To understand the importance of reliable data to economic policymaking, think about driving without an accurate speedometer. Knowing when to press on the brakes and when to push down on the ...

The investment from longtime benefactors John Edwardson, MBA ’72, and Fran Edwardson is the latest in their history of ...

Accounting for the costs of climate change is an increasing focus globally. In 2024, the United States alone had 27 “confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each,” ...

Knowledge may be power, but information can also be overwhelming. Decision-makers often have access to so much potentially relevant data that they must choose what to ignore. Economists call this ...

Back in 2020, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill wrote about an experiment she conducted for the news site Gizmodo the year before to see how hard it would be to disconnect from Big Tech—Amazon, ...

As catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, and floods roil the planet, investors are increasingly interested in portfolios to hedge the risks associated with climate change. A research team including ...

Why are some countries rich and others poor? It’s among the most important questions in economics—in all the social sciences—and one at the heart of the work for which MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Simon ...

It’s been seven years since US president Donald Trump took to a Washington, DC, podium to sing the praises of a tax bill, soon to become the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017—better known to many as the ...

Several recent studies point out that the COVID-19 pandemic is taking a greater toll on women in the workforce than on men. In this respect, the startup world is no different. A December 2020 headline ...

Last fall an artist duct-taped a banana to a wall, and the piece sold for $6.24 million. As an economist who also runs the 800-piece contemporary-art collection at Booth, can you explain what made ...

Fostering high vaccination rates was one of the major public-policy challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Policymakers tried various strategies to encourage vaccination, including offering monetary ...

For almost two decades, the conventional wisdom has been that when the US Federal Reserve makes a surprise rate decision, the resulting moves in the stock market are driven by the projected equity ...