National Bureau of Economic Research
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How Japanese Fuel-Economy Subsidies Affected Cars Sold in America
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Multinational firms often sell nearly identical products across global markets. This raises the question of what happens when a government regulates a product in one country: Does that change propagate to the same product sold elsewhere? In Global Policy Spillovers: How Environmental Policies Propagate Through Product Attributes (NBER Working Paper 35197), Koichiro Ito, James M. Sallee, and Jonathan (Andrew) Smith study “attribute propagation”—the mechanism by which a domestic policy induces broader changes in...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Program Report: Economics of Education
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The NBER Economics of Education Program covers topics related to education in a manner that is deeply informed by economic logic and empirical methods. The program draws upon theory from several fields including public, labor, development, and urban economics, as well as industrial organization. The program has 179 members and meets three times a year in Cambridge, Chicago, Stanford, and Washington. The average meeting attracts about 100 submissions for a program of about 10 papers. The program has a culture that combines rigor, constructive advice, and noteworthy collegiality.
Top North American universities are very well represented, but the Economics of Education draws participants from many states, countries, universities, and organizations. While the papers often analyze high-income countries’ policies, most of the…
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
How Inspection Timing Affects Care Quality in US Nursing Homes
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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...
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Mixed Immigrant-Native Founding Teams Excel
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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...
Featured Working Papers
Using 20th-century US data linking fathers' Social Security eligibility to their children's later-life outcomes, Daniel K. Fetter, Lee M. Lockwood, and Paul Mohnen find that sons whose fathers gained access to benefits 10 years earlier in life, due to their working in an early-eligible industry, earned about 12 percent more over their careers. They do not find any effect on daughters’ earnings.
Financial sanctions sharply cut targeted banks' access to global dollar and euro payment networks, and even push non-sanctioned banks in heavily sanctioned countries like Russia and Belarus to shift toward Chinese yuan clearing, while having little impact on the dollar's dominant role elsewhere in the developing world, according to Gregor Matvos and Brent Neiman.
Federal transfers to school districts during the COVID-19 pandemic, which averaged about $390 per student, were largely offset by local property tax cuts and showed no measurable effect on math or reading test scores, find Jeffrey Clemens, Philip G. Hoxie, and Stan Veuger.
Nicola Borri, Aleh Tsyvinski, and Yukun Liu find that stocks whose returns move more closely with growth in AI consumption, especially from frontier closed-source models, paying and experienced users, and complex queries, earn notably higher returns than those on other stocks, with a simple long-short trading strategy based on this "AI exposure" generating about 64 basis points per week.
A field experiment with Zambian farmers found that prompting them to itemize their future expenses category-by-category raised spending forecasts by more than 35 percent and led to 15 percent higher savings as well as 9 percent higher farm revenues the following year, according to Ned Augenblick, B. Kelsey Jack, Supreet Kaur, Felix Masiye, and Nicholas Swanson.
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