Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

AI Can Now Explain 20 Percent of Stock Moves After Earnings — Four Times Better Than the Old Standard

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• New research from Chicago Booth found that frontier AI models explained about 17-20 percent of same-day stock price moves following earnings announcements, a major improvement over the traditional "earnings surprise" metric, which explains only about 5 percent.
• The AI models didn't just predict moves — they generated human-readable explanations, picking up on executive tone, forward guidance, and market expectations already baked into prices, giving researchers testable hypotheses about what actually drives markets.
• The researchers ran a live test on nearly 2,000 earnings calls in late 2025 to avoid the data-snooping pitfalls common in finance research, and have launched an open competition inviting others to push the explanatory power even further.

Voters Want Lower Health Care Costs, Not Fraud Crackdowns — and Most Think Trump's Medicaid Actions Are Political

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• Health care costs are the top midterm issue for most voters, but Republican voters are more focused on fraud in government health programs, reflecting Trump administration messaging.
• Most voters — including majorities of independents and even 61% of Republicans — believe delaying federal Medicaid payments will cause eligible people to lose care, and 71% say ensuring access should take priority over reducing fraud.
• Large majorities of Democrats and independents see the Medicaid payment deferrals as politically motivated, while most Republicans see them as genuine anti-fraud efforts — a sharp partisan divide that will shape the midterm health care debate.

Battery Storage Can't Pay for Itself at Scale — Which Is Why Policy Support Still Matters

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• Battery storage faces a self-defeating economics problem: as more batteries enter the grid, they smooth out the price swings they depend on for profit, making large-scale investment unprofitable without subsidies or mandates.
• A study of California's electricity market finds that small battery fleets can break even on their own, but value per kilowatt-hour drops sharply as capacity grows — from ~$280/kWh for a tiny fleet to ~$140/kWh for a large one at 50% renewable penetration.
• The future of storage hinges on three forces: state renewable mandates (which widen price gaps batteries can exploit), surging electricity demand from AI and data centers (which could triple storage investment), and federal tax credits that the 2025 'One Big Beautiful Bill' extended through 2033.

In the News

The US Lead in AI Over China Is Down to Six to Nine Months, Anthropic Warns

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• Anthropic's head of national security policy told the Aspen Security Forum that the US holds only a six-to-nine-month lead over China in frontier AI models — and says that gap would be larger if Chinese firms weren't using unauthorized "distillation" techniques to copy American models.
• Distillation allows Chinese labs to extract the capabilities of US models without direct access, and Anthropic claims it is now shutting down millions of accounts per week engaged in the practice.
• Washington is responding with new export control legislation and closer cooperation between the Trump administration and leading AI companies, signaling that AI competitiveness with China is becoming a top national security priority.

Analysis

The EU's new pay transparency law could narrow the gender wage gap — but mostly in countries where unequal pay is actually the problem

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• The EU's Pay Transparency Directive, which member states must implement by June 2026, is expected to reduce the adjusted gender pay gap by around 3 percentage points, but a new simulation finds the gains will vary enormously across countries.
• In Central and Eastern Europe, where unequal pay for comparable work is the main driver of the gender earnings gap, the directive could have a substantial effect; in countries like Germany, Austria, and Italy, where part-time work, employment gaps, and occupational segregation dominate, equal pay rules will barely move the needle.
• If firms comply by raising women's wages rather than cutting men's, the directive would boost household incomes, reduce poverty among single mothers, and increase government revenues by roughly 1% of GDP under a full equal-pay scenario.

Also Worth a Look

• AI Data Centers Are Triggering a New Wave of Eminent Domain Battles (the_conversation)
• AI Could Scramble Economic Research as Thoroughly as Globalization Did (voxeu)
• Why Financial Crises No Longer Produce Sweeping Bank Regulations Like They Used To (voxeu)
• AI is making us want to live forever — and stop having children (noema)
• Republicans and Democrats Are More Alike Than You'd Think in How They Actually Participate in Public Life (pew)
• Neurons May Be Far More Computationally Powerful Than We Thought (science)
• America's Key Oil Hub Is So Low on Crude That Storage Tanks Are Hitting Their Operational Limits (eia)