Recent social distancing guidelines have undoubtedly deepened local appreciation for public spaces as places of respite from otherwise hectic lives. For many, green public spaces (namely parks) have provided a low-risk avenue to connect with nature, meet other... More »
Public bikeshare systems (PBS) have become increasingly popular in cities, prompting studies on their relationship with different forms of transit, including cars, rideshare, walking, and public transit such as buses and rail. Many of these studies have found ... More »
Death may be unavoidable, but taxes? Not so much. An estimated $430 billion per year evades capture from tax collecting regimes worldwide. Developing countries are disproportionately harmed by tax evasion, with individual country losses equal to about half of ... More »
Since the 1970s, the United States has experienced growing inequality as the wealthy increased their total income share while the middle class shrunk. One of the most important explanations of this phenomenon is rising college premiums coupled with stagnant re... More »
Approximately one in twenty adults in the US suffer from a serious mental illness (SMI) such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depressive disorder. Yet barriers to accessing behavioral health services, including mental health care and substance use ... More »
Over the past few decades, research has suggested that there exists a gap in access to higher education for low-income populations in the United States. The attention this problem has received has pushed many colleges to develop new programs to improve access.... More »
The current U.S. political system is deeply polarized, defined by partisan animus and infighting. A contentious election cycle culminated in an armed insurrection of the U.S. Capitol and a violent attack on U.S. democratic institutions. The political stakes of... More »
More than a third of incarcerated individuals in the United States today have a diagnosed mental illness. In the 1960s, this population constituted fewer than 5% of all inmates. How did having a mental health condition become criminalized? A well-meaning polic... More »
Once data from the 2020 Census becomes available, the United States is set to undergo redistricting, which will undoubtedly influence the levels of minority representation in government. Historically, most Black and Latino candidates have been elected in distr... More »
Governments enact federal programs with the hope that they will improve the well-being of their citizens. But how do we know which programs have the highest long-term returns on investment? It is difficult to compare policies from different domains because of ... More »
In 2015, The Boston Globe famously reported that Donald Trump spoke at a fourth-grade level. The future president’s 2016 announcement speech scored a 4.1 on linguistic tests, meaning a fourth-grade student could understand his speech. By contrast, Hillary Clin... More »
On January 13, 2021, Lisa Montgomery was the first woman executed in 68 years by the federal government, for what the Department of Justice called an “especially heinous murder.” She was the twelfth individual killed since July 2020, when the former administra... More »