National Bureau of Economic Research

In January 2025, New York City (NYC) implemented the first cordon-based congestion pricing program in the United States. The program levies charges on vehicles entering Manhattan’s central business district (CBD) during peak hours, 5 am–9 pm on weekdays and 9 am–9 pm on weekends. Passenger vehicles pay $9 each day they enter during peak hours, motorcycles pay $4.50, and trucks and buses pay between $14.40 and $21.60, depending on their size. For-hire vehicles are charged on a per-trip basis: $0.75 for taxi trips and $1.50 for rideshare trips that start, end, or pass through the CBD. In The Short-Run Effects of Congestion Pricing in New York City (NBER Working Paper 33584), Cody Cook, Aboudy Kreidieh, Shoshana Vasserman, Hunt Allcott, Neha Arora, Freek van Sambeek, Andrew Tomkins, and Eray Turkel evaluate the policy’s initial impacts...

Over sixty years ago in 1964, the launch of the War on Poverty represented one of the largest and most comprehensive attempts to improve wellbeing in US history. President Lyndon Johnson’s administration invested billions of dollars in American education, health, employment, and community development. Many of these programs targeted the roots of poverty, seeking to provide a “hand up, not a handout.” Johnson aimed “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

My research with collaborators digs deeper into the workings of specific War on Poverty programs, seeking evidence about their effects on generational poverty and economic mobility. Our long-run perspective takes advantage of newly available data. Large-scale data…

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is a critical tool for responding to the opioid crisis. However, prior to the 2010s, two barriers hindered its widespread distribution and use in the United States. One was legal access: Naloxone required a prescription from a healthcare provider. Another was that naloxone was administered by injection and therefore required training for proper use. 

In 2010, Illinois became the first state to adopt a dispensing naloxone access law (NAL) that permitted individuals to obtain naloxone directly from pharmacists, eliminating the need for an individual prescription. By 2015, another 35 states had implemented dispensing NALs. These policy initiatives were complemented by the introduction of Narcan, the first FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, in 2016. This new…

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...