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From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Program Report: Industrial Organization
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Researchers in the Industrial Organization (IO) program study consumer and firm behavior, competition, innovation, and government regulation. This report begins with a brief summary of general developments in the last four decades in the range and focus of program members’ research, then discusses specific examples of recent work.
When the program was launched in the early 1990s, two developments had profoundly shaped IO research. One was the development of game-theoretic models of strategic behavior by firms with market power, summarized in Jean Tirole’s classic textbook. The initial wave of research in this vein was focused on applying new insights from economic theory; empirical applications came later. Then came the development of econometric methods to estimate demand and supply parameters in…
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest
Technological Advance and Labor Demand: Evidence from Two Centuries
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There have been concerns about technological progress displacing workers since the start of the Industrial Revolution, but systematic evidence on how such advances affect labor demand is limited. In Technology and Labor Markets: Past, Present, and Future; Evidence from Two Centuries of Innovation (NBER Working Paper 34386), Huben Liu, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Lawrence D. W. Schmidt, and Bryan Seegmiller construct novel measures of exposure to technological change for occupations between 1850 and 2020 by applying natural language processing and…
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic
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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...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Underwriting Based on Cash Flow Helps Younger Entrepreneurs Access Credit
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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…
Featured Working Papers
Jason Allen, Ali Hortaçsu, Eric Richert, and Milena Wittwer find that hedge funds have increasingly entered the primary debt market, where they participate irregularly, while dealers, who are typically consistent bidders, have exited.
Between 1953 and 2022, the US Supreme Court became increasingly polarized along partisan lines on cases of economic redistribution. Republican-appointed justices' pro-wealthy voting share rose from about 45 percent to 70 percent over the period, while Democratic appointees’ share declined to 35 percent, creating a 47 percentage point party gap by 2022, according to Andrea Prat, Fiona Scott Morton, and Jacob Spitz.
A three-week entrepreneurship training program for Ugandan secondary school students increased their entrepreneurial business profits by 16 percent and total earnings by 13 percent nine years later, a return 27 times the program’s cost, according to Laura Chioda, Paul Gertler, David Contreras-Loya, and Dana R. Carney.
A more positive visual sentiment in millions of GIFs posted on Stocktwits.com is associated with a 27 basis point rise in same-day S&P 500 returns, but a drop of 127 basis over the following month, according to Ming Gu, David Hirshleifer, Siew Hong Teoh, and Shijia Wu.
Onur Altındağ, Jane Greve, and Yulya Truskinovsky find that women experience up to a 28 percent increase in mental-health-care visits during the three-year period around a parent's dementia-related death. Increased visits begin five years before death and persist until nearly a decade after.
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