NBER conference in Beijing.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research-China Center for Economic Research

The eighth annual NBER-CCER Conference on China and the World Economy, jointly sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the China Center for Economic Research at Beijing University, took place in Beijing on June 28-July 1.

At this conference, the discussion topics included: Chinas role in the world economy, the importance of international capital flows, monetary policy under fixed exchange rates, FDI and economic growth, the effect of social capital on poverty, regulation issues, human capital and its relation to growth and inequality, and the measurement of productivity.

U.S. participants at this year's conference were: NBER President Martin Feldstein and Professor Shang-Jin Wei, who is currently on leave from the NBER at the IMF, both serving as the U.S. conference organizers; NBER researchers Alberto F. Alesina of Harvard University; Ernst R. Berndt, James M. Poterba, and Nancy L. Rose of MIT; William J. Collins of Vanderbilt University; Mark Duggan, University of Maryland; Gordon H. Hanson, University of California, San Diego; Casey Mulligan, University of Chicago; and Michael Woodford, Columbia University.

The entire conference program with links to other related information is available on the NBER's web site at www.nber. org/china.

Brown, Coe, and Finkelstein provide empirical evidence of Medicaid crowd out of the demand for private long-term care insurance. Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey, they estimate that a $10,000 decrease in the level of assets an individual can keep while qualifying for Medicaid would increase private long-term care insurance coverage by 1.1 percentage points. This implies that if every state in the country moved from their current Medicaid asset eligibility requirements to the most stringent Medicaid eligibility requirements allowed by federal law--a change that would decrease average household assets protected by Medicaid by about $25,000--demand for private long-term care insurance would rise by 2.7 percentage points. While this represents a 30 percent increase in insurance coverage relative to the baseline ownership rate of 9.1 percent, it also indicates that the vast majority of households would still find it unattractive to purchase private insurance.

Feldstein and Altman ask whether unemployment insurance (UI) savings accounts based on a moderate saving rate can finance a significant share of unemployment payments or whether the concentration of unemployment among a...