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Open Weights and the Open-Closed Choice: What Jensen Huang’s First X Post Argues, and What the Data Shows
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary On July 24, 2026, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang published his first post on the X platform. The post shared a joint industry letter titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," signed by 25 organizations spanning Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Mistral, Perplexity, Andreessen Horowitz, The…
Do Vibes Predict Recessions? What a New San Francisco Fed Paper Tells Us About Sentiment as an Early-Warning Signal
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary On July 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released Working Paper 2026-14, titled "Do Vibes Predict Recessions? Evidence from a Big-Data Forecasting Framework." The paper compares two recession-forecasting models trained on real-time data from August 1999 through May 2026. One uses only…
The Grocery Pullback: US Shoppers Buy Fewer Items as Seven Years of Food Inflation Catches Up
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary U.S. grocery unit sales fell 1.8 percent in June 2026 compared with a year earlier, a sharp reversal from the 0.1 percent year-over-year growth recorded in June 2025. That is according to a Bain & Company analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shared with CNBC on…

One Brand Took Years to Build Trust in a Taboo Category. The Other Lost It in 24 Hours: What TENA and Pepsi Reveal About the Real Determinants of Marketing Success
In 2017, one of the world's largest beverage companies released a celebrity-led advertisement that collapsed within 24 hours. Two years later, a brand selling adult incontinence products — a category most marketers would consider unmarketable — launched a platform that won industry awards, expanded globally, and is still scaling into…
The Influence Your Analytics Can’t See: Measuring Dark Social’s Impact on Offline Retail Sales — and What Brands Should Do About It
The majority of consumer sharing happens in private channels — closed Facebook groups, DMs, group chats — where web analytics records it as "direct" traffic or misses it entirely. For brands that sell through retail partners, that blind spot can swallow the single most persuasive touchpoint in the customer journey….
The EU Delayed Its AI Act by 16 Months. U.S. States Just Passed 19 More AI Laws. An Economic Look at What Any Company Operating in Both Markets Now Has to Comply With
The European Union delayed the hardest parts of its AI Act by up to 16 months while U.S. states continued to enact new AI statutes at a pace unmatched by any other regulator in the world. An economic look at what any company operating in both markets now has to…

Do Vibes Predict Recessions? What a New San Francisco Fed Paper Tells Us About Sentiment as an Early-Warning Signal
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary On July 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released Working Paper 2026-14, titled "Do Vibes Predict Recessions? Evidence from a Big-Data Forecasting Framework." The paper compares two recession-forecasting models trained on real-time data from August 1999 through May 2026. One uses only…
The Grocery Pullback: US Shoppers Buy Fewer Items as Seven Years of Food Inflation Catches Up
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary U.S. grocery unit sales fell 1.8 percent in June 2026 compared with a year earlier, a sharp reversal from the 0.1 percent year-over-year growth recorded in June 2025. That is according to a Bain & Company analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shared with CNBC on…
The Boom and the Gap: Twenty Years of North Texas Growth, Prices, and Mortgage Access
AcadeResearch Economic Report Executive Summary North Texas contains four of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Celina, Texas grew 24.6 percent in a single year to a population of 64,427 in the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates, the fastest growth of any U.S. city with more than 20,000 residents….

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
– W. Edwards Deming