AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 2, June 2023
The Reporter
A free quarterly publication featuring program updates, several summaries of affiliates' research, and news about the NBER
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The International Trade and Investment (ITI) Program holds three regular meetings annually, in winter, spring, and at the NBER Summer Institute. The ITI Program has 85 research associates, 11 faculty research fellows, two research economists, and 34 members with primary affiliations in other NBER programs, making a total of 132 members. Research within the group covers a wide range of topics, such as explaining patterns of international trade and foreign direct investment,...
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Economic crises bring questions about the design and implications of fiscal systems to the forefront. In the United States, state and local governments employ roughly one in seven workers and spend an amount equivalent to one-fifth of GDP. Because many of these entities operate with balanced budget requirements, downturns create pressure because declines in revenue coincide with a rise in demand for public services. These pressures come with some urgency, as state and local...
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Life expectancy has increased tremendously in the United States, from an average of roughly 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 2020. However, increases in longevity have not been equally distributed among all subgroups of the population. Longevity is an important component of well-being, possibly as important as income; people are willing to pay very large sums to protect and increase it. Understanding the evolution and distribution of lifespan is critical to understanding...
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Search frictions in the labor market make it difficult for workers to locate the jobs that best suit their abilities. Search frictions in the product market make it difficult for buyers to find the products that best suit their preferences. Improvements in information and communications technology (ICT) that have ostensibly reduced search frictions —telephones, fax machines, the internet, smartphones — should have made it easier for workers to find better jobs and, in turn,...
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Traffic congestion poses a significant challenge in urban centers, especially in fast-growing emerging economies where rapid urbanization and increased travel demand have outpaced road infrastructure and regulations. Longer travel times and worsened air quality resulting from congestion hinder mobility and urban development while reducing the overall quality of life. In the 2018 TomTom Traffic Index, which is based on real-time GPS traffic data from 403 cities in 56...
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Following a call for nominations in January, the NBER has appointed 68 new affiliates: 15 research associates and 53 faculty research fellows. In addition, seven faculty research fellows have been promoted to research associates.
The directors of the NBER’s 20 research programs recommend appointments after consulting with steering committees made up of leading scholars. Research associate appointments must be approved by the NBER Board of Directors...
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Ten postdoctoral scholars have been awarded NBER fellowships for the 2023–24 academic year, following widely disseminated calls for applications.
Riley League (left), who received his PhD from Duke University, and Parker Rogers (right), who received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego, will hold postdoctoral fellowships in aging and health economics supported by the National Institute on Aging. League is focusing on the role of administrative burdens...
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Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, a research associate in the NBER’s Public Economics Program, has won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually by the American Economic Association to an American economist under the age of 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.
Zucman has made path-breaking contributions in public finance, using rich new datasets to estimate the importance of both household and corporate...
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The American Economic Association has named four new Distinguished Fellows, three of whom — Guillermo Calvo, Olivia Mitchell, and Maurice Obstfeld — are NBER research associates.
Guillermo Calvo of Columbia University, a leading contributor in macroeconomics, international finance, and the analysis of sovereign debt, is a research associate in the NBER’s International Finance and Macroeconomics (IFM) Program.
Olivia Mitchell of the Wharton School of the...
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Brent Neiman, an affiliate of the NBER’s International Finance and Macroeconomics and International Trade and Investment programs, is taking leave from the NBER to serve as the Deputy Under Secretary of Treasury for International Finance.
Neiman, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, has carried out research on a wide range of issues examining the causes and consequences of trade, and the financial interactions among nations.
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The NBER has awarded five fellowships to enable economic statisticians working in government statistical agencies and international organizations to attend the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth (CRIW) meeting to be held July 17-18 2023 in Cambridge, MA. The meeting will be part of the NBER Summer Institute.
The CRIW was founded in 1936 by Simon Kuznets to promote research and implementation of economic measurement. Its meetings provide opportunities for...
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The NBER is launching a new Economics of Health Program that merges its existing programs in health care and health economics. For nearly three decades, two NBER programs have studied issues related to health and health care. The Health Economics Program, which was launched in the early 1970s, focused on the economic determinants of health capital and analyzed individual behaviors such as smoking and substance abuse that affect it. The Health Care Program, created in 1994,...
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Detailed programs for NBER conferences are available at nber.org/conferences
East Asian Seminar on Economics
Organizers: Takatoshi Ito and Andrew K. Rose
June 5–6, 2023
Fertility and Declining Population Growth in High-Income Countries
Organizers: Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine
June 1–2, 2023
Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy Conference
Organizers: Tatyana Deryugina, Matthew Kotchen, and Catherine Wolfram
May 25...
Books
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Nadim Ahmad, Brent R. Moulton, J. David Richardson, and Peter van de Ven, editors
The substantial increase in the complexity of global supply chains and other production arrangements over the last three decades has challenged some traditional measures of national income account aggregates and raised the potential for distortions in conventional calculations of GDP and productivity.
Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts examines a variety...
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Benjamin Jones and Josh Lerner, editors
Entrepreneurship and innovation are widely recognized as key drivers of economic dynamics and long-term prosperity. This series communicates new findings about the determinants and implications of entrepreneurial and innovative activity across the economy.
In the first paper, Joseph Barberio, Jacob Becraft, Zied Ben Chaouch, Dimitris Bertsimas, Tasuku Kitada, Michael Li, Andrew Lo, Kevin Shi, and Qingyang Xu measure...
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Matthew J. Kotchen, Tatyana Deryugina, and James H. Stock, editors
This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy.
Gilbert Metcalf examines the distributional impacts of substituting a vehicle miles traveled tax for the existing federal excise tax in the United States.
David Weisbach, Samuel Kortum, Michael Wang, and Yujia Yao consider solutions to the leakage problem of climate policy with differential tax policies on the...
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Martin Eichenbaum, Erik Hurst, and Valerie A. Ramey, editors
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2022 brings together leading scholars to discuss five research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics.
First, Andrea Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Xiaolan document the rise of a new class of worker that receives part of its labor income as equity-based compensation, its role in the recent decline in the labor share of income, and implications for the...