Institutional research & analysis

Source: NBER

RESEARCH

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Safer Driving for a Price: Evidence on Behavior and Habits in Kenyan Minibuses -- by David Schönholzer, Gregory Lane, Erin M. Kelley

Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among people aged 5–29. Where traffic laws are weakly enforced, it is unclear whether road safety interventions can change behavior. We run a randomized controlled trial among 203 Kenyan minibuses, testing whether an incentive scheme improves safety overall or merely shifts unsafe driving to unmonitored times. Drivers reduce speeding by 29 percent and harsh braking by 13 percent, improving a safety index by 0.096 standard deviations. Labor-...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Wealth Inequality and Safe Asset Demand -- by Xuning Ding, Zhengyang Jiang

We study how wealth inequality shapes safe-asset demand in heterogeneous-agent economies. Asset bubbles arise when agents face sufficiently high probabilities of falling into extreme poverty. In such cases, assets insulated from idiosyncratic risk become infinitely large relative to agents' wealth ex-post, which makes them infinitely valuable ex-ante. This mechanism is fundamentally different from classic rational bubbles, generates bubbles even under stationary wealth distributions, and requ...

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Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Immigration, Innovation, and the Geography of Growth -- by Costas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, Michael Peters

Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants settled in the United States. We study how this migration wave affected innovation and growth. Using a newly constructed dataset linking individual census records to historical immigration records and the universe of US patents, we highlight a new channel through which immigrants contributed to growth: they disproportionately settled in urban innovation hubs. To quantify the aggregate and regional effects of this mass migration episode, w...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Government Funding Costs Under Financial Repression -- by Roberto Gómez-Cram, Howard Kung, Hanno Lustig, David Zeke

We study the equilibrium effects of financial repression on government funding costs in an endowment economy with limited asset market participation. We show how a broad set of repression policies operates through a wedge in the Euler equation responsive to government size or by affecting fiscal redistribution between agents. Repression intensity is captured by a policy feedback rule that depends positively on net government spending. When fiscal policy is profligate and monetary policy accom...

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Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Pricing and Production Without the Invisible Hand -- by Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, Karthik Sastry

Modern theories of the business cycle do not allow for the simultaneous rational choice of both prices and quantities, instead assuming that an “invisible hand” determines one of these variables to clear markets. In this paper, we develop a macroeconomic model in which both prices and quantities are chosen optimally by firms and exchange is both voluntary and efficient. As a consequence, individual markets will generically be in Walrasian disequilibrium: either slack (over-supplied) or ration...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

International Risk-Sharing in a Fragmented World -- by Javier Bianchi, Sebastian Horn, Giovanni Rosso, César Sosa-Padilla

This paper studies how geopolitical risk shapes financial fragmentation and international risk-sharing, using bilateral official lending data from 1910 to 2024. We document that when geopolitical risk is high, bilateral lending increasingly follows geopolitical alignment. Because geopolitically aligned countries experience more synchronized shocks, this fragmentation limits the effectiveness of international risk-sharing. To rationalize these patterns, we introduce geopolitical considerations...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Fragmentation of Shareholder Power -- by Andrey Malenko, Nadya Malenko, Anton Tsoy

The asset management industry is increasingly shifting toward tailored portfolios, fund proliferation, and decentralization of stewardship—trends partly driven by growing heterogeneity in investor preferences. While these developments better align investment products with investor demands, they also reshape ownership structures, potentially leading to more fragmented ownership and weaker managerial oversight. We develop a framework to evaluate these trade-offs and show that fund proliferation...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

GLP-1–Induced Weight Loss and the Female Obesity Penalty -- by Rebecca Diamond

GLP-1 medications generate large weight loss and may also alter social and economic outcomes. Using the Understanding America Study, I compare women starting GLP-1s for weight loss with matched women who would like to start a GLP-1 but have not. Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline non-employed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters. Existing partnerships do not dissolve, and already-employed women show no u...

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Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Openness, Integration, and the International Monetary Order -- by Tarek Alexander Hassan, Thomas M. Mertens, Jingye Wang, Tony Zhang

This paper develops a calibrated general-equilibrium model to study how different configurations of trade and financial policy reshape the hierarchy of global currencies—and the U.S. dollar's position at its anchor. Currency safety and anchor status arise endogenously from each economy's 'effective size'—the weight its domestic shocks carry in setting world prices. Tariffs reduce this effective size on the goods side; capital controls do the same on the financial side. A unifying result emerg...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

The Fragility of Semi-Liquid Private Credit Funds -- by Chuck Fang, Itay Goldstein, Yao Zeng

We study fragility in semi-liquid private credit funds, which have expanded rapidly and now manage over $300 billion in assets. These funds perform liquidity transformation by holding far more illiquid loans than traditional loan mutual funds while allowing investors to redeem at NAV through quarterly repurchase offers, typically capped at 5% of shares outstanding. We show that cash buffers and contractual loan repayments are insufficient to fund repeated 5% quarterly redemptions; inflows dec...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

When Medicaid Pays the Bill: Routine Vision Benefits, Eye Care Use, and Eyeglasses Spending Among Dual-eligible Medicare Enrollees -- by Michel H. Boudreaux, Brandy Lipton, Melissa McInerney

Vision problems are prevalent among Medicare beneficiaries, with the majority having treatable conditions including uncorrected refractive error and cataracts. However, traditional Medicare does not cover routine eye exams or eyeglasses, and Medicare Advantage supplemental vision benefits often include low annual limits. We examine the effects of Medicaid routine vision benefits among adults dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, a population with high rates of vision impairment, morbidit...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 29, 2026

Unilateral-Veto Mechanisms -- by Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey, E. Jason Baron, Richard Lombardo

Unilateral vetoes, in which an agent takes an action that restricts the set of possible outcomes for themselves independent of what other agents do, are a frequently used tool in real-world approaches to multi-dimensional screening. We study how this tool works in a class of task-allocation problems. We characterize obvious strategy-proofness of unilateral-veto mechanisms, yielding structural insights into how veto rights shape incentives: obviously strategy-proof mechanisms consist of divers...

NBER1 min read