Research

New NBER Papers

Latest Books

The Digest

The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages
Article
Minimum wage announcements by national firms have striking spillovers to other firms. Many employers responded to Amazon’s $15 minimum wage by matching it. Between 2014 and 2019, five major national retailers — Amazon, Walmart, Target, CVS, and Costco — implemented company-wide minimum wages. Ellora Derenoncourt, Clemens Noelke, David Weil, and Bledi Taska investigate the impacts of these policies on low-wage workers who are not employed by these firms in...

Racial Disparities in Paycheck Protection Program Lending
Article
Black-owned businesses were least likely to receive Paycheck Protection Program loans from small and mid-sized banks, where subjectivity was most likely to influence lending decisions. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was designed to help businesses retain employees as they weathered the COVID-19 pandemic. Private lenders administered PPP loans at virtually no risk to themselves, as the loans were federally guaranteed. In Racial Disparities in Access to...

The Reporter

Inflation Dynamics during COVID-19
Article
Author(s): Alberto Cavallo
For over a decade, my research has explored the use of high-frequency microdata to measure inflation and other economic statistics in real time in an effort to make academic macroeconomic research more timely and useful for policymakers. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to test this methodology, particularly around the topic of inflation. After the crisis started, the United States experienced a relatively small decline in inflation in 2020, followed...

Public Health Efforts and the US Mortality Transition
Article
Author(s): D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles & Daniel I. Rees
In the mid-1800s, mortality rates in US and Western European cities were much higher than those in rural areas. Since then, urban mortality rates have fallen dramatically. Driven by reductions in infectious diseases and diseases of infancy and childhood, this phenomenon is often referred to as the mortality transition and has been recognized as one of the most significant developments in the history of human welfare.1 By the 1940s, the mortality “penalty” from living in a...

The Bulletin on Retirement & Disability

Panel on Social Security and COVID-19 Labor Market Effects
Article
The 2021 NBER Summer Institute's Economics of Social Security meeting featured a panel discussion on the implications of COVID-19 related disruptions in the US labor market for Social Security. NBER President James Poterba introduced the panel by noting that the pandemic could affect Social Security in many ways, including through effects on economic growth, long-term fertility, and mortality, as well as on labor market outcomes such as labor force participation and wages...

The Effect of Changes in Social Security’s Delayed Retirement Credit
Article
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...

The Bulletin on Health

Medicaid Managed Care Outcomes Vary with Patient Health
Article
In 2016, 80 percent of Medicaid enrollees received their insurance through private managed care plans. These private plans take responsibility for providing medical care for Medicaid recipients in exchange for a fixed per-enrollee payment from the state. These arrangements could restrain Medicaid spending if private firms had a greater incentive to control costs than the government does. However, such cost savings could have implications for patient health. Outcomes...

Urgent Care Centers Raise Medicare Costs
Article
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...

The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

Exploring the Chemistry of Entrepreneurial Teams
Article
Teams with more women performed better when they had a female section leader. Ethnically diverse teams performed worse than homogenous teams, especially when diversity was assigned by algorithm. 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...

Universities Catalyze Entrepreneurial Culture
Article
Areas near a national laboratory or a research university exhibit more startup activity, but increased federal research support only spurs entrepreneurship near universities. Many cities and states search for policy levers that could enable them to develop a startup culture. In "More than an Ivory Tower: The Impact of Research Institutions on the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship" (NBER Working Paper 28846), Valentina Tartari and Scott Stern conclude...