National Bureau of Economic Research

More than 2,800 researchers, hailing from 31 countries, traveled to Cambridge for the 48th annual NBER Summer Institute, which was held over three weeks in mid-July. The Summer Institute included 50 distinct workshops that were arranged by more than 150 organizers. Most of the meetings were streamed on the NBER’s YouTube channel.

The participants represented 432 universities, central banks, think tanks, businesses, and government agencies. About one third of the participants were NBER affiliates; over 500 were first-time Summer Institute participants.

The 602 research papers presented during the course of the Summer Institute were selected from 3,448 submissions, implying an…

There is broad agreement that the wages of unionized workers are higher than those of workers who are not union members. There is less consensus, however, on the source of this wage premium and in particular the extent to which it reflects actions by unions rather than differences between union members and other workers or unionized and other firms. In Why Do Union Jobs Pay More? New Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data (NBER Working Paper 33740), Pierre-Loup Beauregard, Thomas Lemieux, Derek Messacar, and Raffaele Saggio…

This is the final issue of the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, coinciding with the closure of the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC). The RDRC was a vibrant hub of research activity from 2003 to 2025 and had a significant impact on stimulating analytic work on Social Security and the wellbeing of Social Security beneficiaries across a wide community of investigators at universities across the United States. 

Over 22 years, from the launch of the NBER Retirement Research Center in 2003, through the addition of the NBER Disability Research Center in 2012 and their consolidation into the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center in 2019, to the closing of the Centers program this year, the RDRC supported more than 400 research projects.

The RDRC was funded by the Social Security Administration (SSA) through a cooperative agreement...

Aggregation is a central problem for macroeconomics—how to reason about aggregate economic statistics that are composed of many heterogeneous and interacting parts. For example, how do energy shocks, like disruptions to the supply of Russian gas or Middle Eastern oil, affect real output and consumption in Europe and the United States? How do changes in consumer spending behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic affect employment and inflation? How do tariffs on Chinese goods affect real wages in the United States? How does churn in the supply chains of firms—additions and separations of suppliers—affect real output? The common element in these questions is their granularity: The economic shock is not aggregate in nature and affects different parts of the economy differently. The economist’s job is to sum up all…

Lower-income adults in the US are more likely to lack health insurance and to suffer worse health, a correlation that raises the long-standing question of whether health insurance affects health. In Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults (NBER Working Paper 33719), Angela Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer present new evidence on this question by evaluating the consequences of recent Medicaid expansions. 

To study the impact of Medicaid on mortality, the researchers exploit variation in the state-level adoption and timing of expansions of Medicaid eligibility to childless, nondisabled, non-elderly adults. Most, but…

The surge in remote work in recent years has transformed labor markets, with potentially important implications for the interaction between workplace flexibility and entrepreneurship. In Hustling from Home? Work from Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry (NBER Working Paper 33237), John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi explore whether the increased flexibility provided by work-from-home (WFH) arrangements has affected entrepreneurial decisions. They focus on the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment and analyze how the sudden shift to remote work affected new business creation. Guided…