National Bureau of Economic Research

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...

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... 

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...

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…

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…