National Bureau of Economic Research

Following a call for nominations in January, the NBER has appointed 71 new affiliates: 17 Research Associates and 54 Faculty Research Fellows. In addition, eight Faculty Research Fellows have been promoted to Research Associates.

The directors of the NBER’s 19 research programs recommend appointments after consulting with steering committees made up of leading scholars. Research Associate appointments must be approved by the NBER Board of Directors, while Faculty Research Fellows are appointed by the NBER president. All new affiliates must hold primary academic appointments in North America; Research Associates must have tenure. 

The newly appointed researchers serve on the faculties of 41 different colleges and universities. They received…

Some organizations reward employees who meet production quotas by pre-set deadlines. Such structures allow employees to manage their time between deadlines, but may also result in procrastination or rushed efforts near the deadline. In Deadlines versus Continuous Incentives: Evidence from the Patent Office (NBER Working Paper 32066), Michael D. Frakes and Melissa F. Wasserman explore whether shifting from a discrete quota structure to a continuous one reduces the bunching of work effort before deadlines. They also assess changes in outcome quality. Their analysis draws on more than 7 million patent applications filed between…

Affiliates of the International Finance and Macroeconomics (IFM) Program study financial interactions among nations, including cross-border capital flows, exchange rates, responses to global financial crises, and the transmission of economic shocks. Rather than attempting to summarize the more than 1,000 working papers these researchers have distributed since the last program report in 2015, we focus here on three issues that have attracted substantial research attention from this group: impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain shocks, and the privileged position of the US dollar in global asset...

Cesarean section (C-section) is the most common surgical procedure performed in the United States. Sarah Robinson, Heather Royer, and David Silver report that C-section rates for first-time, singleton births increased from 24 percent to 32 percent between 1989 and 2017 alongside significant changes in medical practices during this period. In 2001, for example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists began recommending C-sections for breech births. The rising rate of C-sections has sparked a debate about whether this procedure is being overused. 

In Geographic Variation in Cesarean Sections in the United States: Trends, Correlates, and Other Interesting Facts (NBER Working Paper 31871), the researchers study how cross-county differences in C-section usage correlate with infant and maternal...

Over the past 25 years, labor force participation at older ages has increased dramatically. In the 12 countries that are part of the NBER’s International Social Security (ISS) project, participation among those aged 60 to 64 has risen by an average of over 20 percentage points for men and over 25 percentage points for women.

In The Effects of Reforms on Retirement Behavior: Introduction and Summary (NBER Working Paper 31979), authors Axel Börsch-Supan and Courtney Coile report on the most recent work of the ISS project. The current analysis builds on previous project phases which showed that changes in health and education could…

Private equity (PE) firms’ business model is to acquire privately held companies, to change their strategy and operations with the goal of improving profitability and growth, and ultimately to sell the companies for a profit. The senior management team is replaced at a majority of private equity acquisitions. More than 40 percent of PE firms report that this is a key way to improve their acquisitions’ success.

In The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity (NBER Working Paper 30899), Paul Gompers, Steven Kaplan, and Vladimir Mukharlyamov compare the characteristics of CEOs installed by PE firms to the characteristics of those who become...