Institutional research & analysis

Reports

Curated financial intelligence from central banks, sovereign funds, and think tanks.

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

How Frontline Supervisors Shape Priorities: Evidence from Police Lieutenants -- by Matthew Gudgeon, Andrew Jordan, Taeho Kim

We study how frontline supervisors shape outcomes in public organizations with competing objectives and limited monitoring. We examine lieutenants in the Chicago Police Department, exploiting its rotational operations calendar for identification. We document dispersion in lieutenant fixed effects on team arrests and find race to be a key predictor. We then compare days Black and Hispanic lieutenants are predicted on duty to days supervised by white lieutenants. Teams under Black and Hispanic ...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Wagering the Bread Money: Sports Betting Legalization and Food Sufficiency -- by Xiaohui Guo, Lizhong Peng, Chad Meyerhoefer

This is the first study to estimate the impact of sports gambling legalization on food sufficiency using the staggered implementation of state laws between 2021-2023. By analyzing Google searches for online sportsbooks and legal wagers, we show that interest in sports gambling increases sharply following legalization. Applying an imputation-based difference-in-differences design to biweekly Household Pulse Survey (HPS) data, we find that legalized sports gambling reduces household food suffic...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Regional Economic Impacts and Emission Responses under Solar Radiation Modification -- by Jenny Bjordal, Evelien van Dijk, Henri Cornec, Anthony A. Smith Jr., Trude Storelvmo

Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) has been proposed as a potential tool to limit increases in global or regional temperatures caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. While previous research has extensively examined the climate system’s response to various SRM strategies, as well as their aggregate economic consequences, the regional distribution of economic impacts has received less attention. In this study, we use NorESM2–DIAM—an Earth System Model coupled to a high-resolution int...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Falling Dominoes? The Impact of the US Exit from Free Trade on the Sustainability of Trade Cooperation -- by Barthélémy Bonadio, Andrei A. Levchenko, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar

This paper quantitatively evaluates other countries' optimal tariffs and the prospects of sustaining international trade cooperation when a large player—the United States—exits the cooperative trade regime. To guide the analysis, we rely on an analytical characterization of the optimal tariff in a simplified multi-country trade model with endogenous labor supply. A country's optimal import tariffs are a function of its trade partners' expenditure shares on its goods, and the trade and labor s...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Field Experiments to Explore Novel Features of Parental Speech and Foster Child Development -- by Julie Pernaudet, John A. List, Arnoldo Müller-Molina, Majid Ahmadi, Imrul Huda, Ajay Sailopal, Dana Suskind

Parents play a critical role in shaping children’s skills during the first years of life. Yet, identifying the contributors to richer learning environments remains difficult due to various unobservable factors. In this paper, we combine field experiments with AI to explore new acoustic features of parental speech. Specifically, we develop a signal processing model that uses more than 600 hours of recorded parent-child interactions combined with assessment data from two home-visiting experimen...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Do Voters Punish Inflation or Pay Cuts? Inflation and Real Wages in U.S. Elections -- by Juan Felipe Riaño, Francesco Trebbi

Between 2021 and 2024, the United States experienced one of the most severe inflation episodes in decades, coinciding with renewed debate over the role of economic conditions for electoral outcomes. This paper studies the political economy of inflation and real wages using U.S. county-level data on family budget costs, nominal income, and electoral results for President and Congress during this period. Exploiting within-state, cross-county variation in changes in local prices over time, it ex...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Explaining the Historical Rise and Recent Decline in Social Security Disability Insurance Enrollment -- by Manasi Deshpande, Maxwell Kellogg, Magne Mogstad, Kuan-Ju Tseng

After substantial growth in the 1990s and 2000s, enrollment in the U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program has been declining since 2013. We use detailed administrative data to quantify the contributions of various factors to trends in SSDI enrollment, focusing especially on the decline in the 2010s. A statistical decomposition suggests that the vast majority of the decline in SSDI enrollment since 2013 is attributable to declines in application rates—and, to a lesser extent,...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Characterizing the File Drawer: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of Parent-Interventions Around the World -- by Peter Bergman, Nat Chowanajin

We conduct a meta-analysis of 82 randomized controlled trials across more than 20 countries to estimate the effects of low-cost, remote parental engagement interventions delivered through text messages, phone calls, and apps. We estimate a joint likelihood function that incorporates both written studies and unwritten studies identified through trial registries, funder records, research labs, evidence clearinghouses, and other sources. By also recording sample sizes for unwritten studies, the ...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Does Regional Variation in Wage Levels Identify the Effects of a National Minimum Wage? -- by Daniel Haanwinckel

This paper asks whether regional wage differences can identify the effects of a national minimum wage. I study two common exposure-based approaches: effective-minimum-wage designs, which compare the minimum wage to contemporaneous local wages, and fraction-affected/gap designs, which measure pre-reform exposure to the new minimum. Using theory, simulations, and evidence from Brazil, I show when these approaches can mislead and how their performance depends on specification choices. The result...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Macroeconomic and Fiscal Consequences of Quantitative Easing -- by Tobias Adrian, Christopher Erceg, Marcin Kolasa, Jesper Lindé, Pawel Zabczyk

Quantitative easing (QE) has been criticized for helping fuel the post-COVID inflation boom and causing large central bank losses. In this paper, we argue that QE should be evaluated mainly on its ability to achieve core macro-objectives as well for its effects on the consolidated fiscal position of the government and central bank, although central bank losses can matter to the extent that they may weaken central bank credibility. Using a DSGE model with segmented asset markets, we show how Q...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

GLP-1 Therapy and the Reshaping of Socioeconomic Gradients in Health -- by J. Felipe Montano-Campos, Bryan Tysinger, Dana Goldman, Darius N. Lakdawalla

GLP-1 therapies for obesity promise substantial health improvements, but little is known about how their benefits vary across socioeconomic and demographic groups. Using a nationally representative microsimulation model of US adults and Shapely-value decomposition, we estimate the lifetime health and economic benefits of GLP-1 treatment and examine how those gains vary across individuals. The largest differences emerge across education. Individuals with less than a high school education exper...

NBER1 min read

Working PaperJune 9, 2026

Predicting Labor Force Types -- by Rui Castro, Jiyoung Kim, Fabian Lange, Jérôme Larivière, Markus Poschke

A small group of people accounts for a large majority of flows between labor market states and of spells in un- and non-employment. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to identify those weakly attached to the labor market during their prime working-age years using information available early in their lives. First, we use information on labor force transitions between ages 30 and 50 contained in the long panel provided by the NLSY79 to identify those weakly connected to the labor mark...

NBER1 min read