The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes taxpayers may deduct on their federal income tax returns. In this report, public finance fellow Joyce Beebe examines the pros and cons of the limit and state-level efforts to circumvent the cap.
Lauded as “The Pastor to the Presidents,” the late evangelist Billy Graham met with or gave counsel to every sitting commander-in-chief from Truman to Trump. This report, drawn from the author's book "A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story" (William Morrow, 1991; updated edition, Zondervan, 2019), provides insight on their relationships.
By tracking the math scores and earnings of adults who were in-utero during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, the authors were able to identify some of the consequences of prenatal malnutrition and stress.
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 report reviews several fundamental challenges in cross-border taxation of the digital economy and presents recent developments toward revising existing laws to enable the taxation of digital companies in Europe.
The authors show that border barriers can have unintended but important biological consequences for biodiversity by, for instance, inducing changes to the environment and reducing genetic diversity.
On Sept. 13, 2018, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and George Washington University’s Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) co-hosted the conference “Building Inclusive and Pluralistic States Post-Arab Spring.” The conference was the culmination of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation and showcased research by leading scholars of the Middle East on political, economic and socio-religious inclusion in Arab states since 2011.
This report addresses some of the conference’s key conclusions and policy recommendations for U.S. policymakers concerned with the future stability of the Middle East.
In separate papers, two Baker Institute fellows — one Palestinian, the other Israeli — provide their perspectives on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
