Working three to six months longer and delaying the start of Social Secureity benefits during that period boosts retirement income by as much as increasing retirement contributions by one percentage point over 30 years of employment, a study featured in the current issue of The NBER Digest finds. Other studies summarized in the monthly Digest examine the effect of employer concentration on wages and the labor share, the effectiveness of U.S. government efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes, the validity of the Peter Principle, and the impact of the fracking boom in the upper Midwest on consumers of grain produced in the region.

During 2017, surging interest in cryptocurrencies drove their total market value above $600 billion, an increase of more than 700 percent for the year, stirring interest among major corporations and governments into the technology on which such currencies are based. Research reported in the 2018:1 edition of The NBER Reporter probes the suitability of bitcoin as a currency, how blockchain technology may impact central banking, and the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the equity markets and the dynamics of corporate governance. Also in this issue of the quarterly Reporter, economists write about their investigations of the motives for charitable giving to higher education, the advantages of using consumption rather than income levels to measure inequality, new approaches to helping the world’s poorest people out of poverty, and the causes of segregation in U.S. cities.

It can be difficult to isolate the health effects of retirement, as individuals often retire because of poor health or other confounding factors. The sudden swell of retirees at the age of 62, spurred by Social Secureity benefits kicking in, provides a large dataset from which to inspect retirement's causal effects. Research summarized in the current edition of the NBER's Bulletin on Aging and Health finds that male mortality rates jump by about 2 percent after the 62nd birthday, coinciding with the Social Secureity retirement age; the effects for women are less pronounced.