Research Library

The toll of Lebanon's dual governance system weighs heavily on the state and its governance structure. The author examines the current need to formalize the country's informal senate.

This brief explores how the alliance between Tunisia's two leading political parties — Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdha — has contributed to the Tunisian public’s growing dissatisfaction with formal politics, which has potentially dangerous consequences for the country’s democratic transition.

This brief explores the Trump administration's policy toward Iran and analyzes the ways in which it differs from that of the Obama administration.

This month, the Syrian Civil War will have lasted seven years. The authors of this brief explore how the United States — first under President Barack Obama and now under President Donald Trump — has struggled to develop a coherent strategy that balances U.S. interests in the conflict with the military, financial and diplomatic resources necessary to pursue them.

In this issue brief, the authors examine the amount of growth and transactional venture capital (VC) in Houston, finding the the city lacks sufficient levels of growth VC needed to support its goals of establishing a high-growth, high technology startup ecosystem.

This brief on the Trump administration's approach to the battle against ISIS is the first of a three-part series on America's foreign policy in the Middle East. Subsequent reports will examine U.S. policy in Syria and the intensified competition between Iran and traditional U.S. partners in the region, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel.   

This brief explores how a quirk in the measurement of women’s labor force participation and the demographic peculiarities of the Persian Gulf have resulted in the significant undercounting of female citizen labor in the Gulf Cooperation Council. I

While academic and popular debates tend to focus on differential benefits and costs of trade across countries or industries, this brief highlights winners and losers at the level of individual firms. The authors demonstrate that preferential liberalization produces concentrated benefits among a relatively small number of very large and productive firms.

Fellow Joe Barnes looks back, and ahead, at the impact of President Obama's foreign policies.

This policy brief analyzes the impact of the increasing number of parents who opt their children out of school-entry vaccinations for nonmedical reasons in Texas and argues that the state should make obtaining nonmedical exemptions more rigorous in order to reduce the public health risks and costs associated with vaccine-preventable diseases.