Institutional research & analysis

Source: NBER

RESEARCH

Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas -- by Teresa C. Fort, Nathan Goldschlag, Jack Liang, Peter K. Schott, Nikolas Zolas

Relatively flat US productivity growth versus rising R\&D expenditures is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of \usas firms' patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this conclusion, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R\&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R\&D inputs is flat o...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Youth Mental Health and School Smartphone Bans: Early Evidence -- by Henry Saffer

This paper is the first to examine the causal effects of school smartphone bans on the mental health of youth in the US. Time series data show that the mental health of youth has been declining for the past decade. Several researchers argue that easy access to social media and other internet sites provided by smartphones is to blame. To provide causal evidence of the effects of these bans, I rely on synthetic difference-in-difference models and the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) ...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

The Persistence of Power: How Family Origins Shape Political Representation and Policy -- by Eric Chyn, Katherine Cohen, Kareem Haggag, Bryan A. Stuart

In the United States, long hailed as the land of opportunity, is access to political office truly open across society, or do the most privileged children disproportionately rise to enter political life? This question speaks to a longstanding concern that elite families may entrench themselves in positions of power, reproducing a form of hereditary privilege within a democratic system. We study the family backgrounds of U.S. politicians over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates -- by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, Joseph Winkelmann

Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling mostly men to enrolling mostly women, while the economic position of non-college men has weakened markedly. We examine how these changes correspond with the evolving structure of marriage markets across cohorts and places. As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying high-earning non-college men. This shift—combined with the broader economic declin...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Earnings Management and Price Informativeness -- by Zhiguo He, Wenxi Jiang, Wei Xiong

We investigate the relationship between stock prices and future earnings in China's A-share market. In the cross-section, firms with higher market valuations report higher earnings over the subsequent one to five years, suggesting that stock prices contain information about future fundamentals. In the time series, however, we find evidence of earnings reversal: higher stock prices predict weaker earnings growth three to five years ahead, consistent with short-term earnings management induced ...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Separations Revisited: Do Layoffs or Quits Drive Lower Separation Rates in High-Quality Firms? -- by Cauê Dobbin, Daniel Fernandez, Tom Zohar

A well-known empirical regularity is that high-productivity firms have lower worker separation rates, but it is unclear whether this pattern reflects quits or layoffs. Using matched employer-employee data from Brazil that distinguish the reason for each separation, we show that the productivity-separation gradient is driven primarily by layoffs rather than quits. We then propose and test a mechanism in which downward wage rigidity prevents firms from adjusting wages in response to adverse sho...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Measuring Water Misallocation in California -- by Will Rafey

This paper proposes and applies new methods to value water rights and assess misallocation across competing uses in California, the world’s fourth largest economy. The empirical strategy combines detailed microdata on farms, evapotranspiration, historical water rights, and the hydrological flow network in order to isolate sources of inefficiency within the hydrological network, assess distributional implications of water access under current property rights, and evaluate alternative mechanism...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

The Causal Effects of Expected Depreciations -- by Martha Elena Delgado Rojas, Juan Herreño, Marc Hofstetter, Mathieu Pedemonte

We construct a novel measure of one-year-ahead exchange rate forecasts and nowcasts for non-financial firms. We then study a randomized information intervention that provides a subset of firms with a publicly available exchange rate forecast. This information treatment persistently shifts exchange rate expectations and perceptions, with stronger effects for non-exporting firms. We link survey responses with administrative customs data and estimate a positive intertemporal elasticity of import...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Authority Figures and the Polarization of Gender Norms -- by Ali Abboud, Samuel Bazzi, Serena Canaan, Antoine Deeb, Pierre Mouganie

This paper examines how authority figures in higher education shape gender norms over the long run. We exploit the random assignment of first-year students to faculty advisors at an elite university in the Middle East and combine administrative records with an alumni survey measuring gender attitudes up to 24 years later. Women assigned to female advisors adopt more egalitarian views about politics and work, while men become more conservative. These effects are strongest among religious stude...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

How does Medicare Eligibility affect Choice and Utilization? Evidence from Veterans -- by Marion Aouad, Liam Rose, Todd Wagner

We examine how Medicare affects health care utilization for those who age in with a more narrow health insurance network by studying veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration (VA). Given the limited geographic density of VA hospitals, we posit that Medicare expands the insurance network for VA enrollees. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find that veterans' inpatient hospitalization rate increases by approximately 3.3 percent at 65. Further, there are large reallocation...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Competitive Exposure and Entrepreneurial Experimentation -- by Joshua S. Gans

Entrepreneurs learn by experimenting, but experiment choices are often public. A closed beta, private pilot, or public launch not only generates evidence; it also reveals what kind of entrepreneur would choose that action. We develop a dynamic model in which a founder chooses between stealthy and public experiments while potential entrants infer from both actions and outcomes. Public outcomes are modelled as garblings of the founder's private experimental evidence, so public leakage informs o...

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Working PaperMay 15, 2026

Labor Market Effects of California’s $20 Fast-Food Minimum Wage -- by Arindrajit Dube

California’s AB 1228 raised the minimum wage for large fast-food chains to $20 per hour in April 2024—roughly 77 percent of the state’s median hourly wage, the highest wage floor for fast-food workers in the U.S. Using QCEW data through 2025Q3, I estimate that the policy raised fast-food wages by about 7 percent. A conventional difference-in-differences yields an employment own-wage elasticity (OWE) of −0.19; synthetic difference-in-differences, which reweights controls to match California’s ...

NBER1 min read