Latest Insights

Research Briefs·Jun 11, 2025

Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults

Recent Medicaid expansions increased enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced mortality by 2.5% among low-income adults, saving roughly 27,400 lives for only $5.4 million and $179,000 per life and life-year saved, respectively.
Research Briefs·Jun 11, 2025

The Persistence of Female Political Power in Africa

Regions and ethnic groups in Africa with a higher historical prevalence of traditional female political leadership tend to have a higher proportion of elected female representatives in today’s political institutions. Institutional, rather than economic, factors significantly shape the traditional political...
Research Briefs·Jun 11, 2025

Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise

Personalizing policies can substantially improve program performance; in a case involving exercise incentives for individuals with lifestyle-related health conditions, such policies increased the treatment effect of incentives by 80% without increasing program costs.
Podcasts episode·Jun 11, 2025

AI, the Economy, and Public Policy

How is AI impacting the economy today? What might this mean for tomorrow? This episode brings you inside a discussion hosted at BFI in April. Moderated by Caroline Grossman, Executive Director of the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, the...

Latest Frontier Research

BFI Working Paper·Jun 10, 2025

Measuring Markets for Network Goods

Market definition is essential for antitrust analysis, but challenging in settings with network effects, where substitution patterns depend on changes in network size. To address this challenge, we conduct an incentivized experiment to measure substitution patterns for TikTok, a popular...
BFI Working Paper·Jun 10, 2025

Global Price Shocks and International Monetary Coordination

Individual central banks respond to global supply shocks that transmit inflationary pressures—such as oil prices, shipping costs, and bottlenecks in global supply chains—taking these conditions as given. However, their combined global response deter-mines global demand and, thus, the resulting global...
BFI Working Paper·Jun 7, 2025

The Local Root of Wage Inequality

Wages vary substantially between and within cities. While wages are on average higher in larger cities, the real earnings of low-wage workers are lower. Using French matched employer-employee data, I document two novel facts that highlight the role of employers...

Past Events

Jun 6
Academic Conferences·Jun 6, 2025, 9:00 AM·University of California, Berkeley | Spieker Forum | Room N640+670 2220 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley CA 94720

2025 IOG Summer Conference

by Matilde Bombardini, Oeindrila Dube, Roger Myerson, Torsten Persson, and Francesco Trebbi
Jun 5
Academic Conferences·Jun 5, 2025, 9:00 AM·The Gwen Hotel, Chicago IL

2025 Memory and Attention Conference

by Daniel Bartels, Alex Imas, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer
Seminar·Apr 4, 2025, 1:30 PM·Harper C05

Spring 2025 Trade and Spatial Afternoons Seminar Series

by Rodrigo Adão, Milena Almagro, Juanma Castro-Vincenzi, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
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Upcoming Events

Jun 19
Event·Jun 19, 2025, 12:30 PM·Saieh Hall 021

Hate the Game: A Juneteenth Book Talk with Dr. Daryl Fairweather

Jun 22
Jul 9
Academic Conferences·Jul 9, 2025, 9:00 AM·University of Chicago Booth School. One Bartholomew Close Barts Square, London EC1A 7BL

The Safer Streets: Mission: Causes, Solutions and Next Steps to Reducing Violence

Organizers: Jens Ludwig
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About BFI

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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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Inspired by our namesakes, Nobel Laureates Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who believed that economics research could help improve the world, BFI works with the Chicago Economics community to turn its evidence-based research into real-world impact.

Our Team

University of Chicago faculty members and other accomplished economists set the goals and direction of the Institute.
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