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This edition was written by Tristan Loa, Andrew Rosin, and Louise Sheiner.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduces the number of workers who lose health insurance when they lose their jobs. Comparing the health insurance coverage trajectory of displaced workers with that of workers who kept their jobs before and after the ACA’s 2014 implementation, Jessamyn Schaller of Claremont McKenna College and Mariana Zerpa of the University of Chile find that the decline in coverage following job loss was about 6 percentage points less in the post-ACA period than in the pre-ACA period. The duration of coverage loss following job loss also fell—from about 16 months pre-ACA to about 10 months post-ACA. The authors suggest two factors likely explain the change: higher Medicaid enrollment prior to job loss and smaller losses of private coverage following job loss. The ACA generated the strongest mitigation effects for middle-income workers—previously the most vulnerable to coverage loss—largely reflecting the expansion of subsidized private insurance through the ACA exchanges.
The central goal of many of the world’s most highly valued AI companies is to create General Intelligence (AGI) systems—highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson of MIT suggest that firms should, in addition to pursuing AGI, expand “pro-worker AI” technologies that make human skills and expertise more valuable by enhancing worker capabilities. They argue that this approach would be equally transformative and promote better labor market outcomes, but is underutilized. AI, they argue, can serve as a force multiplier for human expertise rather than a substitute for it. The authors identify market failures that hinder the development of pro-worker AI, including incentives that favor automation and slow worker adaptation to new systems, as well as dominant pro-automation ideology. To address these challenges, they propose a host of policies, including public investment in AI applications in health care and education—sectors where human judgment, care, and interaction are difficult to replace—tax reform to incentivize hiring labor, stronger antitrust enforcement, and expanded research and development support for pro-worker AI.
Data from the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves suggest that the U.S. dollar share of official foreign exchange reserves fell from a peak of 70% in the late 1990s to about 60% by 2020. Linda S. Goldberg of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Oliver Hannaoui of Carnegie Mellon University attribute this decline to two factors. First, shifts in central bank preferences reduced the aggregate dollar share. A small group of major reserve holders—especially Russia, India, and China—accounted for much of the decline, reflecting lower geopolitical alignment with the U.S. and changes in trade and debt patterns that reduced their dollar holdings. The authors find that such diversification tends to occur only when countries’ reserve portfolios are already large enough to satisfy precautionary foreign-currency liquidity needs. Second, reserve accumulation by countries with relatively low initial dollar shares—such as Switzerland—mechanically lowered the global dollar share between 2015 and 2020, even as those countries increased their dollar holdings.
“Three percent inflation is not good enough—and it’s not what we promised when the Federal Reserve committed to the 2% target. Stalling out at 3% is not a safe place to be for a myriad of reasons we know all too well. We need to make more progress,” says Austan Goolsbee, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
“There have been some encouraging developments on the inflation front. Housing, for example, has improved nicely. But there have been some warning signs, too. Goods inflation went the wrong way in 2025. Multiple studies show that the U.S. has absorbed the vast bulk of the cost of tariffs. Precisely how much has found its way downstream to the consumer so far and how much more is on the way is not yet known…
“It’s not just about goods inflation, though. Core PCE services excluding housing inflation has been running stubbornly high, at 3.3%, over the past year. That is very unlikely to have come from tariffs, and it’s harder to make an optimistic case that high services inflation is just transitory. So we need to be vigilant.”
Call for papers
We are seeking proposals for papers on the municipal bond market and state and local fiscal policy to be considered for the Municipal Finance Conference to be held in-person Tuesday, July 21, 2026 and Wednesday, July 22, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
About the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings
