Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with Associated Press reporter Paul Wiseman about the economic impact of the U.S. conflict with Iran. “A week ago or certainly two weeks ago, I would have said: If the war stopped that day, the long-term implications would be pretty small,’’ says Knittel. “But what we’re seeing is infrastructure actually being destroyed, which means the ramifications of this war are going to be long-lived.’’
Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks with Boston Globe reporter Joshua Miller about the impact of the conflict in Iran on oil and gas prices. “There’s something that economists call the rockets and feathers phenomenon: When oil prices go up, gasoline prices go up like a rocket,” explains Wolfram. “They kind of match. But then when oil prices come back down, gasoline prices float down like a feather. They don’t go down as fast.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that “one in five couples could boost retirement savings by reallocating contributions,” reports Caroline Castrollon for Forbes. “There are pretty large gains to coordinating your finances,” explains Prof. Taha Choukhmane. “We find that couples leave quite a lot of money on the table every year.”
According to the 2026 QS World University Rankings, MIT has been earned a No. 1 global ranking in 12 subject areas, including chemical engineering; chemistry; civil and structural engineering; computer science and information systems; data science and artificial intelligence; electrical and electronic engineering; engineering and technology; linguistics; materials science; mechanical, aeronautical, and manufacturing engineering; mathematics; and physics and astronomy, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes.
Prof. John Horton speaks with CNN reporter Harmeet Kaur about the use of the world “agentic” in describing AI. “My sense is that it’s a word that’s useful to describe software that acts a bit more like a person does,” says Horton.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Christopher Knittel and graduate student Fischer Espiritu Argosino make the case that in Massachusetts the “current compensation structure for the electricity produced by solar panels turns a climate solution into an inequitable cost shift that burdens many residents.” They add: “The state needs to prioritize large-scale wind and solar deployment and fix how residential solar exporters are compensated…. Massachusetts has long been a clean-energy leader. It can remain one by showing that decarbonization and affordability can go hand in hand.”
Writing for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores how businesses can best prepare for the rapid advancements underway in the field of neurotechnology. “I believe that one of the most important steps companies can take regarding this emerging technology is to act now, without waiting for regulatory clarity first,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Treat neural data as categorically sensitive from day one—not because you are forced to, but because you understand that operating this close to the human mind demands a higher threshold of trust than almost any technology before it.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Danielle Li examines the risks for highly skilled workers whose expertise is used as training data for AI systems. “As workers, people should think about how to use AI to expand their skills: whether by building complementary capabilities or by finding ways to scale their expertise through AI systems,” Li writes. “As citizens, they should press for policies that give workers clearer rights over the data generated by their work and compensation for it.”
Visiting Senior Lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Newsweek reporter Adam Mills about how AI implementation across organizations can have impacts on business oversight and governance. “The organizations I’ve seen moving fastest have built governance systems early enough that they become a permission structure, rather than a constraint,” says McDonagh-Smith.
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with New York Times reporter Emmett Lindner about how the conflict with Iran has influenced gas prices in the United States. “When there’s a supply disruption in the Middle East, that raises prices for every barrel of oil in the world,” explains Knittel. “Those price increases then trickle down to products that use oil, gasoline being the most relevant one.”
A new essay by Profs. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson, has offered “a more hopeful vision for the future of human work,” in a world infused with AI, reports Greg Rosalsky for NPR’s Planet Money. The authors “spend much of the essay providing a thought-provoking analysis of how new technologies can affect human jobs in general,” writes Rosalsky. “In short, it's complicated. Yes, often they do kill jobs. Other times they can make jobs less lucrative by, for example, making those jobs easier to do — or ‘de-skilling’ them — which means the supply of workers who can do these jobs goes up and wages for the occupation can go down.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Associated Press reporter Paul Wiseman about how the conflict with Iran has impacted the global economy. “The Strait of Hormuz has to be reopened,” says Johnson. “It’s 20 million barrels of oil a day going through there. There’s no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with CNBC Squawk Box reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of private credit. “The opacity of this sector has become a problem,” says Johnson. “I think disclosure, at least to the authorities and publicly, would be healthy for everyone.”
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with Bloomberg reporter Stacey Vanek Smith about increased gas prices. “Gas is something we tend to buy on a weekly basis,” says Knittel. “But also, we see the price hundreds of times a day. Even if you’re not buying it, you see the price, so the salience of gas prices is like no other.”
Prof. Catherine Wolfram speaks with Politico reporter James Bikales about the price of oil and gasoline in the United States. “Economists talk about what’s called rockets and feathers — that gas prices go up like rockets when oil prices go up, but then if oil prices go back down … they go back down like feathers,” says Wolfram. “Especially if you’re coming into the period when [gas prices] tend to rise because of summer driving, they might just stay high, even if oil prices go back down.”