Research Library

A survey of Houston area high school students finds the highest levels of depression occur among older students and transgender youth. This issue brief from the Child Health Policy Program explains how demographic factors affect survey outcomes, noting that school absenteeism and behavioral issues are also associated with students’ poor mental health.

Latinos are the largest and most rapidly expanding minority group in the U.S. Our latest brief describes the overall state of health and wellness among Latino children and the broader community — including indicators of obesity, mental health, and kindergarten readiness.

In the second brief of a two-part series on the Chinese Communist Party's 100th anniversary, the author examines the rhetoric of China's president, Xi Jinping, and his deeply nationalistic vision of a unified country that erases ways of being Chinese that do not conform to that of the Han majority.

By Courtney Freer, London School of Economics Cross-ideological movements uniting Islamist and secular groups have increasingly focused on sweeping political reforms instead of social policies and ideology in post-Arab Spring Kuwait, writes the author. This brief is the second of four resulting from a May 2018 workshop held in Kuwait by the Baker Institute in partnership with the Alsalam Center for Strategic and Developmental Studies. This work is part of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on “Building Pluralistic and Inclusive States Post-Arab Spring.”

The authors examine the arguments for and against source-based capital income taxation, focusing on the factors that countries must balance in thinking about the extent to which they should rely on a corporate income tax as a significant source of revenue.

Houston and Harris County area law enforcement leaders weigh in on the need for drug policy reforms in the United States.

With the Texas Legislature now considering several bills that would decrease penalties for marijuana possession and legalize the use of medical marijuana to treat a variety of conditions, authors William Martin and Katharine A. Neill present updated findings in this new issue brief that support the case for reforming marijuana policy in Texas.

Drug Policy Program director Bill Martin summarizes the scientific and fiscal evidence supporting the efficacy of syringe exchange programs and outlines a framework for public policies to deal with this aspect of drug use and abuse.

Using charts, figures and graphs of this survey data originally created by former career intelligence analyst Brian C. Bennett and updated by the Drug Policy Program, this issue brief offers an overview of drug use trends in America over the last four decades. The brief is part of a larger online project chronicling the pattern of the use and abuse of individual drugs over (in most cases) more than 40 years.

While the recent fiscal troubles in Greece have received much attention, the U.S. fiscal position is hardly comparable to that of Greece. However, the United States is experiencing, and will continue to experience, one of the fundamental economic costs of relatively large and persistent deficits.