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Poverty, Hardship, and Government Transfers

In the years leading up to the pandemic and during 2020, income poverty and consumption poverty tracked closely. The two measures diverged in subsequent years, however, apparently due to savings behavior: expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus payments boosted savings and...

An Extra Slice of the Pie, with James Robinson: History, Politics, and the Road to an Economics Nobel

Professor James Robinson a University Professor with appointments in both UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy as well as the Political Science Department in the Division of Social Sciences is the university’s latest faculty member to win the Nobel Memorial Prize...

Can Interest Groups Influence Elections? Evidence from Unions in Great Britain 1900-2019

Union sponsorship in British elections historically benefits candidates, causing an inflow of resources into constituency-party organizations, and promotion of union-friendly candidates in parliament, but only moderate shifts in the balance of power between parties.

Economics Meets Ecology: The Huge Costs of Ecosystem Declines

Bats are considered a natural pesticide. When they began to die out due to an invasive fungus, farmers turned to chemicals to control pests. The result, as Eyal Frank of the Harris School of Public Policy describes on this episode...

Latest Frontier Research

Information and Macroeconomic Expectations: Global Evidence

Standard rational learning models with information frictions can explain consumers’ heterogeneous macroeconomic beliefs but not their systematic bias. Using novel data on 47,000 consumers across 47 countries representing 90% of global GDP, we document novel facts that can inspire realistic...

Carbon Burden

We quantify the U.S. corporate sector’s carbon externality by computing the sector’s “carbon burden”—the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual...

Commitment and Randomization in Communication

When does a Sender, in a Sender-Receiver game, strictly value commitment? In a setting with finite actions and finite states, we establish that, generically, Sender values commitment if and only if he values randomization. In other words, commitment has no...

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About the Becker Friedman Institute

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...

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