Call for Master’s Research Program: Policy Research Laboratory Fall 2022 The Master’s Research Program (MRP) within the Policy Research Laboratory is designed to help graduate students engage in coauthor level policy research. As a member of the MRP you will work with professors to learn many of the skills to help you succeed in academia […]
Impacts of Lockdowns on COVID Death Rates and Employment
As the American presidential draws near, it is time to discuss one of the key talking points in this campaigning season: COVID-19 lockdown policies. Taking data from the CDC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and WalletHub’s COVID Restriction Score, the Policy Research Lab has created the following plots to analyze the Lockdown and COVID […]
Kenneth Judd Talks About Advancing Computation in Economics
Ken Judd, the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is an expert in the economics of taxation, imperfect competition, and mathematical economics. His current research focuses on developing computational methods for economic modeling and applying them to tax policy, antitrust issues, macroeconomics, and policies related to climate change. During his virtual visit […]
Previous Monthly Cybersecurity Posts
September 2020:
Why the Texas Employment Recovery is even BETTER than the Official Numbers Say
In mid-May, the Chicago Booth Review published an article, Why US unemployment is even worse than the official numbers say, in which they discuss what happened to the labor force at the beginning of the recession in terms of unemployment rates, labor force participation rates, and so on. As COVID policies have been relaxed, we […]
Should You Update Your Computer?
In May of 2017 the WannaCry attacks infected over 300,000 systems in 150 countries and the approximate estimated cost that these attacks is $4 billion. One month later, the NotPetya attacks, another major global attack that primarily targeted Ukrainian systems, began. The approximated costs of the NotPetya attacks were even larger than the WannaCry attacks […]
Unemployment Claims in the State of Texas: COVID-19 Data Work and Research
Co-Author: Thatcher Thornberry Unemployment Claims are requests for cash benefits after getting laid off from a job. When a person makes an unemployment claim, they are seeking temporary benefits from their state government to support them during their time out of work. This metric can be very useful in times of economic crisis because it […]
The Trade-Offs of Working From Home
As COVID policies either pushed workers toward telework or unemployment, it is important to understand the trade-offs and incentives that are now at play in this new working environment. According to a recent paper by Darja Reuschke and Alan Felstead, people’s preference to work from home is steadily on the rise in the UK. This […]
COVID-19 Data Work and Research
As COVID-19 has driven a lot of local and state policies over the last five months, the Salem Center has dedicated a large amount of our research hours to contribute to this conversation. The mission of our project has been to gather information about large areas of economic activity in Texas. We also started with […]
China’s Cyber Attacks
The Communist government of China is not known as a beacon of free speech or religious freedom or many other human rights, in fact, it has a well known tract record of brutally cracking down on these human rights (e.g. Tiananmen Square, Shanxi church demolition in 2018, etc.). As we have seen with the crackdown […]