Research Brief Library

Despite the aggressive post-pandemic rate hikes, which pushed Australian mortgage rates up by over 4 percentage points and monthly payments up by $13,800, adjustable-rate borrowers did not cut their spending because they tapped into large savings buffers they had built...

A six-month experiment with 459 diverse Chicago families shows that providing high-quality math apps to children of parents without college degrees improved their math skills by 0.17 standard deviations, closing roughly one-third of the initial education-based achievement gap. The intervention...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, much unsecured debt is implicitly asset backed, and the degree to which unsecured debt is asset backed can change with a firm’s condition and macroeconomic conditions. Asset values can also affect the price of borrowing, notably...

Although foreign producers partially absorbed the 2019 US tariffs on European wines by lowering their prices, domestic markups amplified the cost as it moved through the supply chain, ultimately causing US consumers to pay more in dollar terms than the...

Many voters support tariffs and protectionist policies that materially hurt them because they derive value from consuming or possessing goods that others want but do not have. Individuals with such “exclusionary preferences” are significantly more willing to accept higher prices...

First-generation students—those whose parents lack college degrees—represent 70% of the student population but only 40% of top academic performers. Large excellence gaps emerge by 3rd grade and persist through high school, with socioeconomic status and school quality explaining only one-third...

A pricing reform in Israeli supermarkets that forced firms to adjust prices revealed that they operated with only partial knowledge of optimal pricing. When forced to explore new pricing strategies, firms gradually learned and improved performance, though meaningful deviations from...

Regions with lower education costs maintain persistently higher levels of human capital and development over centuries. Improving educational access in poor regions generates local benefits but may reduce global welfare when population shifts away from more productive areas. Policies that...

The Industrial Revolution fractured the strictures from a centuries-old “society of orders” in England, introducing the phenomenon of social mobility that created new opportunities for workers, and initiating a “dawn of liberty” for those previously entrenched in rigid social hierarchies.

Using a foreign language reduces the “winner’s curse” in auctions, as bidders make more strategic decisions and are less likely to overbid when processing information in a non-native tongue. This effect largely disappears as bidders receive feedback across consecutive auctions,...