Business News
The hidden cost of a mansion tax: How Los Angeles may be losing much of what it collects
Los Angeles taxed pricey property sales to fund housing. New research finds the tax cut sales roughly in half, quietly erasing about 80 percent of the revenue through lost future property taxes.
When doing good becomes a cost: India’s CSR mandate and the hidden hit to stock returns
A study of 2,017 Indian companies finds that firms forced to spend on CSR under a 2014 mandate saw stock returns fall relative to unaffected firms, with spending more than required offering no reward.
When central bank bond-buying pays for itself: A new look at QE’s fiscal scorecard
An IMF team's model finds quantitative easing typically improves the government's overall fiscal position, even when central banks take large losses on their bond portfolios. But QE looks riskier in shallow downturns than in deep ones.
How China’s bullet trains quietly fueled its electric car boom
A new study finds that China's high-speed rail network may explain up to a third of the country's electric vehicle boom, by easing the fear of running out of charge on long trips.
Fiscal news becomes inflationary only under one condition, study finds
A survey experiment with 7,000 German firms shows that pessimistic news about French, Italian, and Spanish debt raises inflation expectations, but only among firms that already distrust the ECB.
Costly content, cheap imitation, and the incentive problem for AI platforms
A Harvard economist models what happens when AI chatbots answer questions instead of sending readers to the sources that produced the information, and finds a self-reinforcing mechanism that can quietly starve costly reporting and research.
When Bitcoin miners race and lose: the hidden energy cost of near-simultaneous wins
Researchers at University College London built a model of how Bitcoin's mining collisions arise, linking network delays and power concentration to wasted electricity totaling roughly 16,000 megawatts in a single year.
The networking blind spot that could be holding back your next big product
A study of Dutch firms finds that a moderately connected business network is linked to the best odds of launching new products, while both sparse and overly dense webs tend to fare worse, especially when partners hold very...
Did voters punish inflation or pay cuts? A county-by-county look at the 2024 election
A new working paper finds that falling real wages, not inflation itself, tracked with Republican gains in 2024. Once wages are accounted for, high-inflation counties actually shifted less toward Trump.
New study shows how a single hot week causes a delayed economic slump
Weekly U.S. data show that a hot week produces a brief economic bump, then a slow slide that lasts more than a year, with labor markets driving most of the decline.