NBER’s Health Economics program: An update on the recent research

Kitt Carpenter who heads NBER’s Health Economics Program updates the recent research in the area of health economics. Since the pandemic, nearly 1300 papers have been released:

The NBER Health Economics Program has historically studied the determinants and consequences of differences in health outcomes,
with a focus on education, health insurance coverage, obesity, and risky behaviors such as smoking and drinking. Since the last program report, in 2015, the program has evolved in several important ways. Most notably, Michael Grossman, distinguished professor emeritus at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, stepped down from directing the program in 2020 after nearly 50 years of impactful leadership.

When I became program director, there was a worldwide COVID19 pandemic underway, an ongoing domestic opioid crisis, changing
regulatory landscapes for marijuana and tobacco, and a renewed focuson the social determinants of health and health equity research. Given
space constraints — and the fact that since the last program report nearly 1,300 NBER Health Economics working papers have been
released — this report can only describe a small fraction of the interesting research in these key areas.

 

International Spillovers of Tighter Monetary Policy

Dario Caldara, Francesco Ferrante, and Albert Queralto in this federal reserve research:

Central banks around the world are tightening monetary policy in response to a global surge in inflation not seen since the 1970s. This synchronization of global interest rate hikes and further increases expected by markets, illustrated in figure 1, have raised concerns about adverse international spillovers of tighter monetary policy. Some commentators have called on central banks to coordinate in their fight to tame inflation, arguing that a failure to account for spillovers could result in an unintendedly deep contraction in global economic activity.² This note builds on a large body of academic and central bank research to review the key channels through which spillovers may materialize, with a focus on the special role of the dollar in international trade and finance.

We show that central bank actions can produce spillovers to foreign economies and create tradeoffs for foreign policymakers. While central banks do take into account cross-border spillovers of their policies, in a world of unusually high uncertainty, there is a risk of underestimating these spillovers, which can lead to overtightening. Central banks are cognizant of this risk and need to manage it against the risk of undertightening that could deanchor long-term inflation expectations.

One hopes Federal Reserve policymakers are reading research produced by Federal Reserve economists.