National Bureau of Economic Research

Recognizing the rising toll of chronic late-life diseases as the US population ages, the NBER has launched a multi-year initiative on the economics of Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias (AD/ADRD). The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has awarded the NBER a five-year grant to serve as a Coordinating Center for the Economics of AD/ADRD, focusing on the care, treatment, and prevention of these diseases. The Center is co-directed by neurobiologist Rhoda Au of Boston University, Julie Bynum, a geriatric care specialist at the University of Michigan, and research associate Kathleen McGarry of UCLA; Susan Stewart is the Executive Director. It will coordinate the work of several NIA-funded research…

Programs that increase educational attainment in low-income countries can yield lifelong benefits for those who attend school and also pay dividends for future generations. In Intergenerational Impacts of Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana (NBER Working Paper 32742), Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Elizabeth Spelke, and Mark P. Walsh find that in Ghana, the children of women who received scholarships to attend high school display better outcomes both...

In the Netherlands, there are striking socioeconomic differences in mortality among older adults, with a 4.4 percentage point (67 percent) higher five-year mortality rate for 70-year-old individuals with below-median income than for those with above-median income. To better understand the role of chronic disease in these health disparities, Kaveh Danesh, Jonathan T. Kolstad, William D. Parker, and Johannes Spinnewijn develop an index of chronic disease burden in The Chronic Disease Index: Analyzing Health Inequalities over the Lifecycle (NBER Working Paper 32577). This index is a measure...

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...

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...