Peggy Teich
The library now subscribes to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Papers database. According to their website, NBER, “founded in 1920, (is) a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.”
Working papers are written by scholars and experts in a field, prior to submitting those papers to peer-reviewed journals or book editors. They typically contain extensive datasets including time-series data on a wide variety of topics. They also include comprehensive bibliographies.
While the papers found in this database are primarily socio-economic, their scope is in fact much broader. Working papers can be found on topics such as criminal justice, public administration, political science, history, demographics and education.
For example, a simple search on the term immigrants pulled up papers with an expected economic bent such as:
- The Earnings of Undocumented Immigrants
- Are Immigrants a Shot in the Arm for the Local Economy?
But the search also retrieved papers on the following cultural, historical, sociological, and demographic topics:
- The Educational Attainment of Immigrants: Trends and Implications
- Immigrants and Gender Roles: Assimilation vs. Culture
- Intergenerational Persistence of Health in the U.S.: Do Immigrants Get Healthier as they Assimilate?
November 2017