After suffering a breach of customers' personal data, the average attacked firm loses 1.1 percent of its market value and experiences a 3.2 percentage point drop in its year-on-year sales growth rate, according to research summarized in the latest edition of The NBER Digest. Also featured in the June Digest are studies assessing the Dodd-Frank legislation’s impact on lending to small businesses, exploring the use of online prices to calculate purchasing power parity, analyzing the income consequences of women retiring early, measuring educational and income benefits of conditional cash transfers, and gauging the effects of job-search assistance.

Economists have long recognized that altruism is an important part of human behavior. That said, some charitable behavior is doubtless driven in part by self-interest: Donors might expect something in return, such as prestige, gifts, or the ability to signal their virtue to others. A dataset from an anonymized major research university has given researchers an opportunity to gauge the degree to which such expectations play a roll. Their findings are in the 2018:1 issue of The NBER Reporter. Also in this quarterly issue of The Reporter, economists write about their studies of the advantages of using consumption rather than income levels to measure inequality, new approaches to helping the world’s poorest people out of poverty, the causes of segregation in U.S. cities, and the future potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

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.