National Bureau of Economic Research

Collins, the President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is an expert on macroeconomics and international finance. Prior to taking up her role with the Federal Reserve, she was a research associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics program as well as a member of the NBER Board of Directors.

Barbara Fraumeni of the University of Southern Maine is a key...

Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University, a research associate in the Public Economics, Political Economy, and Economic Fluctuations and Growth programs, has won the 2025 John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually by the American Economic Association to an American economist under the age of 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

Stantcheva has made wide-ranging contributions in public finance, studying the effects of taxation on innovation, immigration, and investments in education. She has also developed novel survey and experimental methods to quantify perceptions of economic policy and the factors that determine them.

The prize citation notes that her “masterful application of innovative tools ... has revisited classic questions in public finance and produced new insights into optimal tax policy and the general effects of taxes on economic behavior.”

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is a critical tool for responding to the opioid crisis. However, prior to the 2010s, two barriers hindered its widespread distribution and use in the United States. One was legal access: Naloxone required a prescription from a healthcare provider. Another was that naloxone was administered by injection and therefore required training for proper use. 

In 2010, Illinois became the first state to adopt a dispensing naloxone access law (NAL) that permitted individuals to obtain naloxone directly from pharmacists, eliminating the need for an individual prescription. By 2015, another 35 states had implemented dispensing NALs. These policy initiatives were complemented by the introduction of Narcan, the first FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, in 2016. This new…

The NBER Corporate Finance Program has been a leading research forum in the field since it was established in 1991. Corporate finance questions intersect with many areas of finance and economics, including macrofinance, asset pricing, financial intermediation, and organizational economics. This breadth of topics is reflected in the work presented at the Corporate Finance program meetings. The importance of the field has been widely recognized in academia and is evidenced by the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig’s work on banking and intermediation. In this report, we cannot do justice to the entire field, but we must select a few topics that have been addressed in a number of recent NBER Working Papers or in presentations at...

The role of standardized tests in college admissions has been a subject of intense discussion and evolving policies for some time. While proponents argue that test scores are vital indicators of academic preparedness, others believe they perpetuate inequality because of differential access to test preparation and the potential for cultural bias in test content. This debate led some colleges and universities to adopt test-optional policies. Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of American colleges and universities stopped requiring standardized test scores, as the tests stopped being administered in much of the country. Many schools are currently reevaluating whether and how they should use standardized tests as part of admissions moving...

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...