Working Papers
New research by NBER affiliates, circulated for discussion and comment. The NBER distributes more than 1,200 working papers each year. These papers have not been peer reviewed. Papers issued more than 18 months ago are open access. More recent papers are available without charge to affiliates of subscribing academic institutions, employees of NBER Corporate Associates, government employees in the US, journalists, and residents of low-income countries. The NBER is working to make its web content accessible to all. Please address any concerns or requests for assistance to webaccessibility@nber.org.
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NEWNew This Week
While U.S. legislation prohibits employers from sharing information about their employees compensation with each other, companies are still allowed to acquire and use more aggregated data provided by third parties. Most medium and large firms report using this type of data to set salaries, a...
NEWThe Covid-19 Baby Bump: The Unexpected Increase in U.S. Fertility Rates in Response to the Pandemic
We use restricted natality microdata covering the universe of U.S. births for 2015-2021 and California births from 2015 to August 2022 to examine the childbearing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although fertility rates declined in 2020, these declines appear to reflect reductions in travel to...
More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes....
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a large and immediate drop in employment among US workers, along with major expansions of unemployment insurance and work from home. We use Current Population Survey and Social Security application data to study employment among older adults and their participation in...
How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common (PISA)...
The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of...
We study two-way-fixed-effects regressions (TWFE) with several treatment variables. Under a parallel trends assumption, we show that the coefficient on each treatment identifies a weighted sum of that treatments effect, with possibly negative weights, plus a weighted sum of the effects of the other...
This paper provides new evidence on the causal impacts of city-wide racial segregation on intergenerational mobility. We use an instrumental variable approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in segregation due to the arrangement of railroad tracks in the nineteenth century. Our analysis...
How does ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance affect stock returns? Answering this question is difficult because existing measures of ESG perfor- mance ESG ratings are noisy and, therefore, standard regression estimates suffer from attenuation bias. To address the bias, we...
We use arbitrage activity in equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets to characterize the frictions and constraints facing intermediaries. The average pairwise correlation between the 29 arbitrage spreads that we study is 21%. These low correlations are inconsistent with canonical...
Currently, most U.S. electricity consumers pay a constant price per kWh consumed that accounts for most of their bill. Ongoing developments in the power system increase efficiency gains that can be made from exposing consumers to widely varying wholesale spot prices. Pure spot pricing is not popular...
NEWCan Pollution Cause Poverty? The Effects of Pollution on Educational, Health and Economic Outcomes
Author(s) - Claudia Persico
Although pollution is widespread, there is little evidence about how it might harm childrens long run outcomes. Using the detailed, geocoded data that follows national representative cohorts of children born to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth respondents over time, I compare siblings who...
We link the sustained appreciation of the U.S. dollar from 2011 to 2019 to international capital flows driven by primitive economic factors. We show that increases in foreign investors net savings, increases in U.S. monetary policy rates relative to the rest of the world, and shifts in investor...
Author(s) - Viral V. Acharya, Abhiman Das, Nirupama Kulkarni, Prachi Mishra & Nagpurnanand R. Prabhala
We study a bank run in India in which private bank branches experience sudden and considerable loss of deposits that seek safety in state-owned public sector banks (PSBs). We trace the consequences of this reallocation using granular data on bank-firm relationships and branch balance sheets. The...
Author(s) - Seth G. Benzell, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Maria Kazakova, Guillermo LaGarda, Kristina Nesterova, Victor Yifan Ye & Andrey Zubarev
Which region(s) will come to dominate the world economy? This paper develops the Global Gaidar Model (GGM), a 17-region, 2-skills, 100-period OLG model, to address this and other questions. The model is carefully calibrated to 2017 UN demographic and IMF fiscal data. Productivity growth and its...
The contraction in health care consumption at the start of the pandemic provides insight into central economic questions of waste and productivity in the U.S. health care system. Using linked mortality and Electronic Medical Records, we compare people who had outpatient appointments scheduled for...
We use a panel survey of ~19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study learning loss after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened. Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of ~0.7...
We examine whether impact investing is more effective in fostering business venture success and social impact when investments are directed toward ventures located in disadvantaged urban areas compared to similar investments directed toward ventures located outside these areas. We explore this...
Vaccines influence the course of pandemics both directly, by protecting the vaccinated, and indirectly, by reducing transmission to the unvaccinated, a key externality. Estimating direct effects is challenging because of selective vaccine take-up; estimating indirect effects also poses difficulty as...
We show how to recover the money-metric utility function, which converts income at one point in time into equivalent income at another point in time, using repeated cross-sectional household data. Our procedure allows unrestricted preferences, but requires that households preferences be the same in...
We analyze how information disclosure policy affects investment efficiency in non-cooperative settings with information externalities. In a two-firm, two-period model, we characterize equilibrium behavior under policies which disclose whether investment returns exceed a predefined level. These...
We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates. Despite...
Many transportation policies indirectly affect vehicle travel and resulting externalities by inducing changes in vehicle scrappage rates. We leverage the staggered removal of state-level safety inspection programs across the United States within an instrumental variables (IV) framework to produce...
Author(s) - Joseph E. Aldy, Dallas Burtraw, Carolyn Fischer, Meredith Fowlie, Roberton C. Williams III & Maureen L. Cropper
Economists have for decades recommended that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases be taxedor otherwise pricedto provide incentives for their reduction. The United States does not have a federal carbon tax; however, many state and federal programs to reduce carbon emissions effectively price...
We match survey data of Italian firms that includes a repeated experiment in which information about inflation is randomly provided to firms over time with detailed credit data that covers the borrowing decisions of firms. This allows us to study how exogenous variation in inflation expectations...
Infrastructure assets have undergone substantial privatization in recent decades. How do different types of owners target and manage these assets? And does the contract formcontrol rights (concession) vs. outright ownership (sale)matter? We explore these questions in the context of global airports,...
Author(s) - Edward N. Wolff
Recent work on wealth inequality based on the capitalization method wherein aggregate wealth totals are distributed in proportion to various forms of income like dividends has motivated a concern about whether rates of return on assets vary across the wealth distribution. In this study, I use a new...
We study a general screening model that encompasses a health insurance market in which consumers have multiple dimensions of private information and a price-setting insurer (e.g., a monopolist or a social planner) offers vertically differentiated contracts. We combine theory and empirics to provide...
In theory, free and fair elections can improve the selection of politicians and incentivize them to exert effort. In practice, incumbency advantage and coordination issues may lead to the (re)election of bad politicians. We ask whether these two forces compound each other. Using a regression...
We study how pre-pandemic inequalities in America influenced social distancing over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Richer counties tended to see more protective mobility responses in the initial (pre-pharmaceutical) phase, but less protective responses later. Near linearity of this income...
We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals treatments when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media...
This paper reviews a framework for studying the aggregation and propagation of microeconomic shocks in general equilibrium. We discuss the determinants of aggregate measures of real economic activity, like real GDP, real domestic absorption, and aggregate productivity in both efficient and...
In developing countries, most manufacturing firms are small and located in high-density urban areas, often near congested streets. To study the determinants and implications of this location choice, we collect a novel firm survey and detailed air pollution measurements within Ugandan cities. We find...
Author(s) - Derek Lemoine
I study how policymakers can access and act on the information about climate change damages that is dispersed throughout the economy. I analyze a new dynamic deposit-refund instrument (called carbon shares) that I show can: i) efficiently price emissions conditional on information, ii) efficiently...
This paper estimates, within a common framework, the effects of four types of integration polices on the employment probability and earnings of refugees in Denmark during the last three decades. We first review the studies that use a credible identification strategy to evaluate the causal effects of...
We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and employment) of families and children with very low incomes. We use a parameterized difference-in-differences...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fairlie
Many small businesses have closed, lost revenues, or downsized as a response to health and economic disruptions caused by COVID-19. But, were economic losses in the pandemic disproportionately felt by businesses owned by people of color? This paper provides the first study of the impacts of COVID-19...
Intensive agriculture and deep plowing resulted in top-soil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s. These effects have been shown to affect agricultural income and land values that persisted for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in-utero and early-life exposures, it is...
We provide a comprehensive assessment of leading monetary policy frameworks away from and at the ELB. Inflation targeting, dual mandate, average inflation targeting under 4- and 10-period horizons, price level targeting, and nominal GDP level targeting are evaluated in a laboratory setting. Contrary...
This paper summarizes empirical findings from a series of recent papers studying a replication of the Jamaica Reach Up and Learn home visiting program in China, China REACH. It collects more detailed information than is available on the original program. An analysis of it facilitates investigation...
We develop an assignment model of automation. Each of a continuum of tasks of variable complexity is assigned to either capital or one of a continuum of labor skills. We characterize conditions for interior automation, whereby tasks of intermediate complexity are assigned to capital. Interior...
Author(s) - Stefanie Stantcheva
Surveys are an essential approach for eliciting otherwise invisible factors such as perceptions, knowledge and beliefs, attitudes, and reasoning. These factors are critical determinants of social, economic, and political outcomes. Surveys are not merely a research tool. They are also not only a way...
We study the impact of remote work on the commercial office sector. We document large shifts in lease revenues, office occupancy, lease renewal rates, lease durations, and market rents as firms shifted to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that the pandemic has had large...
Perceptions of global supply chains (GSCs) have shifted in recent years from a positive to a more cautious view. Standard GSC measures have mostly not adapted to this change as they focus on participation in, rather than exposure to, foreign supply chains. This paper presents the tools necessary to...
The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...
We analyze whether second-generation immigrants have different political preferences relative to observationally identical children of citizens in the host countries. Using data on individual voting behavior in 22 European countries between 2001 and 2017, we characterize each vote on a left-right...
Author(s) - Nicholas Z. Muller
Carbon intensity from fossil fuel use in the United States economy peaked in 1917. World War I ended, and the Spanish Flu pandemic broke out one year later in 1918. This paper contends that these events, coupled with associated turmoil in the domestic coal industry, were largely responsible for the...
This study analyzes information production and trading behavior of banks with lending relationships. We combine trade-by-trade supervisory data and credit-registry data to examine banks' proprietary trading in borrower stocks around a large number of corporate events. We find that relationship banks...
The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts choices of learning modalitywhether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instructionover the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis takes...
This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where excess supply might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of Chinas rapidly...
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