National Bureau of Economic Research

Philippe Aghion, research associate Peter Howitt, and NBER board member Joel Mokyr have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in announcing the prize, explained that their studies have illuminated the process by which “new products and production methods [replace] old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better…

David R. Agrawal, James M. Poterba, and Owen M. Zidar, editors.

Policy Responses to Tax Competition provides an in-depth exploration of how jurisdictions design taxes on mobile economic factors. Tax competition between jurisdictions that seek to attract businesses and residents presents both opportunities and challenges.

It can foster government efficiency and provide a counterweight to lobbying for increased spending, but it can also result in inefficiently low tax rates and revenue shortfalls as jurisdictions vie for tax bases. This volume examines the economic…

The value of the US municipal bond market in early 2025 was $4.2 trillion. This substantial debt burden exposes local governments to significant financial risks during downturns. While in recent decades US cities have often received federal assistance during recessions—like the $350 billion Coronavirus Local Fiscal Recovery Fund during the COVID-19 pandemic—such support mechanisms are relatively recent innovations in American fiscal federalism.

In Public Goods Under Financial Distress (NBER Working Paper 34011), Pawel Janas examines how municipal debt affected local public services during the Great Depression. This historical setting offers two key advantages for analysis: local…

N. Gregory Mankiw

It is a great honor and delight to deliver this year’s Feldstein Lecture. I was never one of Marty’s students—I was educated not at Harvard, but at Princeton and MIT. Yet Marty nonetheless had a profound influence on my life and career.

As a freshman at Princeton in 1977, I took introductory microeconomics from the superb teacher Harvey Rosen, who later hired me to be his research assistant. Harvey was a recent PhD student of Marty’s, so even though I did not know it at the time, I entered the economics profession as Marty’s grandstudent.

Four years later, as a first-year student in MIT’s PhD program, I took a couple of courses from a promising, young assistant professor named Larry Summers, making me Marty’s grandstudent…

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…

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...