New editions of the Greenhouse 100, Toxic 100 Air, and Toxic 100 Water projects, led by PERI researchers Michael Ash and James Boyce, document the U.S. corporations that are creating the largest shares of environmental damage in the areas of greenhouse gas emissions as well as air and water pollution. The Greenhouse 100 finds that three corporations, Vistra Energy, Duke Energy and Southern Company, are alone responsible for 4 percent of all U.S. emissions. The top air and water polluters include Boeing, LyondellBasell, Huntsman, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Inc.

Interest rates in the U.S. have experienced persistent declines since the 1980s. This paper by Santiago Capraro, Carlo Panico, and Luis Daniel Torres-González explains this pattern based on the choice of the Federal Reserve to attribute high priority to financial stability. The interaction between changes in financial regulation, the transformation of "specialized" into "universal” banking, and the concern with financial instability have led the central bank to assume the role of "lender of first resort" beyond its “lender of last resort” interventions. This policy systematically provides liquidity at a low cost to financial firms.

Although contemporary China has developed a distinct economic system, the analytic foundations underpinning China’s state–market relations remain unclear.  PERI researcher Isabella Weber and Hao Qi develop in this paper a conceptual framework of what they term China’s state-constituted market economy. They argue that the Chinese state ‘constitutes’ the market economy by creating, participating, and steering markets for essentials in order to stabilize and guide the economy as a whole. Then then draw on China’s statecraft tradition as well as on proposals for financial policy reform in the U.S. to conceptualize the state-market constitution in China.