Research Library

Media stories have raised concerns about Florida’s expansion of advanced trauma centers, with newly designated centers charging high trauma activation fees for relatively minor injuries, and Texas has experienced similar expansion in the last decade. In a new working paper, Chair in Health Economics Vivian Ho and her co-authors study the association between trauma center upgrades and patient outcomes — examining Texas commercial claims to track changes in spending, mortality, and readmissions of trauma patients

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.

This is the first analysis focused specifically on whether subnational resource curse dynamics seen in other oil-rich locales (1) apply to the Permian Basin and if so, to what extent, and (2) compensatory policy steps.

Texas is the source of about one-quarter of all energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the US industrial sector and about one-eighth of all CO2 emissions from the US power generation sector, with a significant proportion of emissions in both sectors located near the gulf coast. As such, Texas has the opportunity to capture significant economies of scale in carbon capture.

A working group led by the Baker Institute has developed an innovative measurement-based standard — “BCarbon” — for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil as organic carbon. BCarbon is a scalable soil carbon storage standard designed to work for landowners and soil carbon storage buyers. The proposed standard allows landowners to monetize soil carbon storage as a property right.

Energy fellow Gabriel Collins investigates how some operators in the Permian Basin are unifying their efforts to solve the unique set of community and infrastructure challenges in the region This working paper is part of a series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”

This working paper examines the lack of reliable data on the number and quality of drug treatment services in Harris County.

Texas' ERCOT ISO is used as a model for examining the costs of replacing fossil fuels by wind generation and storage, and for comparing wind power with generation based on nuclear and storage.

The unfettered development of Houston's flood-prone areas undoubtedly magnified the tremendous damage caused by Hurricane Harvey, but zoning or other land use controls are unpopular on the Texas coast and are unlikely to be adopted as a result. With this in mind, the SSPEED Center at Rice University looked to innovation and the market system to find a creative solution to protect important natural, flood-prone areas from further development. 

The authors investigate two plausible causes for the significant price discount of U.S. crudes during the U.S. “shale boom” and evaluate how much each mattered.