NBER Economy Full text
Health care utilization per capita varies widely across the United States, yet higher utilization areas have no better patient health. In the late 2000s, this pattern was widely interpreted as evidence that health care…
NBER Economy Full text
During research and development, firms must decide which types of individuals to engage in developing and testing their products. We investigate how lowering the cost of including one group shapes its representation…
NBER Economy Full text
This paper studies policy interventions intended to eliminate gender differences in labor market outcomes, principally wages. Because gender is an individual attribute rather than a manipulable treatment, the ideal…
NBER Economy Full text
This paper examines the role of government capacity to collect taxes in driving economic development. We first draw on a new macro-historical database to document that tax collections relative to tax administration…
NBER Economy Full text
This paper studies whether governments can change social norms that constrain women’s education and work, and through which mechanism. Albania’s 1967 religion ban, which created the world’s first atheist state, provides…
NBER Economy Full text
This paper shows that insuring landlords against non-payment risk can improve housing access and upward geographic mobility for fragile tenants. We study Visale, a large-scale publicly funded rent guarantee insurance…
NBER Economy Full text
Synthetic control methods hold the promise of identifying a credible counterfactual by closely reproducing pretreatment outcome paths. Their reliability, however, depends in part on how effectively they constrain…
NBER Economy Full text
Over the past four decades, the earnings gap between college graduates and non-graduates has widened substantially, prompting interest in policies aimed at promoting higher education among low-income students. A key…
NBER Economy Full text
Some occupations pay higher wages than others, even conditional on worker characteristics, implying that occupations can be ranked on a ladder. We develop a simple decomposition to study the role this occupational…
NBER Economy Full text
We examine optimal non-cooperative monetary policy in a two-country New Keynesian setting with complete financial markets and pricing to market for goods. In contrast to the case in which the law of one price holds for…
NBER Economy Full text
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to meet a key goal in economics: a quantitative model of household decision making, across a variety of settings. Yet existing evaluations cover few surveys and outcomes…
NBER Economy Full text
Forecasts of the federal budget depend greatly on trends in medical spending. Since 1970, medical spending has nearly tripled as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). However, spending growth has barely exceeded GDP…
NBER Economy Full text
A commonly used migration regression relates population changes to local labor demand shocks, often yielding small or statistically insignificant coefficients despite sizable effects on labor market outcomes. We argue…
NBER Economy Full text
Some firms are more likely than others to invest in workers’ skills. We document this phenomenon and discuss its implications in light of models of firm-sponsored skills training. The data show that better managed…
NBER Economy Full text
Venture capital specializes in the financing of customer capital intensive firms—firms with higher sales and marketing expense to revenue ratios, a higher wage bill for sales and marketing employees, and a higher…
NBER Economy Full text
We study how global financial conditions transmit to firms’ investment. We document that increases in risk premia are followed by large investment contractions, particularly among firms with higher default risk. We…
NBER Economy Full text
Do shorter workweeks generate work-sharing and productivity gains, as intended by policymakers? We study France’s pay-preserving reduction in the workweek from 39 to 35 hours, bundled with employer payroll tax cuts. We…
NBER Economy Full text
TRIPS (1995) has played a major role in shaping the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Conventional theory suggests that strong intellectual property rights (IPR) frameworks should strengthen innovation incentives. Yet…
NBER Economy Full text
School choice can weaken the link between residential neighborhood and educational opportunity only if students can reach the schools available to them. We study school choice in Chicago, where high schoolers can choose…
NBER Economy Full text
We use a dynamic factor time series model to estimate the national mortality impact of the Great Recession. In aggregate, the Great Recession reduced the average annual, age-adjusted mortality rate by about 2 percent…
NBER Economy Full text
How leaders allocate their limited time and attention is an important question in economics. This paper constructs and analyzes a novel data set covering the daily calendars of three Federal Reserve Chairs, Ben…
NBER Economy Full text
Expanding access to financial services may not be enough to develop markets in low-income settings: providers also need to be held accountable to consumers. We test this in a field experiment across 195 rural Sierra…
NBER Economy Full text
Credit constraints and other demand distortions are pervasive in lower-income contexts. A model of clean technology adoption shows that demand distortions can increase the welfare gains from green subsidies. This arises…
NBER Economy Full text
The return covariance matrix is widely assumed to have an eigenvalue cliff: a few large eigenvalues, then a bounded bulk, as in the approximate factor structure of Chamberlain and Rothschild (1983). This premise…
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