National Bureau of Economic Research

Valerie Ramey, an NBER Research Associate in the Economic Fluctuations and Growth and Monetary Economics Programs, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego, has been named chair of the Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC). She is an expert on the sources of business cycles and the macroeconomic impact of monetary and fiscal policies and has served on the Committee since 2017. Ramey succeeds Robert Hall, who has chaired the Committee since it was launched in its current form in 1978. The BCDC chair is appointed by the NBER President with approval of the Executive Committee of the NBER Board of Directors.

The rapidly expanding home-sharing market has led to calls for new regulations to restrict activity in short-term rental (STR) markets. Debates about such regulations have identified potential benefits of an active STR market as well as potential costs. In The Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulation: Insights from Chicago (NBER Working Paper 32537), Ginger Zhe Jin, Liad Wagman, and Mengyi Zhong present a novel analysis of local regulation of an STR market.

The researchers study Chicago because it was one of the first large US cities to attempt to regulate STR activities in a comprehensive way. The city’s STR ordinance aims to permit such rentals while addressing public safety...

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...

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...

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…

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…