National Bureau of Economic Research

Mark Mason, Jack Porter, and Mark Wolfson were elected to the NBER Board of Directors at the Board’s September 28 meeting. 

Mason, an at-large board member, is the Executive Vice Chair and Senior Executive Advisor to the Chair and CEO of Citigroup. He served as Citi's Chief Financial Officer from February 2019 to March 2026, providing financial stewardship during a period of substantial macroeconomic disruption. He joined Citi in 2001 and held a variety of roles including CEO of Citi Private Bank and Citi Holdings; prior to joining Citi he was director of Strategy and Business Development at Lucent Technologies. He serves on the Microsoft Board of Directors and is Vice Chair of the Howard University Board of Trustees. Mason earned his undergraduate degree at Howard University and holds an MBA from the Harvard…

Many analyses of fiscal sustainability focus on the ratio of debt to GDP and the gap between interest rates and economic growth rates. Yet some governments have carried debt loads exceeding annual GDP for extended periods without crisis, while others have faced fiscal pressure at comparatively modest debt-to-GDP levels. In From Stocks to Flows: Debt Service and Fiscal Sustainability (NBER Working Paper 35459), Barry Eichengreen, Maxime Menuet, and Gregory Donnat explore the links between the outstanding stock of debt, the cost of…

In research conducted in collaboration with Arkey Barnett at the University of Michigan and Meghan Beal at the National Sheriffs’ Association, we investigate the effects of innovative investments in local jails that aim to improve health and rehabilitation outcomes for incarcerated individuals and their communities. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with nearly 2 million people detained in correctional facilities every year. While most people are held in state or federal prisons, local jails house 546,000 individuals across 3,116 facilities, the majority of whom are not convicted. Local jails serve as the front door to the criminal justice system, with more than 7.6 million admissions per year and a significant share of those released being rebooked within the same year, revealing a persistent…

Nursing homes certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to provide care and receive public reimbursement through Medicare and Medicaid are subject to mandatory annual inspections. While inspections are unannounced, they typically occur on an approximately yearly basis, as 74 percent of inspections take place between 40 and 60 weeks after the previous one. The average gap is around 53 weeks. Due to the cyclical nature of inspections, nursing home operators are able to anticipate when an inspection is likely and adjust their behavior accordingly. They appear to devote more effort to patient care when inspections are approaching.

In Predictably Unpredictable Inspections (NBER Working Paper 34491), Ashvin Gandhi, Andrew Olenski, and Maggie Shi study how the predictability of nursing home inspections shapes facility effort and patient...

Roughly one-quarter of new employer businesses in the United States are started by immigrants. Immigrant inventors have been responsible for approximately 23 percent of US patents produced since 1976 despite making up only 16 percent of the total US-based inventor population. Yet immigrant entrepreneurs usually do not build companies in isolation—many cofound startups alongside US-born entrepreneurs. In Native-Immigrant Entrepreneurial Synergies (NBER Working Paper 33804), Zhao Jin, Amir Kermani, and Timothy McQuade examine whether startups cofounded by immigrant and native entrepreneurs outperform those with founders from exclusively one...