National Bureau of Economic Research

R. Glenn Hubbard, Angelo Melino, and John Pepper were elected to the NBER Board of Directors at the Board’s September 23 meeting.

Hubbard will represent Columbia University. He is the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics and the Director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at the Columbia Business School. He is also the Dean Emeritus of the School. Between 2001 and 2003, he served as the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and between 1991 and 1993, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at the US Treasury Department. He was a Research Associate in four NBER programs — Corporate Finance, Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Monetary Economics, and Public Economics — prior to joining the Board. Hubbard received his undergraduate degree in…

Average property insurance premiums have risen by more than 30 percent since 2020, and there is wide variation by location. Premiums have risen the most for homeowners in areas with the highest risk of natural disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires.

While premiums have always been higher in riskier locations, the relationship between disaster risk and premiums has grown stronger over time. If present trends in the incidence of natural disasters continue, premiums are likely to continue to rise.

The main factor behind the higher prices homeowners face is a rapid rise in reinsurance rates, according to Benjamin J. Keys and Philip Mulder in Property Insurance and Disaster Risk: New Evidence from Mortgage Escrow Data (NBER Working Paper 32579). Insurance companies buy reinsurance to guard against one or more catastrophes...

Between 1995 and 2010, the share of births in Sweden that involved assisted reproductive technologies (ART) rose from 2 to 10 percent. These treatments range from low-cost drugs to costly and invasive interventions, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

In The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (NBER Working Paper 32445), Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova provide new evidence on the consequences of infertility and the role of insurance coverage in household decisions to initiate treatment. Using administrative, population-wide data for the period 2006–2019, the researchers estimate the use of infertility treatment. They find that over the course of their fertile years...

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) “family maximum” rules cap the benefits that can be paid to a disabled worker’s family at the lower of 85 percent of the worker’s average indexed monthly earnings and 150 percent of their primary insurance amount. The effect of these rules is that family payments are the same whether a DI beneficiary has one or many dependents, and when DI beneficiaries have low benefit determinations, there are no payments for dependents at all. 

In Understanding the Disparate Impacts of the Social Security Disability Insurance Family Maximum Rules (NBER RDRC Paper NB23-07), Timothy J. Moore examines how the economic wellbeing of DI beneficiary...

Negotiations between workers and firm management are a defining feature of labor markets around the world. By many measures, labor relations have deteriorated substantially in recent years, often leading to strikes. In the United States, there were nearly 350 labor actions last year, the most in two decades, followed by 124 in the early months of 2024. Most of these actions are related to differences over worker compensation, benefits, and amenities.

Organizational economics is premised on the notion that firms are not monoliths but rather groups of individuals attempting to coordinate actions towards a set of common goals. Firm performance, then, depends critically on the preferences, incentives, and constraints of individuals, and the nature of their interaction within the organization. Understanding these many factors can…

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…