Research & Innovation

When inflation spiked after COVID-19, many critics accused the Federal Reserve of abandoning traditional monetary policy. In a study presented at the 2025 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, UC Berkeley economists Emi Nakamura, Venance Riblier and Jón Steinsson revisited that claim.

At the center of the debate is the Taylor Rule, a guideline developed in the 1990s to describe how central banks should adjust interest rates in response to inflation and economic conditions. According to the Berkeley researchers, the Fed deviated from this rule...

When Julia Chac first applied for a front desk position at Bakar Bio Labs three years ago, biotech wasn’t even on her radar.

An Integrative Biology and Psychology double major at UC Berkeley, Julia knew she was premed. She also knew she needed to work. Coming from South Fresno, where her parents are farmers, and most of her community is economically underserved, she had always understood the importance of supporting herself financially while pursuing an education.

“I wanted to place myself...

The term “person of color” has grown increasingly common in American public life. A new Berkeley Political Science paper, “Who Counts as a ‘Person of Color’? The Roles of Ancestry, Phenotype, Self-Identification and Other Factors” seeks to answer what the term actually means to the public, and more specifically, how Americans decide who falls under that label.

UC Berkeley Political Science Ph.D. student William Halm conducted a survey experiment to determine which characteristics matter most in classifying someone as a person of color....

Asked if his new book on the history of capitalism is hopeful, Trevor Jackson outright laughs. The UC Berkeley history professor has spent his career documenting the rise of the economic system that orders the lives of most people on the planet.

The resulting book, The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, is rife with tales of precipitous inequality, bloodshed and environmental...