Georgetown University recently attained a dubious distinction: it became one of sixteen colleges nationwide with a price tag of more than $100,000 (including tuition, required fees, room, and board). Cue the usual caveats: “Ignore the sticker price” and “Nobody pays the sticker price.” The message is that students shouldn’t be warned off by those hefty…
Fix this rule that blocks genuine equalization reform beng Tue, 07/14/2026 – 09:00 EST. READ TIME 3 MIN. Canada’s equalization program is heading for its comprehensive mandatory review by March 2029, and Finance Canada is already making preparations. Officials should not treat the review as a routine exercise. Big changes should be on the table….
Writing in May for Above the Law, Ken Crutchfield observed that “over the past year, we’ve seen a steady stream of headlines about AI hallucinations where fake cases, fabricated quotes, and misstated facts made it through a review process and into court filings.” The predicament isn’t just that GenAI tools invent non-existent cases that some…
We harmonize survey data on interest rates paid by approximately 15,000 small and medium enterprises across 125 firm surveys and 285,000 households across 83 household surveys spanning developing and rich countries to study the relationship between monetary policy rates and borrowing costs faced by SMEs and households. Using within-country variation in policy rates over time,…
Buoyed by AI stocks, global financial markets have largely shrugged off the war with Iran. Yet the conflict’s long-term economic costs are only beginning to emerge, as depleted strategic oil reserves, damaged refining capacity, and rising fuel and fertilizer costs increasingly weigh on lower-income economies. NEW DELHI—The on-again, off-again US-Israeli war against Iran has underscored…
Thursday, December 18, 2025 Mexican Crime Organizations and the Synthetic Drug Crisis Thousands of Americans die each year after overdosing on illicit synthetic drugs, including synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Transnational criminal organizations have played a central role in fueling this health crisis here in the United States. In a new report, we look specifically at…
Transit commission appears to give up on customer satisfaction in Toronto beng Tue, 07/14/2026 – 07:22 EST. READ TIME 3 MIN. It’s official. When it comes to customer satisfaction, the Toronto Transit Commission appears to have given up. In the TTC CEO’s latest monthly report, the customer satisfaction target was revised downward to 70 per…
The central trade-off for designing Disability Insurance (DI) is between providing insurance to those in need while maintaining incentives to work. This paper develops a novel revealed-preference approach to identify the insurance value of DI benefits. We show that comparing the DI take-up response to a change in benefits versus a change in wages identifies…
Thursday, January 8, 2026 Water Recycling Program Could Help Drought-Stricken Communities In some parts of the United States, growing populations and prolonged droughts are straining water supplies. Large-scale water recycling could offer these communities a solution to their shortages. In a new report, we looked at the status of these efforts and their challenges. We’ll…
This paper was prepared for a conference on “The Forces Shaping America’s Fiscal Future” in June 2026. The conference was organized by the Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Utah, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution….