National Bureau of Economic Research

Coal-fired power plants generate about 20 percent of US electricity. Prioritizing the generation of electricity using natural gas could immediately replace at least two-thirds of coal-fired generation in the US and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector by at least 18 percent. That would correspond to a reduction of between 5 and 8 percent of total US energy-related CO₂ emissions, at a cost of $49 to $92 per ton of CO₂, according to a new study, On the Feasibility, Costs, and Benefits of an Immediate Phasedown of Coal for US Electricity Generation (NBER Working Paper 32235), by Stephen P. Holland, Matthew Kotchen, Erin T. Mansur, and Andrew J. Yates.

The researchers analyzed 2022 data from the Continuous Emission Monitoring System (CEMS) of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which tracks hourly generation for each fossil fuel powered plant...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new field. The term was coined in 1956, but the field has only recently begun having significant effects on the economy.

Research in AI went through three eras. Early work focused primarily on symbolic systems with hand-coded rules and instructions. In the 1980s, expert systems, which consisted of hundreds or thousands of “if…then” rules drawn from interviews with human experts, helped diagnose diseases and make loan recommendations, but with limited commercial success.

Later, the focus shifted to machine learning systems, including “supervised learning” systems trained to make predictions based on large datasets of human-labeled examples. As computational power increased, deep learning algorithms became increasingly successful, leading to an explosion…

Immigrants play a significant role in the entrepreneurial landscape. In the United States, immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. More than half of America's billion-dollar startup companies trace their roots to immigrant founders. There is limited research, however, on the factors that influence immigrants' decisions about where to locate their startup businesses. 

In The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada's Start-up Visa Program (NBER Working Paper 31634), Saerom Lee and Britta Glennon investigate the impact of Canada's Start-up Visa Program on US-based…

Cesarean section (C-section) is the most common surgical procedure performed in the United States. Sarah Robinson, Heather Royer, and David Silver report that C-section rates for first-time, singleton births increased from 24 percent to 32 percent between 1989 and 2017 alongside significant changes in medical practices during this period. In 2001, for example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists began recommending C-sections for breech births. The rising rate of C-sections has sparked a debate about whether this procedure is being overused. 

In Geographic Variation in Cesarean Sections in the United States: Trends, Correlates, and Other Interesting Facts (NBER Working Paper 31871), the researchers study how cross-county differences in C-section usage correlate with infant and maternal...

Over the past 25 years, labor force participation at older ages has increased dramatically. In the 12 countries that are part of the NBER’s International Social Security (ISS) project, participation among those aged 60 to 64 has risen by an average of over 20 percentage points for men and over 25 percentage points for women.

In The Effects of Reforms on Retirement Behavior: Introduction and Summary (NBER Working Paper 31979), authors Axel Börsch-Supan and Courtney Coile report on the most recent work of the ISS project. The current analysis builds on previous project phases which showed that changes in health and education could…