NBER

New country-level measures of productivity in collecting taxes and their role in economic development, from Radhika Goyal, Anders Jensen, David Lagakos, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Yuntian Zhao www.nber.org/papers/w35934

Albania banned religion in 1967, razing religious sites except the 6 percent listed as monuments in 1948. Where none survived, women’s employment rose more, from Richard Murphy and Shqiponja Telhaj www.nber.org/papers/w35933

France’s Visale rent insurance helps vulnerable tenants access housing and move to higher-wage areas at moderate public cost—but may raise rents for ineligible renters, from Thomas Bézy, Antoine B. Levy, and Timothy McQuade www.nber.org/papers/w35932

Using the case study of California's $20 fast-food minimum wage to explore the sensitivity of synthetic control and synthetic difference-in-differences methods to researcher degrees of freedom, from Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, Jonathan Meer, and Joshua D. Nguyen www.nber.org/papers/w35931

Featured in the latest Bulletin on Entrepreneurship: Who Gets Ahead in Venture Capital: New Evidence from 100,000 Investors' Careers www.nber.org/be/20262/who...

Finding moderate effects of most unconditional financial policies on college attendance, with small effects on completion conditional on attendance. By contrast, some merit-based incentives have substantial effects, from Harris, Taber, and Yang www.nber.org/papers/w35930

Studying the role occupational ladders play in average wage growth and in the fanning out of wages over the life cycle, from Henry E. Siu, @kellyfoley.bsky.social, and @cortesecon.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w35929

Self-oriented central banks should care about currency misalignments. Cooperation isn't needed if policy rules are set before asset trading; setting them after lowers welfare, from Louphou Coulibaly and Charles Engel www.nber.org/papers/w35928

Can AI predict household behavior? HouseholdBench tests 13 LLMs on 32 tasks. A fine-tuned open model rivals frontier AI and approaches statistical benchmarks, from Jin Huang, Diego Ferreras Garrucho, Yutong Xie, Walter M. Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei, Chen Lian, and Jonathon Hazell www.nber.org/papers/w35927

Managerial misperceptions and heuristics lead to inefficient contract design, reducing firm performance by over 55 percent and challenging key assumptions of optimal contracting, from Francis Annan and Collin B. Raymond www.nber.org/papers/w35788

Featured in the latest Digest: Firm Responses to Changes in Overtime Pay Thresholds www.nber.org/digest/20261...

Why give foreign aid, and how? The why is complicated yet often converges to the same policy. The how is about the evidence, from @deankarlan.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w35926

Formalizing and generalizing the theory behind using “calibration questions” to correct for scale-use heterogeneity, from Daniel J. Benjamin, Kristen B. Cooper, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Jiannan Zhou www.nber.org/papers/w35925

If China’s goal is to reduce its carbon emissions and thereby slow climate change, benchmarks need to be tightened within the existing rate-based system or an alternative system adopted, from Shuang Zhang and Douglas Almond www.nber.org/papers/w35924

A low-cost intervention in which coaches delivered text messages that encouraged persistence promoted high school completion among adults who returned to earn a diploma, from Alberto Ortega, Pietro Pellerito, and Patrick S. Turner www.nber.org/papers/w35923

Health care may save or harm the federal budget, from @davidmcutler.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w35922

Arguing that conventional migration regressions can be biased, as they do not reflect how workers choose among competing locations, from Kirill Borusyak, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, and Brian K. Kovak www.nber.org/papers/w35921

Reviewing the evidence on firm-sponsored training and shows that firms train workers differently depending on how they are organized, from David J. Deming, Raffaella Sadun, and Christopher T. Stanton www.nber.org/papers/w35920

Venture capital finances customer capital intensive firms, having shifted away from knowledge capital intensive firms over the past 30 years, from Martin Aragoneses, Young Soo Jang, and Amir Sufi www.nber.org/papers/w35919

Documenting that firms' investment responds to global price of risk shocks. Constructing a model to identify a risk dimension to stabilization policies, from Caitlin Hegarty, Matias Moretti, Pablo Ottonello, and Diego J. Perez www.nber.org/papers/w35918

France’s 35-hour workweek didn’t generate work-sharing: absent tax cuts, employment would have fallen 3.8%, concentrated among lower-skill workers. TFP rose 2%, output fell 1%, from Pauline Carry, Claire Montialoux, Elio Nimier-David, Alexandra Roulet, and Nina Roussille www.nber.org/papers/w35917

Challenging the assumption that stronger intellectual property rights alone would catalyze discovery-based R&D, from Chirantan Chatterjee, Aniruddh Bhaskaran, and Matthew J. Higgins www.nber.org/papers/w35916

Public transit access affects school choice in Chicago, with longer travel times limiting demand for top-rated schools among Black students, from Cecilia H. Moreira, Steven L. Puller, and Ini Umosen www.nber.org/papers/w35915

Using a dynamic factor time series model to estimate the national mortality impact of the Great Recession, from Amy Finkelstein, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Enzo Profili www.nber.org/papers/w35914

How do Fed Chairs spend their time? Systematically analyzing the daily calendars of Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell, from @tdecon.bsky.social and Dali Tsakadze www.nber.org/papers/w35913

In rural Sierra Leone, upgrading savings groups into mobile money and bank agents expands markets, but consumer feedback drives larger gains for households, groups, and providers, from Francis Annan and Seth Garz www.nber.org/papers/w35912

The latest NBER Reporter is now live: www.nber.org/reporter?pag... Featuring Mark Duggan’s Martin Feldstein Lecture, and research summaries by: • Christoph Boehm, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar • Kasey Buckles, Joseph Price, and Zachary Ward • Kalena Cortes • Stefan Nagel

In theory, demand distortions such as credit constraints can raise the welfare gains from green subsidies. Demonstrating this in an RCT of induction stoves in Kenya, from @sberkouwer.bsky.social and Joshua T. Dean www.nber.org/papers/w35911

The covariance matrix of asset returns is assumed to have an eigenvalue cliff. Showing that the cliff does not survive the conditioning information on which modern empirical asset pricing relies, from Mikhail Chernov, Bryan T. Kelly, Semyon Malamud, and Johannes Schwab www.nber.org/papers/w35910

Characterizing equilibrium in models with endogenous production networks, generalizes Hulten's Theorem, and describes the macro effects of micro volatility, from Simone Cerreia-Vioglio, Roberto Corrao, Joel P. Flynn, and Giacomo Lanzani www.nber.org/papers/w35909

Expanding Medicaid increased credit-card borrowing by improving access to credit. The credit-supply channel generated 30 percent of the policy’s net welfare gains, from Gideon Bornstein and Sasha Indarte www.nber.org/papers/w35908

Mortgage fee waivers meant to help borrowers often benefit lenders instead: New evidence shows loan officers pass through less than 40 percent of the savings, from Neil Bhutta, Benjamin J. Keys, and Adithya Raajkumar www.nber.org/papers/w35907

Direct estimates show home-foreign expenditure elasticities rise with domestic expenditure shares, reducing gains from trade relative to fixing elasticities at initial values, from Jonathan Vogel www.nber.org/papers/w35906

Featured in the latest Digest: Subsidized Childcare and Mothers' Labor Outcomes in Quebec www.nber.org/digest/20261...

Showing that widespread use of LLMs in credit markets can lead to an endogenous market structure where ex-ante identical lenders specialize across qualitatively distinct segments, from Maryam Farboodi, Péter Kondor, and Pablo Kurlat www.nber.org/papers/w35905

Are we consuming too much groundwater from Earth's 3,400 aquifers? Three- to four-fifths of aquifers have water extraction above the welfare-maximizing rate, costing trillions of dollars, from Brian Greaney, @joseph-s-shapiro.bsky.social, and Katherine R.H. Wagner www.nber.org/papers/w35904

Open call for papers, Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. Conference to be held in Stanford, CA on June 2–3, 2027. Submit papers by 11:59pm EDT on February 18, 2027. More information: www.nber.org/calls-papers...

Before 1906, naturalizations spiked 30 percent in election years. Federal standards erased that cycle, especially in patronage-run cities. Rules can thus discipline political bias, from Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu www.nber.org/papers/w35903

Why does US monetary policy move global asset prices so much? Dollar funding: when the Fed tightens, dollar-funded arbitrageurs lose wealth, raising the global price of risk, from Rohan Kekre and Moritz Lenel www.nber.org/papers/w35902

Featured in the latest Bulletin on the Economics of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias: Employment and Cognitive Decline www.nber.org/ba/20262/emp...

Modeling the labor market and public budget effects of immigration finds that inflows in Europe and US in 2019–2024 mostly increased welfare of natives, from Michele Battisti, Giovanni Peri, and Eleonora Romano www.nber.org/papers/w35901

Studying the role of foreign ideas in US innovation by constructing a directed “genealogy” of technologies from the full text of 13 million patents filed between 1887 and 2024, from Tarek Alexander Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, and Juan Cruz Lopez Del Valle www.nber.org/papers/w35900

California's Billionaire Tax Act would collect roughly $30 billion. Accounting for lost income taxes from departures, the mean Net Present Value is negative $39 billion, from Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh www.nber.org/papers/w35899

Multilateral controls on dual-use goods reduce leakage and adversaries’ real military spending. Acting alone, even with an embargo, cannot match the security impact, from Jingting Fan, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limão www.nber.org/papers/w35898

Inverting structural gravity to recover trade cost changes delivering targeted outcomes. Domestic cost changes are far more powerful than international ones, from James E. Anderson, Mario Larch, and Yoto V. Yotov www.nber.org/papers/w35897

Documenting three findings that challenge the conventional view of pension funds as stabilizing investors, from Aleksandar Andonov, Kristy A. E. Jansen, and Joshua Rauh www.nber.org/papers/w35896

Changes in the US Supreme Court's ideological balance shift macroeconomic expectations. Demonstrating this using deaths of Supreme Court Justices as quasi-experimental shifts, from @tdecon.bsky.social and Naixin Zhang www.nber.org/papers/w35895

Presenting a roadmap for ex-ante power calculations when evaluating policies aimed at small, vulnerable populations, illustrated with abortion bans' effects on economic welfare, from Kelly M. Jones and Mayra Pineda-Torres www.nber.org/papers/w35894

Brazil's affirmative action helped more disadvantaged students graduate from top college programs, but knock-on effects from displacing other students reduced the overall gains, from Nano Barahona, Cauê Dobbin, and Sebastián Otero www.nber.org/papers/w35893

Studying how strategic interactions in states and actions shape equilibrium dynamics, persistence, the planner’s allocation, and identification in linear-quadratic mean field games, from Fernando E. Alvarez and David Argente www.nber.org/papers/w35892