Publications

California is less affordable and poorer than it should be given the strength of our economy. In Part 1 of our white paper series on making California more affordable, BESI researcher Sam Trachtman lays out the basics facts, including that California has the nation’s highest poverty rate when accounting for cost of living.

Read BESI director Paul Pierson’s introduction to our three-part white paper series on solving California’s affordability crisis.

In a paper for the May 2026 issue of the journal Energy Policy, BESI climate fellow Kathryn Chelminski and her co-authors Guixing Wei and Gian Pietro Bellocca investigate how utility governance structure affects electrical grid reliability in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.

Many countries assume that leading with subsidies (“carrots”) reduces the need for punitive policies (“sticks”) to achieve decarbonization goals. In this paper for Nature, co-authored by BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling, the authors use an economic model that allows them to compare carrot- and stick-first policy decisions, finding that a carrot-first strategy still requires similar-sized sticks to a stick-first approach to achieve comparable levels of decarbonization.

Former Roosevelt Institute senior research Sunny Malhotra and BESI Capitalism and Democracy affiliate Steve Vogel and analyze the American political economy past and present through the lens of predistribution.

In a November 2025 article for the journal Politics & Society, UC Berkeley Political Economy director and BESI steering committee member Steve Vogel argues that that economists should bring power into the heart of their analysis of wage formation.

In an article for the December 2024 volume of the journal Energy Policy, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and visiting scholar Nicholas Goedeking highlight the limits of business-led coordination.

In this article, published in Nature, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling gives an account of a major shift in global decarbonization politics — from international cooperation on the costs of climate change mitigation to competition for the benefits of clean technologies.

In a September 2025 article for the journal Politics and Society, Isabella Mariani advocates for antitrust legislation that centers the autonomy of the user as part of a solution to the problems of the attention economy.

In a new article for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, environmental historian Matthew Shutzer traces how images of extractive technologies have shifted from thematizing social questions about labor and industrial capitalism to serving as representations of the ecological crises of the present.

In a July 2025 article for the journal Perspectives on Politics, political science Ph.D. student and BESI graduate student researcher Sarang Shah and Tufts political science professor Eitan Hersh report on the results of a survey of business leaders and the mass public. They find that while the public cares very little about corporate leader engagement, business leaders would like to see active engagement on issues from their firms, albeit from behind the scenes.

In a new pre-print published published by the American Political Science Association, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling investigates how an economy’s exposure to “impatient capital” predicts the amount of opposition policymakers will face to decarbonization policy.