The world experienced over 60 armed conflicts in 2024, a “historically high” number according to scholars in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Consequently, the risks faced by multinational companies (MNCs) operating in conflict-torn regions, especially the Middle East and North Africa, have significantly intensified.

Variety is the sauce of life. Suzanne Kreiter/Boston Globe via Getty ImagesAt its heart, pizza is deceptively simple. Made from just a few humble ingredients – baked dough, tangy sauce, melted cheese and maybe a few toppings – it might seem like a perfect candidate for the kind of mass-produced standardization that defines many global food chains, where predictable menus reign supreme.

Sinem Hacioglu-Hoke, Leo Feler, and Jack ChylakUsing zip-code median income as a proxy for household income is common in economics but can mask heterogeneity and yield misleading conclusions. Using zip-code median income and self-reported household incomes from a representative panel of 150,000 U.S. households, we decompose average retail spending for 2018-2024. When using self-reported incomes, we observe substantial divergence in spending between low- and high-income households starting in mid-2021.

Shantanu Banerjee, Paul Cordova, Michiel De Pooter, and Olesya V. GrishchenkoWe apply natural language processing tools to news articles in the financial press to construct a sentiment index—an index of the perceived semantic orientation of monetary policy communications around scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. To that end, we develop several dictionaries that capture various monetary policy tools: conventional monetary policy, asset purchases, and forward guidance.