Latest Insights

Research Briefs·Jul 9, 2025

Measuring Markets for Network Goods

Users value apps like Instagram and YouTube more when TikTok is collectively banned than when TikTok is individually deactivated, suggesting the importance of accounting for network effects when defining markets.
Research Briefs·Jul 9, 2025

Administrative Fragmentation in Health Care

A recent Medicare reform that aimed to reduce administrative fragmentation by consolidating billing processes successfully reduced fragmentation, but had only modest effects on administrative efficiency and no discernible impact on patient outcomes or hospital administrative costs.
Podcasts episode·Jul 8, 2025

When Religion Meets the Marketplace: Faith, Farming, and Trade-Offs

What happens when your religion forbids the production of crops that dominate your local economy? In this episode, UChicago economist Eduardo Montero unpacks new research on the economic costs of religious prohibitions, and how these trade-offs shape church membership, satisfaction,...
Research Briefs·Jun 27, 2025

Meaning at Work

Randomly implementing an intervention that helps white collar employees at a multinational consumer goods firm find meaning at work leads low-performing employees to exit the firm, and remaining employees to improve their performance. As a result, compensation increases.

Latest Frontier Research

BFI Working Paper·Jun 30, 2025

Culture, Policy, and Economic Development

Culture shapes how policies are made and how people react to them. This chapter explores how culture and development policy affect each other. First, we provide evidence that cultural mismatch — specifically a mismatch between project manager background and the...
BFI Working Paper·Jun 30, 2025

Building Costs and House Prices

We take a long, broad, and theoretically agnostic view toward the connection between building costs and house prices in the US housing market. We find that building costs have never had all that much explanatory power over US housing prices,...
BFI Working Paper·Jun 30, 2025

Borrowing Constraints, Markups, and Misallocation

We document new facts that link firms’ markups to borrowing constraints: (1) less constrained firms within an industry have higher markups, especially in industries where assets are difficult to borrow against and firms rely more on earnings to borrow; (2)...

Past Events

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

by Jens Ludwig
Seminar·May 9, 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

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
Aug 21
Academic Conferences·Aug 21, 2025, 9:00 AM·David Rubenstein Forum

2025 Women in Empirical Microeconomics Conference

Organizers: Pauline Carry, Renata Gaineddenova, Elisa Jácome, Virginia Minni, and Manasvini Singh
Aug 27
Academic Conferences·Aug 27, 2025, 9:00 AM

Economic Theory Conference X

Organizers: Agathe Pernoud and Frank Yang
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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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Our Legacy

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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