Data gathered online can be used quickly and transparently to compute purchasing power parity measurements, but the results may be less accurate in countries that are more rural and have fewer large retailers, researchers report in the June edition of The NBER Digest shows. The act was recently revised to ease regulation of small and medium-sized banks. Also featured in the June Digest is research exploring the use of online prices Also featured in the current Digest are studies analyzing the income consequences of women retiring early, measuring educational and income benefits of conditional cash transfers, gauging the effects of job-search assistance, examining the impact of cyberattacks, and documenting the Dodd-Frank Act’s impact on lending to small business.

Influenza is among the top ten causes of death in the United States, and even less-severe cases of the flu can affect worker productivity and consume substantial healthcare resources. Research summarized in the current edition of the NBER's Bulletin on Aging and Health finds a significant positive relationship across states between average sunlight exposure and reduced levels of the flu.

Most of the discussion around recent trends in inequality stresses that dispersion is growing. However, this conclusion is commonly based on growing income differences. Analyses of consumption data , featured in the latest issue of The NBER Reporter, show that the rise in consumption inequality has been much more modest than the rise in income inequality. Also in the 2018:1 issue of the quarterly Reporter, economists write about new approaches to helping the world’s poorest people out of poverty, the causes of segregation in U.S. cities, the future potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, and the roles of affinity and expectations of reciprocity in charitable giving.