National Bureau of Economic Research

Access to higher education remains a significant challenge for many families as college costs rise and public funding declines. Effective college saving strategies can help students offset some of these costs and reduce the burden of their future student loan debt, yet many families do not take up tax-advantaged college savings accounts (CSAs), also known as 529 plans.

In Navigating the College Affordability Crisis: Insights from College Savings Accounts (NBER Working Paper 34126), researchers Guglielmo Briscese, John A. List, and Sabrina Liu analyze...

Recognizing the challenges to traditional approaches to economic measurement—among others, declining survey response rates, the growing economic significance of hard-to-measure digital services, and the rise of the gig economy—the NBER has launched a new initiative on economic statistics. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the NBER a multi-year grant to promote research on economic measurement as well as the development and implementation of new approaches to the creation of official economic statistics. The Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI) is co-directed by research associates...

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...

Global value chains have come under severe scrutiny in the past few years. Pandemic-era shortages, geopolitical concerns, and new industrial strategies have all revived an old worry: have firms become too dependent on a handful of foreign suppliers and assembly hubs? Should governments use policy tools such as tariffs or subsidies to promote domestic manufacturing employment and capabilities?

The heart of this debate centers around a firm’s decisions about whether and how to participate in global value chains: which countries will supply its components, where should it open assembly plants, and what foreign markets shall it enter to sell its goods?

Our research starts from the premise that the right unit of analysis for understanding this system is not the country or the industry, but the firm…

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…