National Bureau of Economic Research

Many nations, including the United States, pursued aggressive fiscal stimulus to combat pandemic-related declines in economic activity in 2020. Assessing the impact of greater spending and reduced taxes is difficult, however, because the labor market disruptions associated with COVID-19, and other public policies such as stay-at-home orders, could offset the usual expansionary effect. In a new study (29531) of the association between government spending, employment, and consumption in US cities, NBER research associates Alan Auerbach and Yuriuy Gorodnichenko of the University of California, Berkeley, and their collaborators Peter McCrory of JP Morgan Chase and Daniel Murphy of the University of Virginia, find expansionary effects of fiscal policy in locations that did not adopt strict stay-at-home policies, but very little impact in places with strict policies. Auerbach summarizes the study's findings in the video above. An archive of NBER videos on pandemic-related research may be found here.

Four new working papers distributed this week report on the economic, health, and related consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and of public policies that respond to it. One examines the impact of the pandemic on anxiety, depression, and other metrics of mental health, and reports substantial benefits of vaccination along these dimensions (29593). Another summarizes how the pandemic affected income inequality in India (29597). A third uses data on the timing of code postings to GitHub, a software and code repository, to track changes in hours of work when work-from-home became the norm (29598). Another study compares different measures of core inflation in the US during the pandemic (29609).

More than 500 NBER working papers have addressed various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. View them in reverse chronological order or by topic area.

Some nations are more likely to elect left-leaning central governments than others. In Sovereign Spreads and the Political Leaning of Nations (NBER Working Paper 29197), Ionut Cotoc, Alok Johri, and César Sosa-Padilla investigate the relationship between a country’s political composition and the interest rate on its sovereign debt, and develop a quantitative model to explain their empirical results.

The researchers analyze data from 56 countries over the…

The textbook model of the labor market posits that workers are paid their marginal products. In this setting, equally productive workers should be paid and promoted at the same rate. While in the general labor market we are able to observe individual education, industry, occupation, and earnings, in most cases it is difficult to link individuals’ capital investments and productivity outcomes. My research has focused on academic labor markets because capital — in the form of federal research funding — and output — in the form of publications and citations — can be linked to individuals to yield new findings about academic careers and knowledge production.

Together with my collaborators, I have examined gender and race/ethnicity differences in research career…

Urgent care centers (UCCs) have proliferated in recent years: the share of zip codes served by a UCC rose from 28 percent in 2006 to 91 percent in 2019.  The implications of this market expansion for overall health care costs are not obvious. If UCCs divert patients from costly emergency departments (EDs), then UCC access could reduce costs. But, if UCCs initiate demand for additional services, they could raise costs. Researchers Janet Currie, Anastasia Karpova, and Dan Zeltzer address the question of how the entry of UCCs into a market affects health care costs for Medicare beneficiaries in Do Urgent Care Centers Reduce Medicare Spending? (NBER Working Paper 29047).

In Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams (NBER Working Paper 28684), Sophie Calder-Wang, Paul Gompers, and Kevin Huang analyze data from an entrepreneurship course at Harvard Business School (HBS) to explore the links between team diversity and entrepreneurial success.

The researchers collect data from a course taken by all 3,684 first-year MBA students in the classes of 2013 to 2016. Over a semester, teams of five to seven students worked together to design and launch microbusinesses, which faculty mentors and judges evaluated…

Social Security is the primary source of income for most individuals aged 65 and up. Benefits depend on the worker’s earning history and on the age at which benefits are claimed, which may be as early as age 62. For each month beyond the Full Retirement Age (FRA) that the worker delays claiming (up to age 70), the monthly benefit amount is increased by the Delayed Retirement Credit (DRC).

The DRC has increased substantially over time, from 3 percent per year of delay for those born prior to 1925 to 8 percent per year of delay for those born in 1943 and later. The DRC increase was phased in gradually in 0.5 percentage point increments every two years. This change has strengthened the incentive to delay claiming for more recent birth cohorts. However, the effects of the policy change have not been extensively studied. …