National Bureau of Economic Research

Social Security Disability (SSD) program beneficiaries, like other consumers, have been negatively affected by inflation over the past several years. In a survey from June of 2023, more than half (59 percent) of SSD program beneficiaries reported higher prices for the disability-related goods and services they need to purchase, and more than one-quarter reported reducing food spending to cover disability-related costs, Zachary Morris and Stephanie Rennane found in Examining the Impact of Inflation on the Economic Security of Disability Program Beneficiaries (NBER RDRC Paper NB23-08).

Using new survey data, the researchers found that 82 percent of beneficiaries reported out-of-pocket expenses related to their disability, with average annual spending of $4,412 and median spending...

The United States Army Human Resources Command annually assigns hundreds of thousands of soldiers to global positions based on military needs, prioritizing these over individual preferences. Assignments are determined by a soldier’s primary military occupational specialty and rank. Service members of the same specialty and rank are considered interchangeable, which results in essentially random assignments within these categories.

In On the Determinants of Young Adult Outcomes: Impacts of Randomly Assigned Neighborhoods for Children in Military Families (NBER Working Paper 32674), Laura Kawano, Bruce Sacerdote, William L. Skimmyhorn, and Michael Stevens exploit this quasi-random assignment to examine the impact of the neighborhood children live in on their future...

It is an honor to be here today; I owe my love of economics to the Bureau as well as my many friends and colleagues. Marty [Martin] Feldstein was one of the people who made it such a special place. I enjoyed seeing him around the Bureau, learning public finance from him, and briefly serving as his research assistant. I’d sit in his office, in awe of his incredible intellect and economic insights, and be completely distracted by the hilarious cartoons he had framed in his office. My favorite was the one in which Marty is depicted rowing in the wrong direction in a skiff while President Reagan yells “Feldstein!” They all reflected his steadfast willingness to speak his mind, to “speak truth to power,” even to the president of the United States...

Sociologists have argued that “third places” like cafés, which provide opportunities for individuals to socialize and exchange ideas outside of home and work, improve neighborhood life. But what about the relationship between such places and economic activity? In Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés (NBER Working Paper 32604), researchers Jinkyong Choi, Jorge Guzman, and Mario L. Small use data on US business registrations between 1990 and 2022 from the Startup Cartography Project to examine whether the opening of a Starbucks in a neighborhood with no previous cafés affects local entrepreneurship...

Between 1995 and 2010, the share of births in Sweden that involved assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rose from 2 to 10 percent. These treatments range from low-cost drugs to costly and invasive interventions, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

In The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (NBER Working Paper 32445), Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova provide new evidence on the consequences of infertility and the role of insurance coverage in household decisions to initiate treatment. Using administrative, population-wide data for the period 2006–2019, the researchers estimate the use of infertility treatment. They find that over the course of their fertile years...