We study how aggregate risk shapes production, trade, and input sourcing in complex supply chains. We develop a quantitative model of sequential production under risk, where each stage sources inputs from multiple origins. Analytically, we first show that sourcing shares...

We revisit the classic identification problem of separating supply and demand for a homogeneous good using data from multiple markets. We allow markets to be heterogeneous according to unobservables, a feature that arises if there are unobservable differences in consumer...

Evaluating optimized AI systems for asset pricing is fundamentally difficult for two reasons. First, models are trained on all data, implying that any backtest or analysis using historical data suffers from look-ahead bias. In addition, markets are reflexive — as...

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...

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.

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

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