National Bureau of Economic Research

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, and Catherine Tucker, editors.

As the effects of artificial intelligence are felt across economies and societies, many of its ramifications are still emerging. This volume brings together economists and political scientists to examine how AI intersects with regulation, military power, and political identity—offering analytical frameworks and identifying key open questions for future research.

In Decoupling Dollar and Treasury Privilege (NBER Working Paper 35000), Wenxin Du, Ritt Keerati, and Jesse Schreger document a pronounced divergence between the convenience yields on the US dollar and US Treasury securities since the early 2010s. The convenience yield—the premium investors implicitly pay for the safety, liquidity, and collateral value of an asset—has historically been positive for both. While the dollar retains strong convenience in global markets, the convenience yield on Treasuries has declined and turned negative…

This short summary describes our research on educator incentive programs in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD). Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, and Andrew Morgan are coauthors on both studies completed for this project, and Jin Luo and Ayman Shakeel are coauthors on one of the studies.

Past studies consistently show the substantial impact of effective teachers at raising students’ achievement and their future earnings. Yet, as US schools search for approaches to ameliorate pandemic learning losses and to improve overall student performance, this general research finding has had little influence on efforts to improve outcomes in the vast majority of districts and states. In fact, there is little consensus about effective school improvement policies that can be taken to scale, particularly for the most…

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...

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...