Research Analysis
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Innovation and Climate Change: A Framework for Effective Environmental Policy
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Climate change and environmental degradation may be the greatest existential threats the world will face for generations to come. After entering in to office in January 2017, the Trump administration signaled that it would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, dealing a blow to the spirit of global cooperation…
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Can Geo-Simulations Provide A Roadmap to Better Disaster Response?
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The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was one of the priciest on record, mirroring a global trend of natural disasters becoming more expensive. Understanding the impacts of these natural disasters has become increasingly important. Researchers often model these impacts by creating relationships between indicators such as hurricane wind speed, predicted costs…
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Digital Health: The Next Frontier in Mental Health Care
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Uber, Airbnb, Seamless, Waze—Twenty years ago these concepts were a distant impossibility. Smart phone technology has given programmers, computer scientists and entrepreneurs tools to revolutionize traditional industries like hospitality, transportation and supermarkets. However, the emergence of new technology need not be limited to satisfying basic consumer needs. The ubiquity of…
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Which Income Group Benefits from Commuting Subsidies? Lessons from Germany
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Most countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offer one form or another of tax breaks for commuting expenses. In countries like Germany and Denmark, the cost of commuting to and from one’s place of work is exempted from taxable income. In the United States, parking expenses are exempt…
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Teachers’ Unions Improve Student Achievement: Insights from California Charter Schools
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Over the past several decades, public sector unionization rates have held fairly steady, even as private sector unionization rates have plummeted. Among economists and social scientists, a debate persists as to whether public sector unions serve the public interest. Proponents argue that these unions increase the efficiency of the public…
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How Our Perceptions of Victims’ Humanity Increases Some Violence, But Not All
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Dehumanization is the process through which we come to believe that a person cannot think, feel, and behave intentionally, nor experience right and wrong. A substantial body of literature from the social sciences posits that dehumanization may be the psychological rationale motivating acts of mass violence, such as the Holocaust…
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This Is Why We Nudge: Reaffirming Nobel Winner Richard Thaler’s ‘Nudge’
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In October 2017, Richard Thaler won the University of Chicago its 29th Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. Stockholm’s nod to Thaler is less coup than coronation, of both Thaler himself and of the broad applicability and value of behavioral economics as an indispensable discipline,…
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Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy: How Birth Place Affects Presidential Decision-Making
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U.S. presidents make up perhaps the most analyzed collection of individuals in the entire world. Researchers routinely mine demographic, electoral and biographical data to gain insights into the composition of the 45-entry dataset and to better understand the decisions presidents make in the White House. Findings range from marginally useful…
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How Nonprofit Organizations Make Their Communities Safer
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In 2016, the FBI reported a 4.1 percent increase in violent crime from the previous year. With more than 1.2 million incidences, that report claims that cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Las Vegas—cities that have all struggled with pervasive crime for decades—are driving the recent increase in violent crime in…
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Revisiting Welfare Reform: Effects on Teenage Crime
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In the early nineties, politicians took up the task of reforming America’s welfare system. A bipartisan effort led to the creation of an employment-focused entitlement program: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Popularly known as “welfare reform”, the legislation had two basic goals: to increase financial independence…
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In Their Own Words: North Korea’s Changing Motives in Nuclear Testing
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North Korea conducted three nuclear tests between 2006 and 2013, but this rate has intensified to three tests in the past two years alone. This threat of unchecked nuclear escalation has led to an all-time low in U.S.–North Korea relations and turned East Asia into a potential flashpoint. North Korea’s…