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.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with autonomous decision-making, understanding their behavior in strategic settings is crucial. We investigate the choices of various LLMs in the Ultimatum Game, a setting where human behavior notably deviates from theoretical rationality....
Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Paul Novosad, Anjali Adukia, and Brandon Tan
We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S....
In this chapter, we develop a framework for analyzing the determinants of economic development and their implications for policy. We distinguish between classical determinants—such as inputs into education and health, access to credit, and geography—and non-classical determinants—including cultural values, social...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
Using a novel, hand-collected dataset of Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) investments in public equities, private firms, and real estate, we establish what SWF portfolios look like. SWF allocations are balanced across risky asset classes, very home-region biased, and very biased toward certain industries, in particular, toward finance (owning 4.8% of world equity) and transportation, energy and telecommunication. SWFs invest actively (with control rights) in both public and private sectors, but mainly in these industries in their home regions. We use these allocations to understand better the objectives that drive SWF investment decisions. We find evidence for financial portfolio investor benchmarking and for hedging of income covariance risk. We introduce and test an industrial planning hypothesis as an alternative objective and find this has considerable explanatory power. We find that both measures to capture financial portfolio and industrial planning objectives together explain 14.4% of SWF portfolio variation. Of this, industrial planning accounts for 45%. There is significant variation in the power of industrial planning objectives across SWFs revealing important heterogeneity in this investor class. Industrial planning helps to explain active ownership, predicting higher ownership stakes.
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.
The Predoctoral Research in Economics Program (PREP) is intended to serve as a bridge between college and graduate school for students interested in empirical economics. The program offers unique research and professional training opportunities at the University of Chicago.
Expanding Discovery in Economics+ (EDE+) brings together a diverse group of early undergraduate students to hone their research abilities and technical skills.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with autonomous decision-making, understanding their behavior in strategic settings is crucial. We investigate the choices of various LLMs in the Ultimatum Game, a setting where human behavior notably deviates from theoretical rationality....
Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Paul Novosad, Anjali Adukia, and Brandon Tan
We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S....
In this chapter, we develop a framework for analyzing the determinants of economic development and their implications for policy. We distinguish between classical determinants—such as inputs into education and health, access to credit, and geography—and non-classical determinants—including cultural values, social...
Captivating and informative videos on the latest insights and trends as well as the tested stock of knowledge in economics from leaders in academia, policy, business, and the media.
