McDonald’s says its value meals have become too complicated

We thank Tommaso Manfe, Gokul Raj Boobathy, and Carlos Chavez for excellent research assistance. For very helpful comments and discussions, we thank Winnie Coleman, Fiorella de Fiore, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and conference and seminar participants in the 2025 American Economic Association Annual Meeting, the G53 Financial Literacy seminar, the Virtual Asian Seminar on Macroeconomic Expectations, the…

We provide descriptive evidence on women’s experiences in platform-based driving and delivery work using survey and administrative data from India and Indonesia. Partnering with major two-wheeler platforms, we study representative samples of drivers, oversampling women to examine gender differences (India: 404 women, 2,153 men; Indonesia: 892 women, 2,114 men). Female participation is extremely low —…

AUD/USD inches lower after registering over 1% gains in the previous day, trading around 0.7020 during the Asian hours on Friday. The pair remains subdued following the release of disappointing Chinese Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) data. China’s NBS Manufacturing PMI fell into contraction territory at 49.2 in July, down from 50.3 prior and below market…

In many ways, Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +9.43%) — aka SpaceX — has confounded investors since its record-breaking debut. The company raised $85.7 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) and ended the day with a record market cap of $2.1 trillion. Since then, however, volatility has been the default. After soaring as much as…

Key Findings Digital services taxes (DSTs) are gross-based taxes, which can pyramid through supply chains and cause disproportionate harm to low-margin businesses and to value chains with multiple participants; the same underlying commerce may be included in multiple firms’ taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from…