Research Library

While many countries are reluctant to accept and integrate refugees, Mexico and Brazil have established effective ways to welcome and absorb refugees through relocation programs. In her new brief, nonresident scholar Elizabeth Ferris outlines how these initiatives promote a win-win scenario by finding solutions that not only enhance refugee protection and well-being but also cater to domestic labor needs.

Traditional approaches to displacement are not working, writes Baker Institute nonresident fellow and Georgetown University professor Elizabeth Ferris. For both refugees and internally displaced people, a push to promote self-reliance could be part of the solution.

Europe’s reliance on fuel-switching and demand-rationing — and its need for new natural gas supply sources — will persist through this winter into next year. Using a newly developed interactive dashboard, Center for Energy Studies experts analyze possible winter scenarios using Germany as a case study.

Information and cyber action have been important but ancillary components of the Ukraine war since its outbreak on February 24, 2022. We offer a set of observations:

This brief estimates the costs of regulatory bank compliance under the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 financial crisis to reduce risk-taking by banks.

Despite the period of very low interest rates since the 2008 financial crisis, bank lending has failed to recover. In this issue brief, public finance fellow Thomas L. Hogan explores the potential causes of this post-crisis decline in bank lending.

In June 2018, Saudi Arabia finally put an end to its legal ban on women driving, opening the way for millions of new drivers to navigate across a country three times bigger than Texas. While the long-overdue policy shift provides relief to women who lacked freedom of mobility, the onset of so many new drivers has enormous consequences for transportation and the energy sector, as well as labor market participation and public health.

This issue brief summarizes the debate over regulatory complexity, outlines a proposal from the Federal Reserve that would simplify bank capital regulations and another from the OCC that would push the financial regulatory system toward greater complexity, and recommends reforms to help improve financial stability.

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.

A study comparing the community benefit expenditures of two sets of Houston hospitals leads the authors to propose strategies that can better justify the tax exemptions the institutions enjoy.