NBER Economy Full text
Economic decisions are often shaped by comparison points such as reference points, goals, expectations and peers. A long-standing puzzle is that decisions sometimes increase in these comparators (assimilation) and…
NBER Economy Full text
Public pension systems are long-term social contracts operating under persistent economic, demographic, and political uncertainty. Periods of turbulence, marked by financial shocks, changes in longevity, and shifting…
NBER Economy Full text
The Affordable Care Act, the largest US welfare reform since 1965, banned health insurance underwriting and rejections based on pre-existing conditions and introduced large premium subsidies for low- to middle-income…
NBER Economy Full text
Nearly the entire world's population breathes air exceeding WHO pollution guidelines, but the extent to which that exposure impairs the accumulation of human capital is not well understood. We study this using…
NBER Economy Full text
We study international cooperation in a general environment with pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities across countries. We derive two main theorems, each demonstrating that market-access commitments, a form of…
NBER Economy Full text
Using a new firm-level measure of AI investment based on AI-skilled employment—spanning machine learning through generative and agentic AI—we show that AI investments are associated with productivity growth in recent…
NBER Economy Full text
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA, P.L. 119-21) eliminates the federal GradPLUS loan program for new borrowers effective July 1, 2026, replacing nearly two decades of uncapped federal graduate lending with annual…
NBER Economy Full text
How much does pricing pollution cut aggregate emissions, and at what cost? We develop a microfounded equilibrium model of firm production and abatement that can be estimated from standard firm financial and emissions…
NBER Economy Full text
We derive four facts from experiments on the spillover effects of cash and in-kind transfer programs onto non-recipients: (1) average spillovers on consumption and asset value are negligible; (2) negative psychological…
NBER Economy Full text
Surveys provide much of what we know in social science and are often the only source of information on private behaviors, attitudes and expectations. Strands of the literature document four broad error sources: survey…
NBER Economy Full text
Liquidity savings mechanisms (LSMs) reduce the quantity of reserve balances that banks need to process payments. An LSM can mitigate coordination failures in which banks delay their payments to each other because they…
NBER Economy Full text
With complete-information bilateral bargaining in network settings, holdup is eliminated when contracts across the network are agreed atomically (all or none) via a smart contract. Applications include over-the-counter…
NBER Economy Full text
We measure how workers use genAI for their jobs in a nationally representative survey linking genAI adoption to detailed occupations and tasks. Our data provide the first task-level genAI adoption indexes, which we show…
NBER Economy Full text
We study how dominant employers can act as *electoral monopsonies*, using local labor market power to shape political preferences and electoral outcomes. We first present original survey evidence showing that workers at…
NBER Economy Full text
The economic burden of natural disasters is shaped by who is exposed, who experiences losses, how those losses alter individual economic trajectories, and how affected communities evolve in the aftermath. We link…
NBER Economy Full text
Amid renewed policy interest, the academic literature on place-based programs has expanded dramatically in recent years. In this essay, we review recent theoretical and empirical work in an effort to assess when and why…
NBER Economy Full text
Post-pandemic inflation raised fears that U.S. monetary tightening would trigger a repeat of the 1982 sudden stop in capital flows to emerging economies. Yet as of 2026 no global recession has followed. We establish…
NBER Economy Full text
Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, with little support beyond a flawed questionnaire. To analyze their decisions, we first develop methods to…
NBER Economy Full text
Private tutoring chains like Kumon and Sylvan have expanded rapidly in recent decades. Combining data on business locations, household spending, and district test scores, we study who uses these centers and how they…
NBER Economy Full text
This paper investigates the determinants of international investors’ portfolio choices between gold and sovereign bonds in an environment shaped by economic and geopolitical shocks. We develop an endogenous portfolio…
NBER Economy Full text
Unemployment rates are substantially higher and more volatile in the euro area relative to the United States. We ask to what extent the lack of cross-country labor mobility can account for unemployment dynamics in…
NBER Economy Full text
Official lending is large, senior, and countercyclical, continuing after sovereigns fall into arrears on private debt. We ask why sovereign finance exhibits this division of labor across creditors. In a production…
NBER Economy Full text
Health technology assessment bodies and policymakers have grappled with the issue of whose preferences – the general healthy population or the patient population – should be incorporated into traditional…
NBER Economy Full text
We study how opening private markets to retail investors affects investors and firms. Calibrating a production-based asset-pricing model, we find that democratization raises retail investors' welfare, but barely. Retail…
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