National Bureau of Economic Research
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Global Evidence on Business Use of AI
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Despite the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), internationally comparable data on how businesses use this new tool are scarce. In Firm Data on AI (NBER Working Paper 34836), Ivan Yotzov, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Steven J. Davis, Kevin M. Foster, Aaron Jalca, Brent H. Meyer, Paul Mizen, Michael A. Navarrete, Pawel Smietanka, Gregory Thwaites, and Ben Zhe Wang address this gap by fielding a representative, multi-country survey...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Program Report: Development Economics
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The Development Economics (DEV) program was launched in 2012 and has 190 affiliated researchers. The success the program is enjoying today is in very large part thanks to Duncan Thomas, who led the program for its first six years. A unique aspect of the program is its close connections with BREAD, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, which is an independent group with worldwide membership. Our fall program meeting is held jointly with BREAD every other year.
Development economics is, broadly speaking, the study of two questions. First, why are some countries poor while other countries are wealthy?…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Capital Gains Taxation and Startup Founders
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The US capital gains tax is realization based, which means that taxes are due when appreciated assets are sold. Critics of this approach argue that it allows asset holders, such as corporate founders, to defer their tax obligations, sometimes indefinitely. An alternative approach, taxing gains on accrual, would require asset holders to value their assets periodically and to pay tax on the gain since the last valuation. Critics of this approach argue that it could force founders to surrender ownership stakes just to pay tax bills, potentially discouraging startup formation. In Dilution vs. Risk Taking: Capital Gains Taxes and Entrepreneurship (NBER Working Paper 34512), Eduardo M. Azevedo, Florian Scheuer, Kent Smetters, and Min Yang examine how shifting from realization-based to accrual-based capital gains...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Immunotherapy Increases the Cost of Cancer Care but Reduces Mortality
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Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are immunotherapy drugs that mobilize the patient’s immune system to detect and attack cancer cells. They are considered a breakthrough development in cancer care, but are very expensive, with a full course of treatment costing more than $150,000 per patient. In The Impact of Immunotherapy on Reductions in Cancer Mortality: Evidence from Medicare (NBER Working Paper 34317), Danea Horn, Abby E. Alpert, Mark Duggan, and Mireille Jacobson use Medicare claims data to evaluate the impact of the first ICIs on healthcare use, costs, and mortality among beneficiaries diagnosed with...
Featured Working Papers
In a survey of 1,286 Ukrainians conducted during the 2024 Russian invasion, the most risk-averse individuals were about half as willing to relocate to high-danger Kharkiv compared to the most risk-tolerant, while risk preferences had little effect on willingness to move to lower-risk Kyiv, according to Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Marianna Kudlyak, Sophia Lobozynska, Iryna Skomorovych, Ulyana Vladychyn, Andriy Kovalyuk, and Iryna Snovydovych.
Foregone economic transactions are one cost of electricity blackouts. In Chile, on the day of a February 2025 nationwide blackout transactions fell 35 percent, but nearly half of the transactions were recovered in the following four days, suggesting that static estimates of electricity outage costs overstate the net economic impact, according to Luis E. Gonzales, Koichiro Ito, and Mar Reguant.
Roughly 80 percent of startup accelerators exhibit negative value added relative to a no-accelerator benchmark. Higher quality accelerators are associated with a higher probability of a start-up being acquired, according to Youn Baek, and Deepak Hegde.
Jacob Bastian and Melody Harvey find that the 2022 expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit reduced consumer sentiment by 1.7 points per $1,000 in lost benefits. Effects were concentrated among lower-income families with children and persisted nearly two years after expiration.
Over the period 2012–2023, on average, Congressional stock portfolios matched or underperformed market benchmarks, with buy-sell decisions tracking publicly observable signals rather than insider information, according to Haotian Chen and Bruce Sacerdote.
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