2026-02-20
We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wild…
Continuing that theme, the weaponization of environmental review as a tactic to delay or block new building has tended to cast the conservation movement as an antagonist to the Abundance Movement. But the same permitting…
This week I’m reading a father-son team with competing explanations of why Europe lags behind the US in generating innovative companies. Luis Garicano (and coauthor Per Strömberg) look specifically at Sweden, which has b…
A new NBER working paper introduces GABRIEL , an open-source library that wraps GPT for extracting, rating, ranking, and categorizing qualitative information from text data. Of note for innovation policy: they apply the …
It’s been a big week for clinical trials. The FDA refused to review Moderna’s flu vaccine trial despite previously indicating their trial design was acceptable. Then, they reversed course . It’s unclear what prompted the…
Ed Mendoza of the Metropolitan Abundance Project has a new feature leveraging research by the Pew Charitable Trusts on how new housing construction moderates older and more affordable “Class C” housing rents even more th…
Transportation policy is the flip side of housing policy. In fact, in many urban economics models, the two are inseparable: house prices are determined by time to commute to the city centre (pay more for a shorter commut…