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From the NBER Bulletin on Retirement and Disability
NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center Winds Down Operations
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This is the final issue of the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, coinciding with the closure of the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC). The RDRC was a vibrant hub of research activity from 2003 to 2025 and had a significant impact on stimulating analytic work on Social Security and the wellbeing of Social Security beneficiaries across a wide community of investigators at universities across the United States.
Over 22 years, from the launch of the NBER Retirement Research Center in 2003, through the addition of the NBER Disability Research Center in 2012 and their consolidation into the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center in 2019, to the closing of the Centers program this year, the RDRC supported more than 400 research projects.
The RDRC was funded by the Social Security Administration (SSA) through a cooperative agreement...
A research summary from the monthly NBER Digest

Leadership Skills: Managing AI Agents vs. Humans
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Leadership quality has a significant impact on firm productivity and can even affect national prosperity, but measuring individual leadership skills is difficult. Existing methods require observing prospective leaders working with multiple randomly assigned groups, an undertaking that can be both logistically complex and expensive.
In Measuring Human Leadership Skills with AI Agents (NBER Working Paper 33662), Ben Weidmann, Yixian Xu, and David J. Deming designed an experiment to test whether the task of managing AI agents could provide a viable alternative to managing human teams. The researchers found that leadership performance with AI agents strongly predicts leadership effectiveness...
From the NBER Reporter: Research, program, and conference summaries

Collusion in Public Procurement
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In both developed and developing countries, annual spending on public procurement averages about 12 percent of national GDP. The efficiency of public procurement can have a long-run impact on the growth and productivity of countries. A major challenge in achieving efficiency, however, is the possibility of collusion among suppliers. Collusive agreements increase prices, leading to wasted tax dollars or, in the case of developing countries, wasted foreign aid. These agreements often shield inefficient firms from competition, diverting resource allocation to low-performing sectors of the economy. Furthermore, the transparency requirements inherent to public procurement, such as public databases of past tenders and associated bids, can facilitate the coordination and enforcement of collusive...
From the NBER Bulletin on Health

Medicaid’s Lifesaving Effects on Low-Income Adults
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Lower-income adults in the US are more likely to lack health insurance and to suffer worse health, a correlation that raises the long-standing question of whether health insurance affects health. In Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults (NBER Working Paper 33719), Angela Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer present new evidence on this question by evaluating the consequences of recent Medicaid expansions.
To study the impact of Medicaid on mortality, the researchers exploit variation in the state-level adoption and timing of expansions of Medicaid eligibility to childless, nondisabled, non-elderly adults. Most, but…
From the NBER Bulletin on Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship as an Alternative to Flexibility at Work
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The surge in remote work in recent years has transformed labor markets, with potentially important implications for the interaction between workplace flexibility and entrepreneurship. In Hustling from Home? Work from Home Flexibility and Entrepreneurial Entry (NBER Working Paper 33237), John M. Barrios, Yael Hochberg, and Hanyi (Livia) Yi explore whether the increased flexibility provided by work-from-home (WFH) arrangements has affected entrepreneurial decisions. They focus on the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment and analyze how the sudden shift to remote work affected new business creation. Guided…
Featured Working Papers
Claudio Ferraz, Luiz C. Moura, Lars Norden, and Ricardo Schechtman report that Brazilian firms investigated as part of Operação Lava Jato, one of the world's largest anti-corruption crackdowns, experienced sizable declines in employment, wage bills, and credit access.
Short-term changes in incomes or prices cannot explain the historically low fertility rates among high-income countries, according to a study by Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine. Rather, they point to a broad reordering of adult priorities, with parenthood occupying a diminished role.
Marika Cabral and Marcus Dillender document wide variation in doctors’ evaluation of workers who file workers’ compensation claims. Being evaluated by a doctor with a one standard deviation higher approval rate for continued benefits is associated with a 20% longer out-of-work stay, and more than a 10% increase in the change of receiving permanent impairment benefits.
Jing Cai, Sai Luo, and Shing-Yi Wang study a field experiment of new hires at a manufacturing firm in China and find that signing bonuses led to longer working hours with no significant gains in performance, while enhanced monitoring improved manager-evaluated performance.
Independent nursing facilities acquired by nursing-home chains over the period 1999–2019 received, on average, 5 percent fewer health deficiency citations in the two years following acquisition than comparable nursing homes that remained independent, Pinka Chatterji, Chun-Yu Ho, and Wenqing Li find.
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