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.
Public finance fellow Thomas Hogan analyzes the relationship between bank lending and the Federal Reserve's policy of paying interest on excess reserves (IOER).
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.
Pablo M. Pinto, Leonardo Baccini, Stephen WeymouthNovember 21, 2017
This working paper studies optimal taxation in a dynamic stochastic economy in which there is uncertainty about the effects of climate change. It concludes that model uncertainty has significant quantitative implications regarding optimal greenhouse gas emissions and the optimal mix of fossil fuel used.