Recent academic research findings on topics relating to taxation and social insurance policy, including the implicit tax imposed by Medicaid on private long-term care insurance benefits, an alternative system of unemployment insurance, and federal energy tax policy.

Leading American and European economists discuss monetary and fiscal policy from an international macroeconomic perspective in a companion volume to the NBER Macroeconomics Annual: cutting-edge research on macroeconomic issues and topical questions concerning the eastward expansion of the...

Social insurance programs shield individuals from specific risks, but these programs are not necessarily independent of each other. The existence and scope of one program can potentially influence the use of others, especially when the risks covered by the programs are related. This study...

We use place of birth information from the Social Security Administration linked to earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program and detailed race and ethnicity data from the 2010 Census to study how long-term earnings differentials vary by place of birth for different...

Does a permanent rise in temperature decrease the level or growth rate of GDP in affected countries? Differing answers to this question lead prominent estimates of climate damages to diverge by an order of magnitude. This paper combines indirect evidence on economic growth with new empirical...

Has the United States economy become less competitive in recent decades? One might think so based on a body of research that has rapidly become influential for antitrust policy. We explain that the empirical evidence relating to concentration trends, markup trends, and the effects of mergers...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction - William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo -- I. Business Organization and Internal Governance -- 1. Revisiting American Exceptionalism: Democracy and the Regulation of Corporate Governance: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania in...

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world's population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of-or in spite of-globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on...

Early fertility is a key barrier to female human capital attainment in sub-Saharan Africa, yet contraceptive take-up remains puzzlingly low, even among educated populations with healthcare access. We study a barrier to hormonal contraceptive uptake that has not been causally tested: the...