National Bureau of Economic Research
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Financing Institutions of Higher Education
news article
John Y. Campbell and Kaye Husbands Fealing, editors.
The US higher education sector faces numerous economic challenges, including the stagnating number of college-age domestic students, geographic mismatch between population growth and the location of colleges and universities, financial pressures including cutbacks in government support, growing student debt burdens, sticker prices that deter prospective applicants, and the risk of low capital market returns on endowment portfolios.
This volume analyzes the responses of students, families, and the financial managers of higher education…
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
New Developments in Financial Markets: The Digital Revolution; Fintechs; Buy Now, Pay Later; and Geopolitics
article
We are witnessing a transformative era in financial markets, driven by the digital revolution and the proliferation of data. Digital footprints now accompany virtually every financial transaction, creating new opportunities for data collection and analysis across individuals, firms, and governments. This surge in data availability is reshaping how financial products are offered, how risk is assessed, and how policies are designed.
This summary highlights four strands of recent research that illustrate these shifts. The first explores how the public provision of a digital payment infrastructure can expand access to formal credit—particularly for underserved populations. The second examines how private sector innovation, such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) lending, leverages digital data to reshape consumer credit. The third…
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic
article
Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted for three decades. The health consequences have been stark, with annual deaths exceeding 100,000 since 2021.
In Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices (NBER Working Paper 34265), William N. Evans and Ethan M. J. Lieber examine characteristics of counties in 1990—prior to the surge—that predict the county-level severity of opioid deaths after 2000. After considering a wide range of potential determinants, they focus on one factor: the percentage of the working-age population...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Underwriting Based on Cash Flow Helps Younger Entrepreneurs Access Credit
article
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
Kory Kroft, Isaac Norwich, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Stephen Tino find that foreign workers who obtain Canadian permanent residency experience a 21.7 percentage point increase in job-to-job transitions and a 5.7 percent increase in earnings, on average.
The EU's Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, which classified funds by sustainability level starting in March 2021, had no significant effect on investment flows. About 86 percent of the greenest funds had explicit sustainability mandates before the regulation, making the disclosures redundant, according to Hunt Allcott, Mark L. Egan, Paul Smeets, and Hanbin Yang.
Business Development Companies (BDCs) are a major segment of the $1.3 trillion private credit market and private equity affiliated BDCs account for about 70 percent of its growth between 2001 and 2023, according to David T. Robinson and Melanie Wallskog.
A one-standard-deviation increase in local broadband internet access was associated with more than a 9 percent increase in adolescent suicide ideation in the US over the period 2009–2019. Girls also report increased cyberbullying and body dissatisfaction, and boys, reduced sleep, according to Brandyn F. Churchill and Kathryn R. Johnson.
The LLM market has experienced rapid growth in both the number of models available and the number of model providers, Mert Demirer, Andrey Fradkin, Nadav Tadelis, and Sida Peng find. Prices have fallen sharply and while the share of firms using multiple models has increased, most firms concentrate over 90 percent of their usage on a single model.
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