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The Costs of Sovereign Debt Crises
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Sovereign debt crises have been a recurring phenomenon in the global economy for over two centuries, with far-reaching consequences for both creditors and debtor nations. Two recent studies examine creditor losses as well as the often-overlooked social costs of sovereign defaults.
In Sovereign Haircuts: 200 Years of Creditor Losses (NBER Working Paper 32599), Clemens M. Graf von Luckner, Josefin Meyer, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch analyze creditor losses in 327 restructurings across 205 default spells...
Cecilia Rouse Delivers 2024 Feldstein Lecture
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Cecilia Rouse, president of the Brookings Institution and a professor at Princeton University, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers between 2021 and 2023, presented the 2024 Martin Feldstein Lecture on "Lessons for Economists from the Pandemic" on July 22. Her presentation highlighted the challenges to policy design in a time of heightened uncertainty about the public health trajectory of COVID-19. Rouse, a former member of the NBER Board of Directors, also described policy trade-offs associated with some of the key macroeconomic and microeconomic policies adopted in response to the pandemic. The Feldstein Lecture Series was launched in 2009 to celebrate the late Martin Feldstein's three decades of transformative leadership of the NBER.
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries
Program Report: Children and Families
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On July 1, the Program on Children was renamed the Program on Children and Families. This change, which better captures the range of research carried out by its 171 affiliates, in part marks a return to the program’s roots. In 1993, the late Alan Krueger launched an NBER project on the Economics of Families and Children. It subsequently became a program and has been known as the Program on Children since 1997. Broadening the program name recognizes the complex web of interactions, economic and otherwise, that involve children. Economic and other forces that affect families can have important effects on children, and developments involving children in turn have significant influence on the wellbeing of adult family members.
In the eight years since our last program report, scholars affiliated with the program have authored 919 working papers on a wide array of topics. We begin this report with a sampling of their continuing research in core areas, such as the long-term consequences of early-life conditions and the effects of public programs affecting children. We then summarize studies...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health
Decision-Making by Medical Surrogates for End-of-Life Patients
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As the population ages, the need for surrogate decision-makers for patients near the end of their lives is rising. When hospitalized older adults are unable to actively participate in decisions about their care, surrogates must make choices, often with limited information. Advance care planning with written directives may improve surrogate decision-making, but directives have limitations: preferences may change after completion, directions may not apply to the ultimate situation, and there can be communication challenges between the surrogates and care teams.
In How Do Surrogates Make Treatment Decisions for Patients with Dementia? An Experimental Survey Study (NBER Working Paper 32116), researchers Lauren Hersch Nicholas, Kenneth M. Langa, Scott D. Halpern, and Mario Macis examined...
From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in SSDI Entry and Health
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In a new study of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in SSDI Entry and Health (NBER RDRC Center Paper NB23-04), Colleen Carey, Nolan H. Miller, and David Molitor document significant racial and ethnic differences in the use of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Non-Hispanic Blacks and Native Americans enter the SSDI program at the highest rates relative to their share of the population while non-Hispanic Asians enter at the lowest rates. Average health status, measured by medical expenditure…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship
Immigration Policy and Entrepreneurs’ Choice of Startup Location
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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.
In The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program (NBER Working Paper 31634), Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon investigate the impact of Canada's Start-up Visa Program on US-based…
Featured Working Papers
Texas data reveal substantial effects of middle school principals who best promote cognitive skills on the schooling and work achievements of their students, Eric A. Hanushek, Andrew J. Morgan, Steven G. Rivkin, Jeffrey C. Schiman, Ayman Shakeel, and Lauren Sartain find.
Despite underutilized land and higher wages in slave states in 1860, free farmers were reluctant to take advantage of the opportunities, indicating an aversion of free labor to working in a slave society, Hoyt Bleakley and Paul Rhode find.
Daughters of civil servants who had female coworkers due to the expansion of women’s clerical employment during World War I were more likely than daughters of similar workers without such exposure to work later in life, command higher income, and have fewer children, according to research by Abhay Aneja, Silvia Farina, and Guo Xu.
Using Canadian Homescan Panel Data on food purchases for 2020–24, Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov estimate that a rise in household purchases of sale items reduced the inflation in the average unit price of purchased goods by 4.1 percent relative to inflation calculated with regular prices. Households also shifted toward cheaper brands, which experienced more rapid inflation during this period than other products.
Analysis of regulatory filings by Judson Boomhower, Meredith Fowlie, Jacob Gellman, and Andrew Plantinga finds that different insurance companies follow very different approaches in modeling local wildfire risk. Those that rely on models that make less granular predictions charge higher prices and are more likely to withdraw from some markets entirely.
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