AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 9, September 2022
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
In the 1970s, court orders to integrate schools led many US cities to bus students far from home. Though court-mandated busing has disappeared, many urban districts now have voluntary school choice programs that allow students to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods when space permits. In many of these systems, students are assigned to seats using school-matching algorithms that take account of applicant preferences and school priorities, randomizing seats...
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Nominal fixed-income securities such as bonds do not protect investors against unexpected inflation. In addition to inflation eroding the purchasing power of payouts, bond prices also fall when interest rates rise, which typically occurs during inflationary periods. In contrast, investors often consider real assets like stocks, real estate, and commodities to be effective inflation hedges. Real estate and commodity prices, which enter the price level directly or...
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Corporate leadership teams have become less politically diverse over the past decade according to The Political Polarization of Corporate America (NBER Working Paper 30183). Vyacheslav Fos, Elisabeth Kempf, and Margarita Tsoutsoura find an increasing tendency for executives to team up with people who share their political affiliation, and an increasing share of Republican executives overall, in a study of senior corporate leadership at companies headquartered in nine...
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Air pollution from electric power plants declined substantially between 2000 and 2018, and reductions in pollution exposure were broadly similar across various ethnic, income, and racial groups, Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kyle C. Meng, and Paige E. Weber note in Decomposing Trends in US Air Pollution Disparities from Electricity (NBER Working Paper 30198). The study focuses on exposure to particulate matter that is released when burning fossil fuels. PM2.5 concentration...
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Measuring poverty is a long-standing challenge. The official US poverty rate is based on households’ before-tax-and-transfer income. Alternative measures, derived from household expenditures, have been proposed as more-informative indicators of well-being among disadvantaged households.
In The Supplemental Poverty Measure: A New Method for Measuring Poverty (NBER Working Paper 30056), John Fitzgerald and Robert A. Moffitt develop a new metric for...
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Counting the homeless population involves substantial challenges, most importantly the inability to use address-based survey approaches that are the foundation of Census Bureau enumeration and many household surveys. This raises questions about the completeness and reliability of any estimates of the homeless population.
In The Size and Census Coverage of the US Homeless Population (NBER Working Paper 30163), Bruce D. Meyer, Angela Wyse, and Kevin Corinth compare...
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