Research Library

Political partisanship is strongly influencing the United States’ response to Covid-19, potentially leading to a suboptimal balance between reopening the economy and protecting public health. Read more at the Baker Institute Blog.

Legislation regulating commercial transport by ship is impeding economic development and growth, the authors write. Read the post on the Baker Institute Blog.  This post originally appeared in the Forbes blog on April 9, 2020.

The authors explain why $100 billion allocated by the CARES act to compensate health care providers for unreimbursed expenses and lost revenue from may be woefully inadequate.

Despite the Trump administration sentiment that the U.S. partner with Saudi Arabia in a joint oil alliance, such an approach is unlikely to be successful, write energy fellows Jim Krane and Mark Finley. Forbes blog: https://bit.ly/2WUa6rb

Fellow Joyce Beebe evaluates a provision of the newly passed SECURE Act, which offers an option for penalty-free withdrawal from IRAs and 401(k)s for new parents. She also discusses Congress’s recent decision to grant 2.1 million federal workers up to 12 weeks paid parental leave. Baker Institute Blog: http://bit.ly/2RZIIUJ

This article reviews certain elements of employee retirement plans and their tax implications, as well as the often-overlooked component of employer matching. Read more on the Baker Institute Blog: http://bit.ly/36T9sft

Given the uncertainty surrounding the economic effects and the poorly targeted benefits and burdens of a minimum wage, it is unlikely to be the best policy to increase the wages of low-wage workers. Fellow John Diamond explains in the Baker Institute Blog

How should cloud computing be taxed? Fellow Joyce Beebe discusses how services like Dropbox and Gmail have both transformed daily life and complicated the taxation landscape. Baker Institute blog: https://bit.ly/2HqRgQ8

While sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project would be very well received in Central and Eastern Europe, they could make the already strained relationship between U.S. and its Western European allies even more challenging, the author writes in a Forbes blog post: http://bit.ly/305Cc1F and the Baker Institute Blog.

On Aug. 11, the Santa Cruz province of Argentina will hold elections for its governor and legislature. Fellow Mark P. Jones reviews the province’s Peronist history and discusses the impact of these elections on Argentina as a whole: https://bit.ly/2YrStjP