In new research, Blake Jackson and Ilya Strebulaev track the careers of 100,000 people working at venture capital firms in the United States to ask which investors succeed and why. They find that five percent of VCs generate 90 percent of the industry's profits, that the backgrounds investors bring with them predict who ends up in that group, and that public recognition itself opens the doors to the deals that keep them at the top.

In new research, Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato argue that the move of private equity firms into life insurance has increased the probability that insurers will go insolvent. If they do, under an obscure system of insurance guaranty funds, the losses will spread out beyond the insolvent insurer’s creditors to other insurers and, ultimately, taxpayers. 

Matthew Lucky reviews The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, now out at Henry Holt and Co.

The Stigler Center is putting out a call for papers for its 2027 annual conference. The theme of this year's conference will be the...

In new research, Andrey Simonov, Daniil Mikhailov, Ruben Enikolopov, and Ruben Durante estimate that when a 2016 law pushed Russia’s leading news aggregator Yandex to reduce its references to independent outlets, readers kept following its recommended news stories as before, reducing traffic to the excluded outlets. In response, excluded outlets changed the news they produced.

In new research, Yulia Chikish, Gregory J. Colman, Dhaval M. Dave, Brad R. Humphreys, Zachary Santamaria, and Zachary Winship find that New York City congestion pricing has reduced emergency medical services response times.