Plenty of reasons for optimism emerged from this year’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States is back in the Paris Agreement, both China and the US have pledged to reduce carbon emissions (Friedman 2021), and many other countries have made addi... More »
It is no secret that the rich hate paying taxes. A recent ProPublica investigation of tax returns revealed that the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of 3.4% on the wealth they accumulated from 2014 to 2018 through entirely legal means. At the same tim... More »
Vivek Kumar is a 2021 Graduate student from the Harris School of Public Policy. His policy interests lie around gender based empowerment in South Asia.“Even if I work outside as a laborer and bring home 200 rupees every day, I will still get a beating from my ... More »
Covid-19 shocked the US health system when it first arrived in 2020. The immediate direct consequences were obvious, but with such a dramatic event there will inevitably be many more delayed or indirect consequences of the pandemic and lockdown. Researchers ar... More »
Deciphering the causal effects, or “treatment effects”, of different educational designs on student outcomes is an increasingly difficult task in the United States. Understanding these effects is vitally important in order to provide students with the best opp... More »
Sarthak Aggarwal is an MS1 at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He can be reached at Sarthak.Aggarwal@uchospitals.edu.The COVID-19 pandemic remains at the forefront of public life, claiming the lives of countless Americans and leaving many... More »
The strategic decision by Mexican drug cartels to assassinate local government officials and politicians in the past 15 years has been surprising, to say the least. Since the 1990s cartels understood that their success depended on remaining out of the spotligh... More »
Immigration is a perennial source of debate in the United States. Debates tend to focus on low-skilled immigrants – their legal status, employability, country of origin, and even potential threat to national security. In recent years, however, high-skilled leg... More »
Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, UChicago. His research focuses on the role of the environment and environmental change in shaping of how societies develop. He has conducted fieldwork related to climate change adaptati... More »
How do countries pursue socioeconomic development in a sustainable and equitable way? This question has received considerable attention, more so with the COVID-19 pandemic bringing about discussion of a green (economic) recovery. The United Nations formulated ... More »
The idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction over the past decade. While the idea of a basic income has existed since the American and French Revolutions, it has never been implemented on a country-wide level. Myriad questions remain on its exe... More »
A large body of evidence shows that Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionally exposed to harmful pollutants. People of color are more likely to live near hazardous waste landfills, more likely to reside near contaminated waterways, and more likely to ... More »