New research from the McCombs School of Business identifies a novel factor in rising home prices: foreign investment. An influx of foreign money during the 2010s drove up housing costs in the areas with the greatest concentrations of purchasers from outside the U.S., finds Caitlin Gorback, assistant professor of finance.

But her findings have broader implications for affordability, she says. Even in markets where foreign investors weren’t plentiful, prices rose much faster than supply did from 2009 to 2018.

As the world faces a critical historical conjuncture marked by rising inequality, ecological disruption, and geopolitical fragmentation, the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) will convene its biennial international conference in Barcelona, Spain, from June 29 to July 3, 2026, hosted across the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Barcelona (UB). The event will bring together more than 1,500 researchers, activists, representatives of civil society organizations, and creators from across the globe to dissect contemporary crises and forge pathways toward peaceful, just alternatives.

A new study from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign labor relations scholar John Kallas explores how union activists practiced “intersectional organizing” at work by uniting around shared social identities rather than better pay and working conditions. 

A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now sheds light, for the first time, on the carbon intensity of household consumption across much of the world – and thus on the distributional impact of climate policy, which, after all, makes carbon more expensive. The greatest differences are not between rich and poor, but within income groups: key factors include car ownership, place of residence and energy use. The study provides guidance on how to socially balance the fight against global heating. Published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), it is supplemented by an interactive online carbon price calculator.

New Rutgers research suggests much of the seemingly endless waiting for complex medical care can be engineered away by recreating operations inside a computer and testing countless possible improvements.

A study in the Annals of Operations Research explains how researchers from Rutgers Cancer Institute and Rutgers Business School built a working computer simulation of the institute’s blood cancer clinic and used it to identify and fix bottlenecks that kept patients waiting up to three hours between check-in and treatment. The result: Laboratory blood work turnaround was cut from roughly 90 minutes to less than 30 and helped the clinic nearly double the number of infusion patients it treats each day, from about 50 to about 80.

Vaibhav Diwanji, a mass commiunications researcher at the University of Kansas, has published a study detailing four experiments he conducted on the effectiveness of AI-derived advertising. The results showed that placement on a website, type of ad, relevance to content contained on the site and other factors could deliver ads people found useful and positively influenced their attitudes toward the advertiser without using surveillance of the persons' internet behaviors. This counters prevailing industry wisdom that spying is necessary for effective advertising, and comes at a time that the future of online privacy is being debated and regulation of such surveillance is increasing, Diwanji argues.