Brookings Institution

On Embedding Equality in Education, a new podcast from the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, hosts Jennifer O’Donoghue and Edem Dorothy Ossai connect research and lived experience to challenge prevailing narratives and advance gender transformative education, spotlighting scholars from the Global South, and bringing policymakers, practitioners, and young people into the conversation. Stay tuned for new episodes soon.

Cities make firms more productive by bringing workers, customers, suppliers, and ideas closer together. Yet in many rapidly growing cities in developing countries, severe congestion makes physical proximity deceptive: firms may be located close to one another yet remain difficult to reach. A recent paper shows that this distinction matters.

In 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sharply increased enforcement in cities across the U.S. This research paper estimates the ensuing local employment effects. In surge cities, where arrests increased most, employment falls below its expected trajectory immediately after enforcement surges. The employment shortfall widens in the following months and shows no signs of recovery nearly one year after enforcement began.

On September 6, the 2.1 million citizens of the small eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt could set off a political earthquake with reverberations all the way to Berlin if, as current polls predict, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) wins the statewide election.

The first 19 months of the Trump Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have changed the nature of the agency. For most of its history, the FCC was a policy-driven body existing in an inevitably political environment. Under the Trump administration, it has become a politics-driven agency employing policy as an instrument.

1. Introduction Preferred Creditor Status (PCS) establishes a hierarchy of seniority among creditors in processes of debt relief undertaken to restore sovereign debt sustainability.

Ahead of students returning to the classroom in the fall, the majority of states have advanced restrictions or bans on cellphones or personal devices in K-12 schools. A smaller but growing body of legislation is beginning to impose similar restrictions on artificial intelligence (AI). These policy surges reflect genuine and well-documented concerns among educators, parents, and lawmakers about attention, adolescent mental health, and the volume of time that young people spend on their devices.

Introduction Vertical integration in health insurance is widespread in the United States. Major insurers now control large parts of the health care supply chain. That includes pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), physician practices, clinics, home health services, and ambulatory surgery centers. Some observers see the growing integration as a mechanism that allows for greater data sharing, care coordination, and efficient matching of patients to treatment.

The surveillance apparatus in the United States has dramatically expanded over the past few decades despite widespread recognition of its threat to American democracy. Especially following 9/11, the government has increasingly sacrificed Americans’ privacy ostensibly for safety purposes, including federal agencies spending millions of dollars on surveillance technologies to scale immigration enforcement efforts.

In a recent post, we documented the substantial increase in the number of Russian shadow fleet oil tankers sanctioned by the EU and UK. Our previous research finds that U.S. sanctions have historically had substantially more impact on shadow fleet activity than EU or UK sanctions. One likely explanation is the threat of U.S. secondary sanctions, which expose anyone conducting business with a sanctioned entity to U.S. action.