Journal: NBER Working Paper Series

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National Bureau of Economic Research

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0898-2937

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2010 - 201972020 - 20257
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Publications 1 - 10 of 14
  • Policies, Projections, and the Social Cost of Carbon: Results from the DICE-2023 Model
    Item type: Working Paper
    Barrage, Lint; Nordhaus, William (2023)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    The present study examines the assumptions, modeling structure, and preliminary results of DICE-2023, the revised Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (DICE), updated to 2023. The revision contains major changes in the carbon and climate modules, the treatment of non-industrial greenhouse gases, discount rates, as well as updates on all the major components. The major changes are a significantly lower level of temperature of the cost-benefit optimal policy, a lower cost of reaching the 2° C target, an analysis of the impact of the Paris Accord, and a major increase in the estimated social cost of carbon.
  • The abolition of immigration restrictions and the performance of firms and workers: Evidence from Switzerland
    Item type: Working Paper
    Beerli, Andreas; Ruffner, Jan; Siegenthaler, Michael; et al. (2020)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    We study a reform that granted European cross-border workers free access to the Swiss labor market and had a stronger effect on regions close to the border. The greater availability of cross-border workers increased foreign employment substantially. Although many cross-border workers were highly educated, wages of highly educated natives increased. The reason is a simultaneous increase in labor demand: the reform increased the size, productivity, and innovation performance of skill-intensive incumbent firms and attracted new firms, creating opportunities for natives to pursue managerial jobs. These effects are mainly driven by firms that reported skill shortages before the reform.
  • Intertemporal Labor Supply Substitution? Evidence from the Swiss Income Tax Holidays
    Item type: Working Paper
    Martínez, Isabel Z.; Saez, Emmanuel; Siegenthaler, Michael (2018)
    NBER Working Paper Series
  • Design Choices for Central Bank Digital Currency: Policy and Technical Considerations
    Item type: Working Paper
    Allen, Sarah; Capkun, Srdjan; Eyal, Ittay; et al. (2020)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a range of new financial instruments and monetary policy levers. CBDCs also give rise, however, to a host of challenging technical goals and design questions that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those in existing government and consumer payment systems. A well-functioning CBDC will require an extremely resilient, secure, and performant new infrastructure, with the ability to onboard, authenticate, and support users on massive scale. It will necessitate an architecture simple enough to support modular design and rigorous security analysis, but flexible enough to accommodate current and future functional requirements and use cases. A CBDC will also in some way need to address an innate tension between privacy and transparency, protecting user data from abuse while selectively permitting data mining for end-user services, policymakers, and law enforcement investigations and interventions. In this paper, we enumerate the fundamental technical design challenges facing CBDC designers, with a particular focus on performance, privacy, and security. Through a survey of relevant academic and industry research and deployed systems, we discuss the state of the art in technologies that can address the challenges involved in successful CBDC deployment. We also present a vision of the rich range of functionalities and use cases that a well-designed CBDC platform could ultimately offer users.
  • Ambiguity vs. Risk in Investment Decisions: An Illustration from Green Finance
    Item type: Working Paper
    Flammer, Caroline; Giroux, Thomas; Heal, Geoffrey; et al. (2025)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    Does ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) or risk provide a greater discouragement to investment? There is general agreement in the financial press that uncertainty discourages investment, with uncertainty here meaning any situation where important future policy variables (such as tariffs or tax rates) are not known. And it seems intuitively plausible that situations of ambiguity are “more uncertain” than those of risk: under risk, although the outcome is not known, its expected value is, whereas under ambiguity we have a distribution of possible expected values. In this paper we show that under quite general circumstances it is the case that ambiguity deters investment more than an equivalent risk. An equivalent risk is one characterized by a compound lottery reflecting the ambiguous situation, but without ambiguity aversion. We show that there will always be investments opportunities that are rejected when characterized by ambiguity but are accepted when characterized by risk with an equivalent compound lottery, and that the converse is not true: there are no investments that would be made under ambiguity that would not be made under equivalent risk. We develop the analysis in the context of the emerging field of green finance.
  • Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in 15 Destination Countries
    Item type: Working Paper
    Boustan, Leah; Fjællegaard Jensen, Mathias; Abramitzky, Ran; et al. (2025)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.
  • What is driving the 'African Growth Miracle'?
    Item type: Working Paper
    McMillan, Margaret S.; Harttgen, Kenneth (2014)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    We show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing and services. These declines have been more rapid in countries where the initial share of the labor force engaged in agriculture is the highest and where commodity price increases have been accompanied by improvements in the quality of governance.
  • The Changing Structure of Africa's Economies
    Item type: Working Paper
    Diao, Xinshen; Harttgen, Kenneth; McMillan, Margaret (2017)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    Using data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center’s Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline is most pronounced for rural females over the age of 25 who have a primary education; it has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity services and manufacturing. We also show that although the employment share in manufacturing is not expanding rapidly, in most of the low-income African countries, the employment share in manufacturing has not peaked and is still expanding, albeit from very low levels. More work is needed to understand the implications of these shifts in employment shares for future growth and development in Africa south of the Sahara.e Sahara
  • Flood Risk Belief Heterogeneity and Coastal Home Price Dynamics: Going Under Water?
    Item type: Working Paper
    Bakkensen, Laura; Barrage, Lint (2017)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    How will climate risk beliefs affect coastal housing market dynamics? This paper provides both theoretical and empirical evidence: First, we build a dynamic housing market model with heterogeneity in home types, consumer preferences, and flood risk beliefs. The model incorporates a Bayesian learning mechanism allowing agents to update their beliefs depending on whether flood events occur. Second, to quantify these elements, we implement a door-to-door survey campaign in Rhode Island. The results confirm significant heterogeneity in flood risk beliefs, and that selection into coastal homes is driven by both lower risk perceptions and higher coastal amenity values. Third, we calibrate the model to simulate coastal home price trajectories given a future flood risk increase and policy reform across different belief scenarios. Accounting for heterogeneity increases the projected home price declines due to sea level rise by a factor of four, and increases market volatility by an order of magnitude. Studies assuming homogeneous rational expectations may thus substantially underestimate the home price implications of future climate risks. We conclude by highlighting potential implications for welfare and flood policy.
  • Competition, Harmonization and Redistribution: Corporate Taxes in Switzerland
    Item type: Working Paper
    Brüllhart, Marius; Köthenbürger, Marko; Krapf, Matthias; et al. (2023)
    NBER Working Paper Series
    Switzerland could be considered as a test case for international corporate-tax policy coordination. It is a federation of 26 fiscally autonomous cantons that have been taxing corporate profits more or less independently for over a century. We document and discuss corporate taxation in Switzerland, with a focus on three aspects: (a) the evolving within-country geography of taxable profits and corporate tax rates, (b) the nature and historical emergence of formal tax-base harmonization, and (c) the functioning of fiscal equalization. Parallels are drawn and differences are discussed relative to ongoing efforts at international tax coordination.
Publications 1 - 10 of 14