National Bureau of Economic Research
Latest from the nber, a research summary from the monthly nber digest.
Workers Auto-enrolled in Pensions Save, but also Borrow, More
Many countries require employers to enroll their workers in retirement savings plans that deposit a regular percentage of their paycheck in a retirement account unless the worker opts out. These automatic enrollment programs are meant to address concerns that the employees, left to their own devices, might save too little for retirement. Previous research has documented that automatic enrollment in a savings plan significantly increases participation and contribution rates.
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Immigration Policy and Entrepreneurs’ Choice of Startup Location
Immigrants play a significant role in the entrepreneurial landscape. In the United States, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. More than half of America's billion-dollar startup companies trace their roots to immigrant founders. There is limited research, however, on the factors that influence immigrants' decisions about where to locate their startup businesses.
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Program Report: International Finance and Macroeconomics
Affiliates of the International Finance and Macroeconomics (IFM) Program study financial interactions among nations, including cross-border capital flows, exchange rates, responses to global financial crises, and the transmission of economic shocks. Rather than attempting to summarize the more than 1,000 working papers these researchers have distributed since the last program report in 2015, we focus here on three issues that have attracted substantial research attention from this group: impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain shocks, and the privileged position of the US dollar in global asset...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
C-section Rates and Birth Outcomes
Cesarean section (C-section) is the most common surgical procedure performed in the United States. Sarah Robinson , Heather Royer , and David Silver report that C-section rates for first-time, singleton births increased from 24 percent to 32 percent between 1989 and 2017 alongside significant changes in medical practices during this period. In 2001, for example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists began recommending C-sections for breech births. The rising rate of C-sections has sparked a debate about whether this procedure is being overused.
In Geographic Variation in Cesarean Sections in the United States: Trends, Correlates, and Other Interesting Facts (NBER Working Paper 31871), the researchers study how cross-county differences in C-section usage correlate with infant and maternal...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Social Security and Retirement around the World
Over the past 25 years, labor force participation at older ages has increased dramatically. In the 12 countries that are part of the NBER’s International Social Security (ISS) project, participation among those aged 60 to 64 has risen by an average of over 20 percentage points for men and over 25 percentage points for women.
Featured Working Papers
Cultural individualism accounts for about one-third of cross-country variation in work from home (WFH) rates. Countries with high individualism levels have high WFH rates, Pablo Zarate , Mathias Dolls , Steven J. Davis , Nicholas Bloom , Jose Maria Barrero , and Cevat Giray Aksoy find.
A study by Adam Kapor of Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan finds that increased clarity of the admissions threshold at selective institutions had a significant impact on the likelihood of top-decile applying to flagship institutions. The students who enrolled as a result of this plan were more likely to come from low-income high schools and to academically outperform the students whom they displaced.
Oliver Binz , John Graham , and Matthew Kubic document a strong positive relation between the impact of earnings announcements on a company’s stock price and the level of inflation. The impact of inflation is greater for firms that are more sensitive to discount rate changes.
Using data from an Arizona State University-Uber partnership that allows eligible drivers to enroll in online college courses without charge, Esteban M. Aucejo , A. Spencer Perry , and Basit Zafar find little trade-off between total time spent working and time spent learning, suggesting that flexible hours can help students balance the two.
Reduction in federal authority over education policy following the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 led to a retreat from the use of output-based assessments of teachers, which was associated with significantly lower student achievement growth, research by Eric A. Hanushek , Patricia Saenz-Armstrong , and Alejandra Salazar shows.
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