Research Library

This report examines how and why corporations buy back shares and whether an excise tax on share buybacks is efficient.

The food environment currently dominated by the industrialized food industry is undermining both brain health and our environment.

Nonresident scholar Richard Kilroy explores how Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s decision to move the Guardia Nacional — an institution created to protect public safety — under the control of Mexico’s military could have dire consequences for civil-military relations and U.S.-Mexico security relations.

Kuwait lags behind the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council in its progress toward sustainable energy targets. Its pro-rentier democracy is slowing it down, writes visiting scholar Osamah Alsayegh.

The number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border far exceeds the immigration system’s capacity, and the flow is not stopping. In this brief, visiting scholar Katia Adimora talks to experts in the field about what the real issues are and how best to solve them.

This policy report examines the push and pull factors that contribute to the formation of so-called “migrant caravans” and offers policy recommendations to staunch the flow of migrants through Mexico.

With the 2023 debt-ceiling negotiations under way, a new issue brief from John Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance, and Autumn Engebretson looks at the effectiveness of the Budget Control Act 2011, enacted in response to the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. Did it in fact control the budget? And could similar legislation work now?

A pledge to boost regional competitiveness is a welcome outcome of last month's North American Leaders’ Summit. But the region’s policymakers should remember the lessons of the past as they work to do so, writes fellow David A. Gantz.

Truth-in-taxation measures, which are intended to serve taxpayers, have failed to constrain the property tax burden in Texas, write Jennifer Rabb and Lebena Varghese of the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth. They argue that it is incumbent upon the government to make tax rate notices clear, relevant and above all truthful.

Texas lawmakers must address the misuse of anticipation notes — short-term debt securities used to raise money for public projects, writes John Diamond, the Edward A. and Hermena Hancock Kelly Fellow in Public Finance. Since they don’t require voter approval, politicians could use them to fund unwanted projects, he explains.