National Bureau of Economic Research
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Financial Incentives Can Increase Permanence for Foster Children
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Protracted periods in foster care can lead to negative long-term outcomes for children. Many states have tried to shorten foster care stays by moving children into either permanent adoptive homes or kinship care. While foster parents receive financial support for the children in their care, adoptive parents or kin guardians often receive less — or no — support. In Financial Incentives for Adoption and Kin Guardianship Improve Achievement for Foster Children (NBER Working Paper 32560), David Simon, Aaron Sojourner, Jon Pedersen, and Heidi Ombisa Skallet examine the outcomes of a policy reform in Minnesota that...
Three New Directors Elected to NBER Board
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R. Glenn Hubbard, Angelo Melino, and John Pepper were elected to the NBER Board of Directors at the Board’s September 23 meeting.
Hubbard will represent Columbia University. He is the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics and the Director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at the Columbia Business School. He is also the Dean Emeritus of the School. Between 2001 and 2003, he served as the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and between 1991 and 1993, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the US Treasury Department. He was a Research Associate in four NBER programs — Corporate Finance, Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Monetary Economics, and Public Economics — prior to joining the Board. Hubbard received his undergraduate degree in…
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
Contrary to the belief that seniors "age in place", Salla Kalin, Antoine B. Levy, and Mathilde Muñoz find that Portugal’s 2013 grant of full tax exemption for foreign-source pensioners induced substantial migration among wealthy and educated pensioners living in higher-tax countries in Europe.
The stock market reaction to surprise monetary policy announcements by the Federal Open Market Committee is largely due to changes in the default-free term structure of yields, not changes in the equity premium, Stefan Nagel and Zhengyang Xu show.
California’s highest-in-nation Earned Income Tax Credit supplement does not affect employment of low-skill single mothers due to unique aspects of its structure and to the state’s high minimum wage, according to a study by David Neumark and Zeyu Li.
During the Industrial Revolution, Britain sustained faster technological change and economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, because British inventors worked on technologies that were more central in the innovation network, Lukas Rosenberger, W. Walker Hanlon, and Carl Hallmann find.
Banks reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last eight years as efforts to mitigate climate change gained support, but voluntary climate commitments did not contribute to syndicated loan reallocation away from high-emission sectors, according to research by Galina Hale, Brigid Meisenbacher, and Fernanda Nechio.
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