Amitabh Chandra

At this AEI event, presenters will examine what we have learned from research on geographic variation in health spending and which health policy reforms are more likely to succeed in strengthening incentives to improve the efficiency of health providers' performance. A distinguished panel of experts, including Peter B. Bach, M.D., of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Andrew Rettenmaier of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University, and Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University, will present on the issue. AEI's Thomas P. Miller will moderate. [READ MORE]

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NRI offers grants to support research, writing, and publication. NRI also offers fellowships. For more information, contact NRI's project manager.

AEI president Arthur C. Brooks will deliver the May Bradley Lecture, based on his new book, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future (Basic Books, June 1, 2010), which focuses on public opinion toward free enterprise today. [READ MORE]

At this AEI education conference, the authors of new research on innovation in higher education will present their findings and discuss what we might learn from emerging entrepreneurial providers and innovative practices. Respondents from across the policy and practitioner communities will discuss the implications of this research for reform in higher education. Presenters include Ronald Ehrenberg (Cornell University), Guilbert Hentschke (University of Southern California), and others. [READ MORE]

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Conflicts of Interest, Low-Quality Ratings, and Meaningful Reform of Credit and Corporate Governance Ratings
By Charles W. Calomiris and Joseph R. Mason
Columbia Business School working paper, April 2010

Policymakers and academic critics have identified "conflicts of interest" in the rating industry that have led to poor ratings quality, harming investors who purchase over- or misrated investments. In this working paper, Charles W. Calomiris (AEI) and Joseph R. Mason (Louisiana State University) develop a new interpretation of corporate governance ratings that sees ratings as a means of expanding or redistributing the aggregate economic rents that accrue to incentive-conflicted management, institutional investors, and rating agencies, and argue that this could explain the popularity of corporate governance ratings among institutional investors and managers. [READ MORE]

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School choice supporters have been disappointed by the results of standardized test scores. Charles Murray, the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI, argues that it is time to acknowledge that standardized test scores are an insufficient way to decide whether one school is better than another. [READ MORE]

AEI's Peter J. Wallison writes that the financial regulation bill proposed by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) could result in massive costs, which taxpayers will ultimately pay. [READ MORE]

Bad Economy Prompts Wall Street to Embrace Environmentalism
By Jon Entine
Washington Post, April 21, 2010

AEI visiting fellow Jon Entine argues that recent corporate environmentalism has been driven by economics, as companies seek financial savings, and that the recession spurred corporate environmentalism to the next level. [READ MORE]

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AEI Press, May 2010

As the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire in 2010, ambitious health care legislation has passed Congress, and entitlement programs are growing at unsustainable rates, U.S. policymakers face important questions about the optimal size and scope of federal spending. The federal government finances its spending mostly through labor taxes, including taxes on income, payroll, and consumption--taxes that generate significant disincentives for employment. In The Impact of Labor Taxes on Labor Supply, Richard Rogerson, the Rondthaler Professor of Economics at the the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, contends that the unintended consequences of increased labor taxes would be too large for policymakers to ignore. [READ MORE]

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Photos: Harvard University/Martha Stewart, iStockphoto/Sharon Dominick, paul goyette/Flickr/Creative Commons, iStockphoto/evirgen.