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Report
The first two reports in this series on the May 2026 Zoning and Land Use Flexibility Survey showed that Americans broadly support starter homes, smaller lots, light-touch density, and homes near jobs when these reforms are described in practical terms. This third report examines why that support weakens among some Americans and identifies two direct barriers to support.
BY Tobias Peter + Edward J. Pinto ON 7 Jul 26
Report
This second report’s main finding is that support is broad, but not uniform. The clearest divides are ideology and perceived affordability severity.[2] Option 3 homes near jobs and amenities has the highest support among liberals, moderates, and conservatives. Option 2 small-scale infill in existing single-family neighborhoods is the most politically divided. Option 1 smaller lots in new neighborhoods falls in between. Respondents who see housing affordability as extremely or very serious are also much more supportive of all three reforms, especially with respect to Option 2, where the lift was 12 percentage points, about double the lift for Options 1 and 3. Perceived affordability pressure matters more than objective affordability pressure: people respond most strongly when they recognize affordability as a serious local problem.
BY Tobias Peter + Edward J. Pinto ON 1 Jul 26
Report
May 2026’s preliminary YoY HPA was 1.4%, the second lowest level of the series, up from 1.2% in April 2026 and down from 2.4% in May 2025.
BY Edward J. Pinto + Tobias Peter ON 1 Jul 26
Report
American Enterprise Institute
Our country has developed a range of undesirable new habits—political, social, and economic—over the past several decades. With steady population growth, we have managed to “afford” these, to progress despite them. We cannot count on that luxury under depopulation.
BY Nicholas Eberstadt ON 1 Jul 26
Report
American Enterprise Institute
Grade-level data show that students in kindergarten through third grade, who entered school after the pandemic, had similarly elevated absenteeism to cohorts that experienced schooling during the pandemic, suggesting a broad cultural change. Without additional resolve, about half of the pandemic-related increase in absenteeism could become the long-term baseline.
BY Nat Malkus ON 30 Jun 26
Report
The AEI Housing Center’s May 2026 Zoning and Land Use Flexibility Survey finds that Americans are open to practical housing-supply reforms. The survey tested three core reforms aligned with the Strong Foundations Playbook.
BY Tobias Peter + Edward J. Pinto ON 29 Jun 26
Journal Publication
We cannot attribute the demise of federally funded nonprofit-provided services solely to the tornado that is the second Trump administration. The sudden toppling of nonprofit services resulted from mounting contradictions that ate away at its foundations and legitimacy for decades.
BY Daniel Stid ON 22 Jun 26
Journal Publication
The sudden change to immigration policy in 2025 has resulted in little or even negative net migration to the US and has meant a sharp reduction in employment growth, consistent with a stable national unemployment rate.
BY Stan Veuger + Anna Maria Mayda + Andrew Selee ON 1 Jun 26
Journal Publication
This paper examines whether certain regulations performed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and perhaps the FCC itself, have outlived their economic and technological justifications.
BY Mark Jamison ON 8 May 26
Journal Publication
Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies
The chapter discusses the ongoing crisis of democracy in the United States and its implications for Europe. It highlights structural weaknesses in American governance, such as a weakened Congress and political parties, intensified polarization and…
BY Dalibor Rohac ON 27 Apr 26
Journal Publication
If Idaho’s results extended to the economy as a whole, then they would not be enough to arrest a moderate recession, but they would meaningfully accelerate labor market recovery.
BY Duncan Hobbs + Michael R. Strain ON 7 Apr 26
Journal Publication
Abstract Whether each generation of Americans continues to economically surpass the previous one has recently been called into question. We construct a posttax, post transfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current…
BY Kevin Corinth ON 1 Apr 26
One Pager
The Senate on Thursday whooped through the misnamed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, 89-10, with nine courageous Republicans and one Democrat voting no. The bill is a road to less housing, and House Republicans needn’t rubber stamp the Senate’s shoddy work…
BY Edward J. Pinto + Tobias Peter ON 16 Mar 26
One Pager
Below is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board's recent opinion piece, "Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup: The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives." The article references Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter, the Co-Directors of AEI's Housing Center.
BY Edward J. Pinto + Tobias Peter ON 11 Mar 26
One Pager
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have formed an axis of aggression to combat the US-led international order. Each of these revisionist states aids the others in their goals to establish spheres of influence and subvert or destroy democratic nations. The axis and its friends have been dealt devastating setbacks: Bashar al-Assad has fallen in Syria, American intervention ousted Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and the regime in Iran now faces defeat. Although Russia and China have not protected their clients from US attacks, they continue to support them in other ways, and all remain committed to a coordinated campaign to overturn the US-led international order.
BY AEI’s Foreign and Defense Policy team ON 9 Mar 26
One Pager
Our most underappreciated tool for improving our chances of getting the outcomes we want, and even more importantly – for living lives that feel full and capacious and ours — is building our sense of agency.
BY David Shaywitz ON 27 Feb 26
One Pager
American Enterprise Institute
The quality of research on China’s international economic activity has declined, a problem worsened by AI-generated material that allows weak and unfounded claims to spread. To counter this, the China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT), released twice a year, provides the most comprehensive public record of China’s overseas investment and construction activity.
BY Derek Scissors ON 28 Jan 26
One Pager
Iran and its Axis of Resistance have suffered successive defeats since the beginning of 2024, reducing their ability to project force and making them more vulnerable to attack. These defeats began shortly after Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023. Tehran and its militia allies waged a regional escalation against the United States and Israel in the ensuing months. Iranian and Iranian-backed forces launched strike campaigns targeting US service members in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, as well as international shipping around the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
BY Nicholas Carl + Brian Carter ON 7 Nov 25
Testimony
United States Environmental Protection Agency
This comment paper is submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with respect to Part 1 of its “comprehensive review of the Biden-EPA’s 2024 Tier 4 light-and medium-duty vehicles emission standards for criteria pollutants.”
BY Benjamin Zycher ON 7 Jul 26
Testimony
Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission
For those who justify or apologize for Turkey’s invasion, the narrative is simple: Turkey invaded to protect Cypriot Muslims from ethnic violence if not genocide at the hands of the Greeks. To justify the occupation of Cyprus, however, would be by analogy to accept not only Nazi Germany’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria, but also the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. More recently, Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea to protect ethnic Russians rested on nearly identical arguments and false claims as Turkey had used in Cyprus four decades previously. Put simply, the notion that human rights or a desire to protect the Cypriot Muslim community motivates let alone justified the Turkish occupation is ahistorical nonsense.
BY Michael Rubin ON 30 Jun 26
Testimony
US Securities and Exchange Commission
This comment is submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to its request for comments “in support of a comprehensive review of the Consolidated Audit Trail and other audit trails and related data sources currently used in the regulation of U.S. securities markets,
BY Benjamin Zycher ON 23 Jun 26
Testimony
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
Adoption is uneven, complementary investments matter enormously, and the workers most exposed to AI's substitution potential are not the same workers capturing its augmentation benefits. Understanding that gap between task-level results and economy-wide outcomes is the central analytical challenge this testimony takes up.
BY Will Rinehart ON 11 Jun 26
Testimony
House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health
Persistently high health care costs place pressure on federal, state, and household budgets. Yet market actors and policymakers frequently lack the information needed to improve market functioning.
BY Benedic N. Ippolito ON 10 Jun 26
Testimony
Chairman Ernst, Ranking Member Markey, and members of the Small Business Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Angela Rachidi, and I am a Senior Fellow in poverty studies at the…
BY Angela Rachidi ON 3 Jun 26
Working Paper
National Bureau of Economic Research
Economists have often shown far more enthusiasm for Pigouvian taxes than the general public has, perhaps because they have assumed away the messy costs that accompany these taxes. The fact that costs and distributional consequences arise implies that good policymaking is based on the size of any impact and the quantity of changes that an intervention implies.
BY Edward L. Glaeser + Paul S. Willen + Adam M. Guren + et al. ON 29 Jun 26
Working Paper
AEI Foreign and Defense Policy Working Paper Series
The US should press the interim Syrian government to enter a formal peace with Israel based on mutual recognition, end to attacks on the Syrian Druze population as a prerequisite for Israeli withdrawal from undisputed Syrian territory, and join the US in its recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
BY Brett D. Schaefer + Danielle Pletka ON 24 Jun 26
Working Paper
AEI Foreign and Defense Policy Working Paper Series
Proponents of the Navy's new shipbuilding plan are using it to justify a historic cash infusion, arguing it is the only way to arrest the rapid decline of American naval supremacy. But throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at a broken system will not buy security.
BY Anand Toprani + Zack Cooper + John G. Ferrari ON 8 Jun 26
Working Paper
AEI Foreign and Defense Policy Working Paper Series
Plummeting fertility rates across both rich and poor regions have shattered long-held demographic assumptions of stabilization, hurtling the planet toward an imminent population peak and a terra incognita of prolonged, indefinite depopulation.
BY Nicholas Eberstadt + Patrick Norrick ON 29 May 26
Working Paper
National Bureau of Economic Research
When output is constrained, policymakers should not hesitate to forcefully restrain aggregate demand with tight monetary policy to prevent price escalation.
BY Jesús Fernández-Villaverde + Xiwen Bai + Yiliang Li + et al. ON 26 May 26
Working Paper
National Bureau of Economic Research
Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a prodigious corpus of human writing and may reveal human preferences over characteristics of life courses, such as income, longevity, and working conditions. We present OpenAI’s GPT-5.4…
BY Amitabh Chandra + Omar Abdel Haq + Tomáš Jagelka + et al. ON 18 May 26
Speech
The following remarks were delivered at St. John's College Commencement on May 23, 2026.
BY Ben Sasse ON 23 May 26
Speech
Robert P. George gives a talk on the history of American music at The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at CU Boulder.
BY Robert P. George ON 18 May 26
Speech
Jay Cost delivers a lecture on James Madison for The Institute for Faith & Freedom.
BY Jay Cost ON 14 May 26
Speech
The following remarks were delivered at Hampden-Sydney College's Commencement on May 9, 2026.
BY Allen C. Guelzo ON 9 May 26
Speech
The following remarks were delivered at the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner on May 6, 2026.
BY Ben Sasse ON 6 May 26
Speech
Dr. Allen Guelzo delivered these remarks at the 2025-2026 series of the Levy Forum for Open Discourse.
BY Allen C. Guelzo ON 19 Mar 26
