CEPA Research Initiatives

Initiative on Affordable Housing

The (in)affordability of housing has emerged as an issue of pressing national concern. Since 2010, the prices of new and old homes have grown, respectively, at twice and three times the rate of overall consumer price inflation. Housing costs thus account for increasingly large shares of a typical household’s budget, a development that has had particularly heavy bite for households with low incomes. The slow pace of new housing construction, which remains below levels that regularly prevailed before the late-2000s housing bust, is a clear culprit. Indeed, cross-market comparisons reveal that low-rates of new-home construction strongly predict higher prices. Dysfunctional markets for homeowners’ insurance have added to these problems in markets impacted by wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

Initiative on Anti-Poverty Policy

In the United States, anti-poverty policy is implemented through a complex patchwork of cash transfer programs, the in-kind provision of food, shelter, and health insurance, minimum wage regulation, and myriad other policies that are administered by a blend of federal, state and local levels of government. Consequently, identifying reform priorities requires a body of research designed to shed light on which policies deliver best with respect to policymakers’ priorities, whether the patchwork’s complexity imposes excessive administrative burdens on program beneficiaries, and what gaps the patchwork might miss.

Initiative on Energy and Environmental Policy

Energy and environmental policy pose a number of unique challenges with wide-ranging implications. While gas prices and the cost of home heating fuels have immediate effects on household budgets, wildfires are impacting the price and availability of homeowners’ insurance, pollution has both short- and longer-run health consequences, and climate change poses long-run challenges.  

Initiative on Entitlement Program Reform

Entitlement programs including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security perform vital social insurance functions, yet are also central to the unsustainable fiscal path on which the U.S. federal government is currently set. The 2024 report of the Social Security Trustees forecasts that the combined trust fund reserves of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance programs will be exhausted by 2035, such that these programs would, absent action from Congress, be unable to pay the full benefits to which beneficiaries are otherwise entitled. The 2024 report of the Medicare Trustees similarly forecast 2036 as the depletion date for the Hospital Insurance trust fund. Balancing fiscal sustainability with a desire for generous health coverage, disability insurance, and old-age pension benefits requires attending carefully to both the benefits and distortions to which these programs give rise, as well as to demographic trends and forecasts for economic growth.

Initiative on Health System Performance

The United States spent $4.9 trillion on health care in 2023, or nearly 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product, which vastly exceeds spending by peer nations whose systems generate similar, and in some instances superior, health outcomes. These figures raise serious questions about the U.S. health system’s performance and highlight the importance of research that sheds light on how the U.S. health system’s efficiency can be improved.

Initiative on State and Local Government Performance

The performance of state and local governments is of critical importance to the U.S. economy. State and local governments play central roles in delivering education, health care, transportation, public safety, and other public services. They also administer many components of the social safety net. Remarkably, they employ roughly one in seven U.S. workers and account for around one fifth of GDP. The centrality of state and local governments to the U.S. economy points to the need for research that helps us gauge their performance and, in so doing, to better inform policy and the design of state and local government institutions.