with investors expecting lower consumption growth or a lower probability of AI-related tail events, according to Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi.
Uditi Karna, John A. List, Andrew Simon, and Haruka Uchida find that first-generation college students are 17 percentage points less likely to reach the top 10 percent of academic achievement by 3rd grade, and 19 percent less likely by 8th. Only about one-third of this disparity can be explained by socioeconomic status and school quality differences.
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