All Research
Blog Post
Education Scorecard Looks Beyond Recovery
This week, the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University and the Educational Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University released the Education Scorecard, which uses data from the National…
Working Paper
The Value of Reliable Statistics
Abstract On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and claimed that the agency’s data were “rigged.” In the aftermath, measures…
Report
Beyond “Do No Harm”: The Next Era of Value-Based Accountability Policy
…the pressure those standards impose by generating their own solutions. Limitations of the Current Standard The OBBBA’s accountability framework is a meaningful step forward, but it is also deliberately modest….
Op-Ed
Chicago’s “Disappearing Middle Class” Can Be Found in Its Proliferating Upper Middle-Class Neighborhoods
…income distribution as rising insecurity and declining living standards. Unbeknownst to us, a perfect example of this misinterpretation appeared a week before we published our report in Chicago magazine. The…
Report
How Policy and Demographics Are Reshaping SNAP: From Families with Children to Older Adults
…addition to the standard annual inflation adjustment (FNS 2021). (Notably, the OBBBA returned the Thrifty Food Plan’s reevaluation to the prior precedent of cost neutrality, preventing future administrations from administratively…
Report
Know the Market to Find the Path for the Most Vulnerable
…general. If we use the HUD ELI standard to measure family income, it is rare that two working spouses will meet that standard, even if each of them has an…
COSM Commentary
Understanding the Recent Declines in SNAP Participation
…varies widely by state, and year-over-year changes in the number of SNAP participants stands out in a few states. In fact, almost one-third of the national decline (4.3 million or…
Op-Ed
Why First-Time Buyer Age Isn’t Rising—Even as Housing Gets Less Affordable
…using Census and American Community Survey microdata that better captures individual outcomes than standard household statistics. By this measure, ownership rates have declined sharply across the board. Among adults ages…
Report
Senate Investor Ban to Cut Supply & Hurt Low-Income Families
…of scale by standardizing materials, centralizing procurement, and managing renovations across large portfolios. This reduces costs by roughly 20% relative to smaller operators and allows the completion of projects more…
Op-Ed
How Much AI-Driven Productivity Growth Do We Want?
…living standards, it is tempting to argue that we should want productivity to grow as rapidly as possible. Rising living standards mean new and better medicines, safer workplaces, longer lives,…
Blog Post
Refocusing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation on Achieving Deep Cost Reductions
…process for evaluating CMMI-tested policies against a standard of “budget neutrality” and no demonstrable harm to the quality of care provided to program beneficiaries. Beyond those two considerations, CMMI is…
Commentary
Assessing Duplicative Federal Benefit Programs and Preventing Abuse
…that very strict standard is hard to square with real-world questions about whether 27 education and training programs or 17 housing programs are all really necessary, or some might be…