Research Library

A survey of Houston area high school students finds the highest levels of depression occur among older students and transgender youth. This issue brief from the Child Health Policy Program explains how demographic factors affect survey outcomes, noting that school absenteeism and behavioral issues are also associated with students’ poor mental health.

What if we could bridge the gap between science and practice to help adolescents transform their lives? Nonresident fellows Lilian Dindo and Jan Lindsay share a plan to expand mental health access, strengthen parity, and promote the well-being of young people post COVID-19.

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?

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.

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.

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.