National Bureau of Economic Research
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Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson Awarded 2024 Nobel Prize
news article
Research associates Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity." The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained that the three scholars "contributed innovative research about what affects countries' economic prosperity." Their work highlights the critical role of political and economic institutions in affecting the evolution of living standards. It not only offers…
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest
Returns to Port Infrastructure Investments
article
Ships carry nearly 80 percent of internationally traded goods, which makes port infrastructure essential to a well-functioning trading system. In Investment in Infrastructure and Trade: The Case of Ports (NBER Working Paper 32503), Giulia Brancaccio, Myrto Kalouptsidi, and Theodore Papageorgiou examine the returns to investments in port infrastructure.
The researchers analyze data on the universe of port calls between 2016 and 2021 by bulk carriers with a deadweight of more than 10,000 tons. They find that the average port call lasts 117 hours, one-third of which is waiting time...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Effects of Insurance Coverage on Infertility Treatments, Childbearing, and Wellbeing
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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...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Disability Insurance Benefits and Household Composition
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Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) “family maximum” rules cap the benefits that can be paid to a disabled worker’s family at the lower of 85 percent of the worker’s average indexed monthly earnings and 150 percent of their primary insurance amount. The effect of these rules is that family payments are the same whether a DI beneficiary has one or many dependents, and when DI beneficiaries have low benefit determinations, there are no payments for dependents at all.
In Understanding the Disparate Impacts of the Social Security Disability Insurance Family Maximum Rules (NBER RDRC Paper NB23-07), Timothy J. Moore examines how the economic wellbeing of DI beneficiary...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Organizational Approaches to Increased Worker Wellbeing and Productivity
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Negotiations between workers and firm management are a defining feature of labor markets around the world. By many measures, labor relations have deteriorated substantially in recent years, often leading to strikes. In the United States, there were nearly 350 labor actions last year, the most in two decades, followed by 124 in the early months of 2024. Most of these actions are related to differences over worker compensation, benefits, and amenities.
Organizational economics is premised on the notion that firms are not monoliths but rather groups of individuals attempting to coordinate actions towards a set of common goals. Firm performance, then, depends critically on the preferences, incentives, and constraints of individuals, and the nature of their interaction within the organization. Understanding these many factors can…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Immigration Policy and Entrepreneurs’ Choice of Startup Location
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Immigrants play a significant role in the entrepreneurial landscape. In the United States, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. More than half of America's billion-dollar startup companies trace their roots to immigrant founders. There is limited research, however, on the factors that influence immigrants' decisions about where to locate their startup businesses.
In The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program (NBER Working Paper 31634), Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon investigate the impact of Canada's Start-up Visa Program on US-based…
Featured Working Papers
Analyzing over 400,000 cases from 1985 to 2020, Alma Cohen and Rajeev H. Dehejia find that panels of Democratic judges are 6.9 percentage points more likely to reverse Republican than Democratic trial judges, and Republican panels are 3.6 percentage points less likely to reverse fellow Republican judges.
A $1000 per student increase in school spending from federal pandemic relief funds was associated with a .0086 standard deviation improvement in math test scores, and a .0049 improvement in reading test scores, according to a study by Dan C. Dewey, Erin M. Fahle, Thomas J. Kane, Sean F. Reardon, and Douglas O. Staiger.
Bank failures are highly predictable from simple accounting metrics that are publicly available, including rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding, Sergio A. Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner find.
Black mothers with unscheduled deliveries are 25 percent more likely to deliver by C-section than non-Hispanic White mothers, a gap that Adriana Corredor-Waldron, Janet Currie, and Molly Schnell find is consistent with provider discretion rather than differences in unobserved medical risk.
Data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System for the period 2004–21 show that an 8 percent increase in adult access to mental health and substance use treatment reduces child maltreatment reports by 1 percent, Mir M. Ali, Thanh Lu, Johanna Catherine Maclean, and Angélica Meinhofer find.
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