National Bureau of Economic Research

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are immunotherapy drugs that mobilize the patient’s immune system to detect and attack cancer cells. They are considered a breakthrough development in cancer care, but are very expensive, with a full course of treatment costing more than $150,000 per patient. In The Impact of Immunotherapy on Reductions in Cancer Mortality: Evidence from Medicare (NBER Working Paper 34317), Danea Horn, Abby E. Alpert, Mark Duggan, and Mireille Jacobson use Medicare claims data to evaluate the impact of the first ICIs on healthcare use, costs, and mortality among beneficiaries diagnosed with...

The CHIPS and Science Act, passed in August 2022, committed the federal government to spending nearly $53 billion to revitalize domestic semiconductor production. While job creation was a central argument of the legislation's proponents, there has been limited assessment since its passage of whether the act delivered on employment promises. In Employment Impacts of the CHIPS Act (NBER Working Paper 34625), Bilge Erten, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Eric Verhoogen use county-level data to provide empirical evidence on the short-term employment effects of this legislation. 

The study applies two difference-in-differences research designs to data from the Quarterly Census of Employment...

Investments in research, development, and innovation are widely recognized as key drivers of long-term economic growth but estimates of the social rate of return on these investments vary substantially. To encourage research on this topic, sometimes called "The Griliches Question," the NBER has launched a five-year project that will be organized around the creation of a pop-up journal devoted to this issue. The project will be led by NBER affiliates Craig Garthwaite (Northwestern University) and Timothy Simcoe (Boston University). A steering committee of leading scholars and policy experts will help guide the project, which will host an…

Over the past three decades trade policy has profoundly shaped the structure of production, employment, and welfare across countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the recent resurgence of tariff protectionism illustrate how deeply globalization and policy choices are intertwined. Evaluating their effects requires quantitative frameworks that capture how shocks to both technology and policy propagate through supply chains, labor markets, and international linkages.

Our research develops tractable general equilibrium models to quantify how shocks such as tariffs affect economies—both in the aggregate and across workers, regions, and sectors. These frameworks extend the Ricardian model of trade to include…

Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…