National Bureau of Economic Research

There have been concerns about technological progress displacing workers since the start of the Industrial Revolution, but systematic evidence on how such advances affect labor demand is limited. In Technology and Labor Markets: Past, Present, and Future; Evidence from Two Centuries of Innovation (NBER Working Paper 34386), Huben Liu, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Lawrence D. W. Schmidt, and Bryan Seegmiller construct novel measures of exposure to technological change for occupations between 1850 and 2020 by applying natural language processing and…

Randall Akee, Lawrence F. Katz, and Mark Loewenstein, editors.

The increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the US population raises the question of whether the race and ethnicity categories and definitions used by federal statistical agencies to create demographic statistics on which government officials, business decision-makers, and private citizens rely fully the changing population. Official definitions of existing race and ethnic groups do not always command wide agreement, and over time, some definitions that were once widely accepted may become less so based on political, legal, and social factors. Comparable measures of race and ethnicity…

We are witnessing a transformative era in financial markets, driven by the digital revolution and the proliferation of data. Digital footprints now accompany virtually every financial transaction, creating new opportunities for data collection and analysis across individuals, firms, and governments. This surge in data availability is reshaping how financial products are offered, how risk is assessed, and how policies are designed.

This summary highlights four strands of recent research that illustrate these shifts. The first explores how the public provision of a digital payment infrastructure can expand access to formal credit—particularly for underserved populations. The second examines how private sector innovation, such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) lending, leverages digital data to reshape consumer credit. The third…

Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted for three decades. The health consequences have been stark, with annual deaths exceeding 100,000 since 2021.

In Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices (NBER Working Paper 34265), William N. Evans and Ethan M. J. Lieber examine characteristics of counties in 1990—prior to the surge—that predict the county-level severity of opioid deaths after 2000. After considering a wide range of potential determinants, they focus on one factor: the percentage of the working-age population...

Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…