What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Ye...

Immigration policy is one of the most contentious public policy issues in the United States today. High-skilled immigrants represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, particularly in science and engineering fields. These immigrants affect ec...

Volume 32 of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features six theoretical and empirical studies of important issues in contemporary macroeconomics, and a keynote address by former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. In one study, SeHyoun Ahn, Greg Kapl...

Since the late 1950s, the engineering job market in the United States has been fraught with fears of a shortage of engineering skill and talent. "U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy" brings clarity to issues of supply and demand in this important ma...

The six research studies in Volume 32 of Tax Policy and the Economy analyze the U.S. tax and transfer system, in particular its effects on revenues, expenditures, and economic behavior. First, James Andreoni examines donor advised funds, which are fi...

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this...

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health....

Modern developed nations are rich and politically stable in part because their citizens are free to form organizations and have access to the relevant legal resources. Yet in spite of the advantages of open access to civil organizations, it is estima...

The eighteenth annual volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Innovation Policy and the Economy focuses on research that explores the interplay between new technologies and organizational structures, such as networks and corporations. In...

The papers in "Tax Policy and the Economy Volume 31" are all directly related to important and often long-standing issues, often including how transfer programs affect tax rates and behavior. In the first paper, Alan Auerbach, Laurence Kotlikoff, Dar...