Category: Finance

As health care costs rise, patients aren’t just shouldering higher bills. They’re bearing more and more responsibility for getting information. Americans are facing a health care affordability crunch on multiple fronts. In 2025, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a sweeping tax law that scaled back premium subsidies for Americans accessing care through the Affordable Care Act […]

The high cost of renting and buying homes in U.S. cities is no secret. But this affordability problem isn’t limited to urban regions – it affects rural areas as well. Rural areas, home to about 25% of Americans, benefit from federally supported rental housing programs – particularly a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to provide […]

Springtime in Pennsylvania is peanut butter egg season. This year some consumers may taste the eggs a bit more critically and scrutinize the ingredients and label more carefully. Reese’s, a Hershey brand, is known for combining chocolate and peanut butter in delicious and iconic ways. Reese’s products come in a variety of formats, called “line […]

When homeless shelters allow people to stay with their dogs and other pets, more unhoused people become more willing to stay in a shelter. That’s what my team at the University of Southern California’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute learned when we evaluated California’s Pet Assistance and Support Program. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development […]

Many provisions in the huge tax-and-spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, sometimes called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will influence how much money Americans give to charity. We conduct in-depth research on philanthropy. Together, we have analyzed the tax policy changes. After crunching the numbers, we predict […]

The Trump administration temporarily suspended the Jones Act on March 18, 2026, as part of its efforts to bring down soaring U.S. gasoline prices. But what does this more-than-century-old law, which originally was designed to support the shipping industry, have to do with the price of gas? As the director of the Center for Energy […]

If you’ve ever ordered food through DoorDash, Uber Eats or Instacart, you may have realized the person who delivers it isn’t a salaried employee. They’re gig workers – independent contractors who pick up delivery tasks through an app, get paid per delivery and have no guaranteed hours, benefits or minimum wage protections. Policymakers in several […]

Your back pain gets worse as you sit through a long meeting. Your wrist pain flares when you’re typing furiously to meet a tight deadline. During a busy shift at the grocery store, you feel a migraine coming on. If that sounds familiar, you’ve got plenty of company. About 1 in 4 U.S. adults suffer […]

Imagine you’re a server at a busy restaurant that requires you to wear a form-fitting, polyester shirt as part of the uniform. When a hot flash hits, you are a sweaty mess. You really wish your employer would let you wear a cotton T-shirt instead. If you live in Philadelphia, relief is on the way. […]

Few regions pose as much of an economic conundrum as Pittsburgh. Is the city and region – once the center of American steelmaking – a paragon of postindustrial transformation, or a left-behind region still struggling to move beyond its industrial past? I’m an economist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the new book […]