Category: Data Source
Immigration and health for elderly Americans
We measure the impact of increased immigration on mortality among elderly Americans, who rely on the immigrant-intensive health and long-term care sectors. Using a shift-share approach we find a strong impact of immigration on the size of the immigrant care workforce: admitting 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 142 new foreign healthcare workers, without evidence of crowd out of native health care workers. We also find striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The politics of using AI
Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se.
That is from a new paper by Nicholas Bloom and Christos Makridis.
For a long time I have been predicting the return of phrenology
Yup:
Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is central for labor-market success, yet personality remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in AI and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, job matching, compensation, job transitions, and career advancement. The Photo Big 5 provides predictive power comparable to race, attractiveness, and educational background, and is only weakly correlated with cognitive measures such as test scores. We show that individuals systematically sort into occupations where their personality traits are valued and earn higher wages when traits align with occupational demands. While the scalability of the Photo Big 5 enables new academic insights into the role of personality in labor markets, its growing use in industry screening raises important ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Can government coerce women into having more babies?
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future. By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.
How much is childlessness the fertility problem?
The average decline in fertility among these recent cohorts relative to the cohorts preceding them by 20 years was 0.25 births. Of this decline, 0.09 births, or 37 percent of the gap, is statistically accounted for by increased childlessness in the later cohort. The remaining 0.16 births, or 63 percent of the gap, is accounted for by declines in fertility among the parous.
A similar analysis can be used to decompose differences across districts in India, where the difference to be decomposed is across districts for women born in the same set of years, with two groups of districts defined by having the lowest and highest cohort fertility rates. Unsurprisingly, given panel B of Figure 5, almost all of this difference—94 percent—is accounted for by the difference in fertility among the parous. Differing patterns of childlessness account for only 6 percent of the gap between high-fertility and low-fertility districts.
That is from a new and useful JEP survey article by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears. The main concern of the authors is whether we can ever expect a fertility rebound.
Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023
We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard K. Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth.
Argentina dollar facts of the day
From greenbacks stuffed into children’s teddy bears to fortunes tucked away in the ceiling, Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.
But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.
Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.
Here is more from the WSJ.
The economics of hip hop
In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.
We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…
Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?
To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.
That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.
Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.
The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.
Here is more from Roland Fryer, from the WSJ. Here is the TED talk.
Effective tax rates for billionaires
Here is the tweet, here is the source data.
Does Peer-Reviewed Research Help Predict Stock Returns?
Finance theory is in even more trouble than we had thought:
Mining 29,000 accounting ratios for t-statistics > 2.0 leads to cross-sectional return predictability similar to the peer review process. For both, ≈ 50% of predictability remains after the original sample periods. This finding holds for many categories of research, including research with risk or equilibrium foundations. Only research agnostic about the theoretical explanation for predictability shows signs of outperformance. Our results imply that inferences about post-sample performance depend little on whether the predictor is peer-reviewed or data mined. They also have implications for the importance of empirical vs theoretical evidence, investors’ learning from academic research, and the effectiveness of data mining.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Y. Chen, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, and Tom Zimmermann. Via KingoftheCoast.
Mainstream research views on kids, teens, and screens
From Michael Coren at The Washington Post:
The child development researchers I spoke to about it? Practically blasé. They saw screens as a valuable tool — overused but useful — that can help families when handled well.
What I didn’t hear: bans, panic or moral judgments. It was framed as a choice — one you can make better or worse. Researchers expressed a lot of compassion for parents squaring off against massive technology companies whose profit models aren’t always aligned with what’s best for children’s health.
“I am just a lot more concerned about how we design the digital landscape for kids than I am about whether we allow kids to use screens or not,” said Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I haven’t seen concrete evidence that convinces me that screen use itself is creating problematic behavior.”
And for older age groups, there is a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, excerpt:
The change in the age profile of workers’ wellbeing may reflect changes in selection into (out of) employment by age, changes in job quality, or changes in young workers’ orientation to similar jobs over time. But changes in smartphone usage – often the focus of debate regarding declining young peoples’ wellbeing – are unlikely to be the main culprit unless there are sizeable differences in smartphone usage across young workers and non-workers, which appears unlikely.
I am a great believer in work as a way to help improve mental health problems. Here is a quick discussion of media bias on the screens issue. I would stress that none of what I am citing here is at variance with mainstream perspectives on these issues.
The United States as an Active Industrial Policy Nation
We document and characterize a new history of U.S. federal-level industrial policies by scanning all 12,167 Congressional Acts and 6,030 Presidential Orders from 1973 through 2022. We find several interesting patterns. First, contrary to a common perception, the United States has always been an active industrial policy nation throughout the period, regardless of which party is in power, with 5.4 laws and 3.4 Presidential Orders per year on average containing new industrial policies. Second, we identify roughly 300% more instances of industrial policies than those in the Global Trade Alert (GTA) database during 2008-2022, despite using essentially the same definition. Third, industrial policies in practice are as likely to be justified by national security as by economic competitiveness. Fourth, many U.S. industrial policies incorporate design features that help mitigate potential drawbacks, such as explicit expiration dates and pilot programs for emerging technologies. Finally, based on stock market reactions and firm performance, the identified policies are recognized as economically significant in shifting resource allocations.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
So if I were designing an “industrial policy” for America, my first priority would be to improve and “unstick” its procurement cycles. There may well be bureaucratic reasons that this is difficult to do. But if it can’t be done, then perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t be setting its sights on a more ambitious industrial policy.
A second form of American industrial policy is the biomedical grants and subsidies associated with the National Institutes of Health.
Published in 2019, but still relevant today.
Understanding Latin America’s Fertility Decline
This paper examines the sharp decline in fertility across Latin America using both period and cohort measures. Combining Vital Statistics, Census microdata, and UN population data, we decompose changes in fertility by age, education, and joint age–education groups. We show that the decline in period fertility between 2000 and 2022 is driven primarily by reductions in within-group birth rates rather than by changes in population composition, with the largest contributions coming from younger and less-educated women. Comparing the cohort born in the mid 1950s and the one born in the mid 1970s, we find that the decline in completed fertility reflects not only delayed childbearing but also substantial reductions in the average number of children per woman. This is driven primarily by lower fertility among mothers rather than by rising childlessness. Our findings provide new evidence on the nature of Latin America’s transition to below-replacement fertility and highlight several open questions for future research.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Who is good at soccer?
This study explores the psychological profiles of elite soccer players, revealing that success on the field goes beyond physical ability. By analyzing a sample of 328 participants, including 204 elite soccer players from the top teams in Brazil and Sweden, we found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills. They also possess personality traits like high conscientiousness and openness to experience, along with reduced neuroticism. Using AI, we identified unique psychological patterns that could help in talent identification and development. These insights can be used to better understand the mental attributes that contribute to success in soccer and other high-performance fields.
That is from a new paper by Leonardo Bonetti, et.al., via Yureed Elahi.
How Restrictive is U.S. Trade Policy?
This short note computes Trade Restrictiveness Index measures for current U.S. trade policy. Building on the ideas of Anderson and Neary (1996, 2005), the Trade Restrictiveness Index is the uniform tariff that leaves the U.S. consumer as well off as under actual policy. As of October 2025, U.S. trade policy is twice as restrictive as headline tariff numbers suggest. The Trade Restrictiveness Index is 23 percent, which stands in contrast to the 11 percent average tariff rate. Trade policy towards Canada and Mexico is two to three times more restrictive than average tariff rates suggest. Sectoral analysis shows that the restrictiveness is concentrated in vehicles, machinery, and electrical equipment.
That is from Michael E. Waugh.