Research Brief Library

Most bank depositors rarely shop for better rates and stay with the same bank for nearly a decade, on average. This “sleepiness” accounts for more than half of banks’ deposit franchise value while also creating stability in the banking system.

Emergency department visits for drug and alcohol use increase by 20-30% following cash benefit receipt but do not respond to food stamp receipt. This is the first direct comparison showing that cash and food stamps affect consumption differently in the...

Collapsing students’ responses to individual test questions to single scores discards useful information about teacher efficacy and student knowledge that predicts outcomes like graduation, discipline, and future earnings.

Parents feel pressured to adopt AI for their children’s education if they know that other children are using the technology, despite its uncertain long-term consequences. This social pressure outweighs parents’ personal desire to restrict AI use in classrooms.

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...