Research Library

Why does Texas have its own power grid, and how can its history inform the future of electric power in the state? Nonresident scholar Julie Cohn looks beyond the mythology surrounding the standalone Texas grid and finds that reliability and economics — not politics — were the major factors leading to isolation.

Research scholar José Iván Rodríguez-Sánchez examines the economic impact of remittances — the money sent home by migrants working abroad — and finds varying results at the state and municipal levels in Mexico. He also warns against relying too heavily on remittances to drive economic growth.

How much can demographic changes account for trends in the U.S. economy? This paper shows that a heterogeneous-agent, overlapping-generations model with historical demographic flows can generate several features of the U.S. economy over the past several decades, including a secular decline in economic growth, a rise in savings relative to GDP, a corresponding decline in real interest rates, and, in part, changes in wealth inequality.

An increasing number of states have begun to contemplate state-administered individual retirement account programs. How do these differ from employer-sponsored plans? And would they be able to provide workers with meaningful retirement savings? Public finance fellow Joyce Beebe explains.

This paper lays out one potential step-by-step path toward decarbonizing Saudi Arabia, imagining a sweeping restructuring of a fossil fuel-driven society and economy.

Texas has long been an economic leader, but the state lags critically in a major area: health. A new report by M.D. candidate Kushal T. Kadakia and nonresident scholar Anaeze C. Offodile II offers a road map for improving Texas’ health rankings by 10 spots in 10 years.

Fellow Joyce Beebe explores the tax scams featured on the IRS' "Dirty Dozen" list in this two-part brief series.

As climate change becomes an increasingly prominent driver of migration, this report investigates possible pathways to ensure that “climate refugees” receive adequate legal protection.

Political, market and geopolitical headwinds have slowed down Biden’s ambitious climate plans, write energy experts Anna Mikulska and Michael Maher. In this brief, they explore why progress on decarbonization is likely to be more gradual than initially envisioned.