Loading...
Latest economic news from trusted sources — 21052 articles
Mergers are commonly evaluated by weighing their expected market power effects against any efficiency gains they create. The larger the market power effect of a proposed merger, the larger must be any efficiencies for it to raise social welfare. We show selection into merger proposal distorts the observed relationship between market power and efficiency effects. Even if market power and efficiency gains are independent (or even positively correlated) across all potential mergers, they will generally be negatively related among proposed mergers. This is because parties propose to merge only if the merger’s expected profitability exceeds a threshold, so the underlying components of profitability become substitutes in clearing that hurdle. It does not rely on managerial bias, behavioral frictions, or strategic misrepresentation. We demonstrate this negative correlation is present under very general conditions when the two effects are uncorrelated among all mergers. We also characterize conditions where this still holds even in the presence of positive underlying correlations and firms’ uncertainty about their own merger’s profitability. Policies that might raise the selection hurdle for proposed mergers do not alleviate the negative correlation; indeed, they would exacerbate it. Our analysis has direct implications for interpreting empirical merger retrospectives and for evaluating efficiency defenses in antitrust policy.
The emergence of firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin has made space a leading example of how private enterprise drives innovation, marking what many see as a sharp break between Old Space and New Space. Yet little systematic evidence documents when the transition to this new phase of space innovation occurred and which firms drove it. We use patent data to provide this measurement and find that the largest surge in space innovation occurred in the 1990s, coinciding with demand-side market creation, and preceding the entry of high-profile startups after 2005. Throughout this period and since, incumbent aerospace firms account for most of the space-related patenting, with entrants contributing a growing but minority share. The same geographic regions that dominated space innovation during the post-Apollo era remain dominant today. These patterns are consistent with directed technical change: incumbents direct R&D toward policy-created markets accessible from existing capabilities, while entrants bring science-based insights into domains requiring new paradigms. Our findings suggest that New Space is more closely connected to Old Space than prevailing narratives imply, and that government's most consequential role in space innovation may lie in constructing appropriable markets. We make patent data on space-related technologies available for future research.
Empirical measures of AI's wage effect typically hold fixed the bundle of activities a worker is paid for at its pre-AI shape. We argue that this assumption hides much of the action. When automation breaks a job apart, firms decide how to recombine the surviving activities; whether they rebundle them into one broad role or split them into specialist roles changes which surviving skills the labour market actually rewards. A skill that played no role in the pre-AI wage can become the dominant component of the post-AI wage, while a skill that anchored the pre-AI wage can disappear from the schedule. We develop an assignment model in which the priced human bundle is endogenous, and we use it to show that a fixed-bundle wage regression can mis-sign the effect of AI exposure. In general, the omitted-redesign bias has no unconditional sign: it is the residual covariance between exposure and role-specific redesign terms. Under explicit sufficient conditions, exposure-correlated unbundling loads specialist comparative-advantage premia onto the exposure coefficient, while exposure-correlated rebundling loads a different, often opposite, omitted term. The sign must therefore be measured from local post-AI partition changes rather than assumed from exposure alone.
Whether medical innovation exacerbates or reduces racial health disparities remains an open question. We study surfactant replacement therapy (SRT), a life-saving intervention for premature infants with respiratory disorders. Before its approval by the FDA in 1989, premature Black infants were much less likely than their White counterparts to die from respiratory-related causes. Within a few years of FDA approval, the Black-White gap in respiratory-related neonatal mortality had essentially disappeared. Using 1980-2000 vital statistics data and non-respiratory-related mortality as a counterfactual outcome, we find that both Blacks and Whites benefited from the introduction of SRT, but White neonates experienced larger and more immediate reductions in mortality. We estimate that, by 1993, SRT had reduced respiratory-related mortality among White neonates by 46 percent, compared to 30 percent for Black neonates. These results are not explained by differences in health care access, as proxied by socioeconomic status or distance to the nearest neonatal intensive care unit. We conclude that racial differences in fetal pulmonary maturation, rather than barriers to access, likely drove the uneven impact of SRT on neonatal mortality.
Using a panel of confidential corporate tax returns, we provide the first direct estimates of the realized present value of corporate tax benefits from R&D credits and deductions in the United States. Realized tax benefits can deviate from statutory tax benefits because firms in loss status are typically unable to fully utilize credits and deductions to offset current-year taxes and instead must carry these attributes forward. We develop a novel procedure to track the intertemporal firm-level utilization of tax attributes generated by corporate R&D spending, and find that the present value of R&D tax benefits varies substantially with firms’ loss status, age, and size. Old and large firms typically use R&D tax benefits quickly, while young firms – especially those that are small – frequently operate in loss status and use tax attributes more slowly. From 2012–2016, the average firm generated $0.41 in statutory tax benefits per dollar of R&D investment, with a realized present value of $0.36. Young and small firms in a loss position realized only $0.23 per dollar, a 44% decrease relative to the statutory benchmark.
How should an organisation choose the breadth of its experimentation portfolio? Breadth has two distinct margins—the number of paths kept alive, and the degree of contrast among them—and prior research has largely studied them in isolation. We bring them into a single framework and show that they need not move together. Under a fixed experimentation budget, adding paths creates more chances to find a strong direction, but it also dilutes learning across paths and weakens the strongest feasible contrast. When the task is primarily ranking among already-viable alternatives, broader portfolios become more attractive as the budget rises. When paths share common viability uncertainty, and experimental signals track payoff relatedness, however, additional paths partly repeat the same viability test rather than provide independent information. We identify conditions under which testing exactly two sharply contrasting paths is optimal, dominating both a single deep test and broader portfolios. The framework reconciles competing prescriptions—many parallel shots versus a few sharp comparisons—by clarifying when each applies, and shows why empirical measures of breadth should not treat the number of options and their relatedness as separable margins.
How should policymakers evaluate policy impacts when firms design products for global markets? Standard economic analyses typically focus on domestic outcomes, implicitly assuming that policies affect only the jurisdiction in which they are enacted. Yet multinational firms often harmonize product design across markets, creating the potential for policies implemented in one country to generate global spillovers through changes in product attributes. We call this phenomenon "attribute propagation" and develop a framework to measure and assess its quantitative importance. Applying this framework to an environmental policy affecting automobiles, we find that a fuel-economy subsidy in Japan led to significant improvements in the fuel economy of vehicles sold in the United States. We then develop a model of multinational automobile markets featuring cross-market cost complementarity as a key mechanism driving attribute propagation. Using the estimated model, we conduct counterfactual simulations to quantify environmental benefits accounting for the policy’s global spillover effects. We find that global spillover effects are first-order—a majority of the CO2 emissions reductions induced by the Japanese policy arise through its impact on the U.S. automobile market. These findings suggest that standard economic analyses that abstract from attribute propagation can substantially understate the full policy impact. More broadly, attribute propagation provides a new lens for evaluating environmental, safety, antitrust, and technology policies in a global economy.
We present a model of “animal spirits” in which context and emotions affect macroeconomic beliefs by shaping which experiences people recall to simulate similar future aggregate states. We test this mechanism by priming Dutch National Bank Survey respondents to recall personal financial or health adversities before eliciting inflation and home price expectations. The treatment causes instability in beliefs and reasoning tied to the measured similarity of the primed experiences to different macro states. This similarity structure also accounts for heterogeneity in beliefs and reasoning based on a range of other personal experiences we measure. The model micro founds several features of macroeconomic beliefs, including narratives, and yields a “confidence multiplier”: spending by some agents cues optimistic context for others, raising their spending.
In traditional macro-finance models, firms' debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of "sophisticated borrowing constraints" akin to financial covenants among large U.S. nonfinancial firms, commonly specified based on firms' debt relative to operating earnings. We model these constraints as debt thresholds that trigger a transfer of control rights to creditors when they are violated, in which case creditors influence firms' decisions to maximize their value instead of cutting credit unconditionally to adhere to fixed ratios. At the micro level, our model is quantitatively consistent with empirical patterns of investment and earnings around covenant violations. At the macro level, sophisticated borrowing constraints do not generate financial acceleration, because constraint tightening and violations do not induce creditors to downscale firms indiscriminately.
Interpreting real-time labor market conditions is challenging because commonly used indicators are noisy, revised over time, and often send conflicting signals. In practice, policymakers and market participants describe labor market developments using a shared narrative language centered on labor demand, labor supply, and matching frictions. In this paper, we show that empirical measures of these narrative concepts can be recovered from latent factors that summarize the joint movements of a broad set of high-frequency U.S. labor-market indicators. We use ninety-four labor-market indicators, over the period from 1960 to 2026, and construct measures for labor demand, long-run labor supply, short-run labor supply, and matching efficiency by selecting the factors that satisfy a limited set of restrictions on how underlying forces map into observed data. We find that labor demand and short-run labor supply account for most of the common variation in labor-market indicators. Our results also show that assigning narrow interpretations to individual indicators can lead to misleading conclusions about underlying labor market conditions. Applying the framework to the post-pandemic period reveals that although labor demand recovered briskly after the acute phase of the pandemic, it cannot account for the large rise in vacancies and quits. Instead, movements in short-run labor supply and matching efficiency play a central role. We also show that the “soft-landing” episode from 2023 through 2025 was characterized by a joint decline in labor demand and short-run labor supply, which slowed payroll growth while generating only a moderate increase in the unemployment rate.
In traditional macro-finance models, firms' debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of "sophisticated borrowing constraints" akin to financial covenants among large U.S. nonfinancial firms, commonly specified based on firms' debt relative to operating earnings. We model these constraints as debt thresholds that trigger a transfer of control rights to creditors when they are violated, in which case creditors influence firms' decisions to maximize their value instead of cutting credit unconditionally to adhere to fixed ratios. At the micro level, our model is quantitatively consistent with empirical patterns of investment and earnings around covenant violations. At the macro level, sophisticated borrowing constraints do not generate financial acceleration, because constraint tightening and violations do not induce creditors to downscale firms indiscriminately.
In this paper I examine Chile’s 1972 initiative to draft a new constitution under President Salvador Allende. I analyze the political and economic circumstances that gave rise to the project and the institutional mechanisms through which the draft sought to advance a socialist economic and political program centered on state ownership of means of production and central planning. I compare the Chilean proposal with the socialist constitutions of the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia. The draft, which was never submitted to a plebiscite, as Allende envisioned, subsequently disappeared and remained unavailable for nearly two decades. Remarkably, the proposal has attracted very limited scholarly attention.
Whether medical innovation exacerbates or reduces racial health disparities remains an open question. We study surfactant replacement therapy (SRT), a life-saving intervention for premature infants with respiratory disorders. Before its approval by the FDA in 1989, premature Black infants were much less likely than their White counterparts to die from respiratory-related causes. Within a few years of FDA approval, the Black-White gap in respiratory-related neonatal mortality had essentially disappeared. Using 1980-2000 vital statistics data and non-respiratory-related mortality as a counterfactual outcome, we find that both Blacks and Whites benefited from the introduction of SRT, but White neonates experienced larger and more immediate reductions in mortality. We estimate that, by 1993, SRT had reduced respiratory-related mortality among White neonates by 46 percent, compared to 30 percent for Black neonates. These results are not explained by differences in health care access, as proxied by socioeconomic status or distance to the nearest neonatal intensive care unit. We conclude that racial differences in fetal pulmonary maturation, rather than barriers to access, likely drove the uneven impact of SRT on neonatal mortality.
In this article, we exploit the recent, rapid diffusion of the use of GLP-1 drugs among individuals with diabetes to measure the effect of the use of these drugs on mental health, self-rated health, employment, and marriage. The documented large weight loss from GLP-1 use may plausibly affect these outcomes and evidence of these broader impacts of GLP-1 use is necessary to evaluate their full value. Estimates are obtained using a longitudinal (within-person) regression approach. Results indicate that GLP-1 use is not meaningfully associated with mental health, self-rated health, employment, and marriage. Overall, our analysis adds new evidence about how GLP-1 use is affecting the lives of individuals with diabetes.
Monitoring systems for disaster prevention are costly, and measuring benefits is difficult when monitoring effort is endogenous. We provide the first causal estimate of one such system's impact using three decades of desert locust monitoring data. We document conflict-induced interruptions to monitoring in remote breeding areas, reconstruct how infestations spread to populated areas, and show that exposure to locust swarms around birth decreases child height-for-age, increasing stunting risk by over 7 percentage points. Eliminating the locust monitoring system would induce annual losses of US$25 billion, implying a benefit-cost ratio between 160:1 and 680:1 from child nutrition benefits alone.
Flooding is among the most salient natural hazards facing households in the United States. A large body of evidence has documented a pattern of disproportionate social vulnerability in floodplains. However, little evidence exists on how household-level exposure to flood risk is distributed. We fill this gap by combining parcel-level flood risk with confidential linked survey and administrative data held at the US Census Bureau. Although net migration to Census blocks in floodplains has increased in recent years, there has been essentially no net migration to parcels with flood risk or change in the overall share of households living in floodplains. Income gradients in flood risk are highly non-linear at the household level, with slightly negative income gradients for the bottom 90 percentiles of the income distribution that are dwarfed by disproportionate exposure in the top decile, especially when considering multiple property ownership. This nonlinearity is largely driven by differences in building type and homeownership within narrow income groups. In contrast to the conclusions in the literature using aggregate data, our household-level analysis suggests that households in floodplains are less disadvantaged and increasingly protected from the impacts of flooding, even as a vulnerable subpopulation of low-income, uninsured homeowners remains.
We study how climate policy can interact with distortionary fiscal policy and potentially lead to transition risk. Using an environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that features financial frictions and preexisting labor and capital taxes, we simulate a carbon tax and an abatement subsidy under different scenarios for returning carbon tax revenue or financing the subsidy. We find novel policy implications and important differences between the carbon tax and the subsidy. Under both policies, transition dynamics can differ sharply from long-run outcomes. For the carbon tax, transition dynamics depend on both financial frictions and the choice of revenue recycling. For the abatement subsidy, distortionary financing can generate contractionary transition dynamics, because of financial frictions. Macroprudential policy can mitigate transition risk under the carbon tax but has little effect under the subsidy.
How should policymakers evaluate policy impacts when firms design products for global markets? Standard economic analyses typically focus on domestic outcomes, implicitly assuming that policies affect only the jurisdiction in which they are enacted. Yet multinational firms often harmonize product design across markets, creating the potential for policies implemented in one country to generate global spillovers through changes in product attributes. We call this phenomenon "attribute propagation" and develop a framework to measure and assess its quantitative importance. Applying this framework to an environmental policy affecting automobiles, we find that a fuel-economy subsidy in Japan led to significant improvements in the fuel economy of vehicles sold in the United States. We then develop a model of multinational automobile markets featuring cross-market cost complementarity as a key mechanism driving attribute propagation. Using the estimated model, we conduct counterfactual simulations to quantify environmental benefits accounting for the policy’s global spillover effects. We find that global spillover effects are first-order—a majority of the CO2 emissions reductions induced by the Japanese policy arise through its impact on the U.S. automobile market. These findings suggest that standard economic analyses that abstract from attribute propagation can substantially understate the full policy impact. More broadly, attribute propagation provides a new lens for evaluating environmental, safety, antitrust, and technology policies in a global economy.
We present a model of “animal spirits” in which context and emotions affect macroeconomic beliefs by shaping which experiences people recall to simulate similar future aggregate states. We test this mechanism by priming Dutch National Bank Survey respondents to recall personal financial or health adversities before eliciting inflation and home price expectations. The treatment causes instability in beliefs and reasoning tied to the measured similarity of the primed experiences to different macro states. This similarity structure also accounts for heterogeneity in beliefs and reasoning based on a range of other personal experiences we measure. The model micro founds several features of macroeconomic beliefs, including narratives, and yields a “confidence multiplier”: spending by some agents cues optimistic context for others, raising their spending.
In traditional macro-finance models, firms' debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of "sophisticated borrowing constraints" akin to financial covenants among large U.S. nonfinancial firms, commonly specified based on firms' debt relative to operating earnings. We model these constraints as debt thresholds that trigger a transfer of control rights to creditors when they are violated, in which case creditors influence firms' decisions to maximize their value instead of cutting credit unconditionally to adhere to fixed ratios. At the micro level, our model is quantitatively consistent with empirical patterns of investment and earnings around covenant violations. At the macro level, sophisticated borrowing constraints do not generate financial acceleration, because constraint tightening and violations do not induce creditors to downscale firms indiscriminately.
How do the sources of worker learning change over the lifecycle, and how does this affect human capital and wages? Using data from Germany and the US, we document that internal learning (from coworkers) decreases with experience, while external learning (on-the-job training) follows an inverted U-shape. We develop a search model featuring multiple learning sources whose returns evolve as workers age and accumulate human capital. Quantitative results indicate that the interaction between sources is key to lifecycle wage dynamics and the effects of remote work, which disrupts internal learning and early-career wage growth, though external learning partially offsets these losses.
Interpreting real-time labor market conditions is challenging because commonly used indicators are noisy, revised over time, and often send conflicting signals. In practice, policymakers and market participants describe labor market developments using a shared narrative language centered on labor demand, labor supply, and matching frictions. In this paper, we show that empirical measures of these narrative concepts can be recovered from latent factors that summarize the joint movements of a broad set of high-frequency U.S. labor-market indicators. We use ninety-four labor-market indicators, over the period from 1960 to 2026, and construct measures for labor demand, long-run labor supply, short-run labor supply, and matching efficiency by selecting the factors that satisfy a limited set of restrictions on how underlying forces map into observed data. We find that labor demand and short-run labor supply account for most of the common variation in labor-market indicators. Our results also show that assigning narrow interpretations to individual indicators can lead to misleading conclusions about underlying labor market conditions. Applying the framework to the post-pandemic period reveals that although labor demand recovered briskly after the acute phase of the pandemic, it cannot account for the large rise in vacancies and quits. Instead, movements in short-run labor supply and matching efficiency play a central role. We also show that the “soft-landing” episode from 2023 through 2025 was characterized by a joint decline in labor demand and short-run labor supply, which slowed payroll growth while generating only a moderate increase in the unemployment rate.
In traditional macro-finance models, firms' debt contracts impose hard borrowing constraints, which require indiscriminate reductions of borrowing and investment when adverse shocks tighten these limits, giving rise to financial acceleration. We study the macroeconomic implications of "sophisticated borrowing constraints" akin to financial covenants among large U.S. nonfinancial firms, commonly specified based on firms' debt relative to operating earnings. We model these constraints as debt thresholds that trigger a transfer of control rights to creditors when they are violated, in which case creditors influence firms' decisions to maximize their value instead of cutting credit unconditionally to adhere to fixed ratios. At the micro level, our model is quantitatively consistent with empirical patterns of investment and earnings around covenant violations. At the macro level, sophisticated borrowing constraints do not generate financial acceleration, because constraint tightening and violations do not induce creditors to downscale firms indiscriminately.
Distressed firms need urgent financing to preserve operations and avoid inefficient liquidation, but they borrow in concentrated markets shaped by existing-creditor blocking power and a small group of specialized lenders. We show that these borrowers pay exceptionally high loan spreads even after removing compensation for credit risk, liquidity risk, and non-risk loan-making costs. To quantify and decompose lender market power, we develop and estimate a dynamic game-theoretic model of distressed lending with latent demand heterogeneity, endogenous lender participation, creditor blocking power, and tacit collusion sustained by repeated syndication. Using granular facility-level data on debtor-in-possession (DIP) loans and highly speculative loans, we find that lender market power explains 533 bps of risk-adjusted spreads in the DIP loan market and 300 bps in the highly speculative loan market, including about 140 bps from tacit collusion in each market. Lender market power is therefore a major source of financial distress costs, reducing survival-critical liquidity by 16–20% and thereby worsening asset-value destruction.
Whether medical innovation exacerbates or reduces racial health disparities remains an open question. We study surfactant replacement therapy (SRT), a life-saving intervention for premature infants with respiratory disorders. Before its approval by the FDA in 1989, premature Black infants were much less likely than their White counterparts to die from respiratory-related causes. Within a few years of FDA approval, the Black-White gap in respiratory-related neonatal mortality had essentially disappeared. Using 1980-2000 vital statistics data and non-respiratory-related mortality as a counterfactual outcome, we find that both Blacks and Whites benefited from the introduction of SRT, but White neonates experienced larger and more immediate reductions in mortality. We estimate that, by 1993, SRT had reduced respiratory-related mortality among White neonates by 46 percent, compared to 30 percent for Black neonates. These results are not explained by differences in health care access, as proxied by socioeconomic status or distance to the nearest neonatal intensive care unit. We conclude that racial differences in fetal pulmonary maturation, rather than barriers to access, likely drove the uneven impact of SRT on neonatal mortality.
We present a model of “animal spirits” in which context and emotions affect macroeconomic beliefs by shaping which experiences people recall to simulate similar future aggregate states. We test this mechanism by priming Dutch National Bank Survey respondents to recall personal financial or health adversities before eliciting inflation and home price expectations. The treatment causes instability in beliefs and reasoning tied to the measured similarity of the primed experiences to different macro states. This similarity structure also accounts for heterogeneity in beliefs and reasoning based on a range of other personal experiences we measure. The model micro founds several features of macroeconomic beliefs, including narratives, and yields a “confidence multiplier”: spending by some agents cues optimistic context for others, raising their spending.
Distressed firms need urgent financing to preserve operations and avoid inefficient liquidation, but they borrow in concentrated markets shaped by existing-creditor blocking power and a small group of specialized lenders. We show that these borrowers pay exceptionally high loan spreads even after removing compensation for credit risk, liquidity risk, and non-risk loan-making costs. To quantify and decompose lender market power, we develop and estimate a dynamic game-theoretic model of distressed lending with latent demand heterogeneity, endogenous lender participation, creditor blocking power, and tacit collusion sustained by repeated syndication. Using granular facility-level data on debtor-in-possession (DIP) loans and highly speculative loans, we find that lender market power explains 533 bps of risk-adjusted spreads in the DIP loan market and 300 bps in the highly speculative loan market, including about 140 bps from tacit collusion in each market. Lender market power is therefore a major source of financial distress costs, reducing survival-critical liquidity by 16–20% and thereby worsening asset-value destruction.
Hydropower is a renewable and flexible energy source that provides essential storage capacity and enhances grid stability. Among storage technologies, pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) remains the most cost-effective solution for long-duration energy storage and plays a key role in power systems with increasing penetration of variable renewable energy. As electricity prices become more relevant under the energy transition, understanding the optimal operation and valuation of PHES assets is increasingly important from a financial perspective. This paper develops a market-based framework that models a PHES facility as a profit-maximizing asset operating in liberalized electricity markets. Using an optimal control approach calibrated with real life technical and operational parameters of the La Muela pumped storage plant and observed electricity prices from the Spanish wholesale market, the model derives an economically intuitive trigger (switching) price governing optimal pumping and generation decisions while accounting for reservoir water inventory dynamics and electricity price uncertainty. The results show that inventory dynamics and electricity price seasonality are central to PHES valuation and optimal operation.
We adapt attention-based neural networks and reinforcement learning to direct portfolio construction, allowing broader portfolio-management objectives (including non-time-additively separable ones) and in a data-driven way, searching over a much richer policy/strategy space than low-dimensional parametric rules or human-specified strategies. As arguably the first non-text-based, “large” GenAI model in Finance, AlphaPortfolio accommodates long- and short-range path dependence in firm and market states (e.g., using Transformer encoder), cross-asset information, flexible (path-dependent) objectives (incl. Sharpe ratio, which is non-additively separable across periods) for end-to-end (rather than step-by-step) optimizations. In U.S. equities, AlphaPortfolio yields superior out-of-sample performance (e.g., Sharpe ratio above two and risk-adjusted alpha over 13% with monthly rebalancing) robust under various market conditions and economic restrictions (e.g., exclusion of small/illiquid stocks) and over time. The gains come from the direct construction, effective sequence modeling, and cross-asset attention network. We further demonstrate AlphaPortfolio's flexibility to incorporate transaction costs, state interactions, and alternative objectives, before developing a polynomial-feature-sensitivity analysis to uncover key drivers of performance, including their rotation and nonlinearity.
We extend the literature on the importance of trust for financial behaviors by examining trust, financial literacy, and financial behavior related to retirement security. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we show that Trust in Financial Institutions aligns with behaviors supportive of retirement security, while Trust in Government Programs does not. We further document racial/ethnic differences: for White respondents, Trust in Financial Institutions relates positively to retirement outcomes, but not for Blacks or Hispanics. Moreover, Trust in Government Programs among minority households is linked to reduced stockholding and lower wealth accumulation. These findings inform efforts to strengthen retirement security.
Sweetgreen’s SWOT analysis: stock faces headwinds amid sales decline
China AI majors Zhipu, Minimax surge on report of potential Hang Seng inclusion
Stocks surge, dollar at six-week high as US-Iran talks in focus
InPost says FedEx-led $9 billion buyout offer to open on May 26
FTSE 100 Set to Rise Every Day This Week
Richemont’s full-year sales rose more than expected as shoppers splurged on its pricey Cartier bracelets and rings, helping the Swiss group weather a luxury market slowdown better than most rivals.
Dollar perched near six-week top on uncertainty over US-Iran deal
Ingredion’s SWOT analysis: stock faces rating downgrade amid mixed results
US arrests sister of Cuban military conglomerate chief
Hong Kong’s anti-corruption watchdog has charged a 62-year-old woman with allegedly bribing a Legal Aid Department clerk to secure custody of her grandson. The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said on Thursday that Wen Congmei allegedly offered HK$10,000 (US$1,280) to the clerk in September last year. She faces one count of offering an advantage to a public servant. Wen has been released on bail and is due to appear at West Kowloon Court on Friday for mention. According to the...
DeepSeek prioritizes AGI over commercialization in funding talks - Bloomberg
Turkey’s top economic policymakers will meet on Friday morning to discuss measures to stem market turbulence after a court ordered the removal of the main opposition party’s leadership.
The last episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" aired on Thursday. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images Stephen Colbert's time with "The Late Show" is over. The show aired its final episode on Thursday night, bringing its over three-decade run to an end. His last episode featured celebrity cameos, shots fired at CBS, and a Paul McCartney-sung farewell song. Stephen Colbert has taken his final bow. "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" aired its final episode on Thursday, ending its more than three-decade run since David Letterman started the show in 1993. Letterman passed the baton to Colbert in 2015. In a short clip before the episode began, Colbert said it had been a joy to do over 1,800 episodes of the show, and gave a shout-out to his band, "The Great Big Joy Machine." "We called it the joy machine because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine," he said. "But the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn't hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears." CBS announced last July that "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" would not be renewed for another season, saying the decision to cancel the show was "purely financial." But it came after the host joked on his show about CBS paying President Donald Trump a $16 million settlement, after Trump sued CBS for what he said was "deceptive editing" in a "60 Minutes" episode. Here are the four most striking moments from Colbert's swan song . A loud round of "boos" in the monologue Colbert ended his 11-year run as the show's host. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images "Welcome one and all to the Late Show. I'm your host, Stephen Colbert. If you're just tuning into the Late Show , you missed a lot," he said at the start of the episode, drawing laughs from the crowd. But as soon as he said, "Tonight is our final broadcast from the Ed Sullivan theater," the crowd erupted into a round of booing. He quietened the crowd, saying he was lucky to have been there for 11 years. Full of celebrity came
Emerging-market stocks extended gains into a second day, putting the benchmark on track for a weekly advance, as investors continued to pour into the AI trade and easing Middle East tensions supported sentiment.
APEC trade envoys gather in China to discuss trade imbalances, supply chain resilience
This article was first published on May 23, 1976. Australia’s long distance swimming heroine, Linda McGill, staggered ashore at crowded Repulse Bay beach yesterday afternoon (May 22, 1976) after completing her round Hong Kong Island swim and said: “I’d do it again – for A$20,000 (HK$883,817 in 2026).” Linda, looking exhausted and close to collapse after just over 17 hours in the water, fell into the arms of her fiance, Dr Bruce Logan, and hundreds of spectators clapped and cheered. With cameras...
Europe’s AI stocks shine through gloom of Iran war
Late-night personality Stephen Colbert mostly steered clear of political jokes and criticism of President Donald Trump as he hosted the last episode of his namesake show on CBS Thursday night.
Julius Baer Group Ltd. said it expects to post profit for the first half of 2026 which is “substantially higher” than a year ago, as the Swiss wealth manager signals progress in an ongoing restructuring.
With the Women's Champions League final between Barcelona and Lyon on Saturday, BBC Sport takes a look at the extraordinary rise of football's next global superstar, Vicky Lopez.