Category: Finance

Headlines have been filled with talk of the catastrophic power of Hurricane Melissa after the Category 5 storm devastated communities across Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti in October 2025. But to see this as a singular disaster misses the bigger picture: Melissa didn’t hit stable, resilient islands. It hit islands still rebuilding from the last hurricane. […]

Technological innovations can seem relentless. In computing, some have proclaimed that “a year in machine learning is a century in any other field.” But how do you know whether those advancements are hype or reality? Failures quickly multiply when there’s a deluge of new technology, especially when these developments haven’t been properly tested or fully […]

As climate impacts intensify, the people most at risk remain the least financed. While adaptation — the act of strengthening communities to withstand climate shocks — is by necessity local, global capital flows haven’t followed suit, with less than 1% of global climate finance going toward community adaptation. The result is that those on the […]

The world is losing vast swaths of forests to agriculture, logging, mining and fires every year — more than 20 million acres in 2024 alone, roughly the size of South Carolina. That’s bad news because tropical forests in particular regulate rainfall, shelter plant and animal species and act as a thermostat for the planet by […]

Imagine walking out of a Walmart, Target or Costco. As you push your large shopping cart to your car, you ask yourself: Did I really need all that stuff? The answer is you probably didn’t. In a recent study, my co-authors Lina Wang, Sungho Park and I found that the presence of supercenters – large […]

Between January and mid-October 2025, calls to local 211 helplines from people seeking food pantries in their community held steady at nearly 1,000 calls per day. But as the government shutdown entered its fourth week in late October, states began to warn residents that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, sometimes known as food stamps, would […]

Major airports across the United States were subject to a 4% reduction in flights on Nov. 7, 2025, as the government shutdown began to affect travelers. The move by the Federal Aviation Administration is intended to ease pressure on air traffic controllers, many of whom have been working for weeks without pay after the government […]

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped low-income Americans buy groceries for decades with few disruptions. But on Nov. 1, 2025, the federal government halted the flow of funds to states to distribute as SNAP benefits. The Trump administration blames this unprecedented disruption on the federal government shutdown, which began a month earlier. Following multiple […]

In the aftermath of the floods in 2022, Pakistan’s financial sector was in crisis. But for different types of financial institutions, this crisis didn’t look the same. For microfinance banks, this was a crisis of capital adequacy; as non-performing loans (NPLs) in flood-impacted areas increased, capital was eroded, and capital adequacy fell from a regulatory […]

American households have become dependent on Amazon. The numbers say it all: In 2024, 83% of U.S. households received deliveries from Amazon, representing over 1 million packages delivered each day and 9 billion individual items delivered same-day or next-day every year. In remarkably short order, the company has transformed from an online bookseller into a […]