For years, I’ve puzzled over a question that seems to defy common sense: If stock markets are hitting records and tech innovation seems endless, why aren’t companies pouring money back into new projects?

Yes, they’re still investing – but the pace of business spending is slower than you’d expect, especially outside of AI.

The president said his tariffs would range from 25 to 100 percent and go into effect next week.

Anushka MitraThe unemployment rate remains elevated long after recessions, a persistence that standard search-and-matching models cannot explain. I show that noise shocks—expectational errors due to the noise in received signals about aggregate shocks—account for much of this sluggishness. Using a structural VAR, I find that absent noise shocks unemployment would have recovered to its pre-recession level six quarters earlier over 1968–2019.

Viktors StebunovsA cornerstone of the law-and-finance literature is that stronger institutions reduce financial intermediation costs. Using global data on cross-border payment costs, I show this relationship can reverse in heavily regulated sectors. Anti-money laundering risks have larger cost effects in advanced economies with strong enforcement than in developing countries with weak enforcement, despite the former having lower underlying risks.