National Bureau of Economic 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…

Damon Jones and Robert Moffitt, editors.

This volume presents new research on taxation, transfer programs, and related issues. Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf examine the potential impact of automatic fiscal stabilizers on fiscal policy and economic activity. They find that a stabilizer providing direct payments could have produced faster unemployment decline after the Great Recession without raising inflation, and much lower inflation after COVID at the cost of a slower…

In a research program with colleagues Nancy E. Reichman at Rutgers University and Ariel Kalil at the University of Chicago, we have been investigating the effects of public assistance retraction on the next generation. We have focused on the 1996 US Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and on state waivers in the early 1990s, collectively referred to as welfare reform, one of the most sweeping social policies of the twentieth century. This legislation reflected a growing consensus that public assistance is a cause of dependence rather than a consequence of disadvantage. Key pillars of welfare reform were work requirements and lifetime limits on welfare participation, both of which are strong work incentives. The logic was that labor force participation would eliminate a “culture of poverty…

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...