National Bureau of Economic Research

John Y. Campbell and Kaye Husbands Fealing, editors.

The US higher education sector faces numerous economic challenges, including the stagnating number of college-age domestic students, geographic mismatch between population growth and the location of colleges and universities, financial pressures including cutbacks in government support, growing student debt burdens, sticker prices that deter prospective applicants, and the risk of low capital market returns on endowment portfolios. 

This volume analyzes the responses of students, families, and the financial managers of higher education…

Banks compete to attract depositors, who care about the interest rates they earn on their deposits, the fees they are charged, and the services they receive. However, once they have chosen a bank in which to deposit their money, depositors rarely switch, even when, as is regularly the case, superior alternative options become available. This “sleepy” behavior by depositors mutes competition between banks and can cause depositors to leave large amounts of money on the table.

In Dynamic Competition for Sleepy Deposits (NBER Working Paper 34267), Mark L. Egan, Ali Hortaçsu, Nathan A. Kaplan, Adi Sunderam, and Vincent Yao combine anonymized...

High-skilled immigration remains at the forefront of the policy debate in the United States. While the economic consequences of high-skilled immigration are multifaceted and complex, there is significant suggestive evidence that immigrants play an important role in US innovation and firm creation. For example, immigrants comprised 23 percent of the total workforce in STEM occupations in 2016 and account for 26 percent of US-based Nobel Prize winners from 1990 through 2000. As of 2022, the four most valuable private, venture-backed US companies had immigrant founders, as well as three of the most valuable public companies globally. In fact, approximately one-quarter of new employer companies in the United States are started by immigrants. Motivated by these facts, in…

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…