Research Library

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 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.

The Mexico Center debuts its "Mexico Centered" podcast, which features interviews with academics, former government officials and other experts on issues central to Mexico's 2018 elections.

The authors investigate whether stance of a religious tradition toward capitalism will help shape individual scientists’ views on science commercialization and whether the religious tradition of scientists correlates with their attitude toward the commercialization of science.

The landscape is changing for foreign direct investment in Latin America. Investments flow not only from north to south, but also from south to south and south to north. What's more, relatively small firms in developing countries are becoming as likely as multinationals to invest abroad.

Social media is becoming more and more a part of the daily political process. From a political science perspective, the ability to capture the ideology of elites and citizens using a common platform greatly helps in answering a very important question: which party’s ideological position is closest to that of its supporters, on a left-right ideology scale? Research scholar Abdullah Aydogan analyzes the tweets of four major Turkish political parties to answer this question in a post for the Baker Institute Blog.

Recent academic research has shown that startup training institutions can greatly increase the number of startup firms receiving seed and early-stage venture capital for the first time. In this paper, the authors examine the startup training institutions in Houston, and what they are doing to open up the city’s pipeline of startups.

In a post for the Baker Institute Blog, the authors examine two associations that have been among the pillars of civil society in Tunisia and have played a key role in keeping alive a feminist, secularist discourse in favor of women’s rights in the last several decades.

Is President Trump's April 2017 executive order calling for a review of the H-1B visa program bad news for foreign workers?