**Note: This post was written in September 2017.**

The hurricanes that hit Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2017 left devastating destruction in their wake, resulting in untold costs and disruptions to millions of people, businesses, and the government. The necessary response effort to address the immediate damages, related negative economic impact, and subsequent rebuilding, will use tremendous resources and exceptional diligence. This includes costs and long-run impacts that will not be realized for several years, compounded by the uncertainty around how large the impact will be on individuals, businesses, and government agencies operating in or around the affected areas.

Topics: econometrics, dynamic forecasting

Tree-based modeling is an excellent alternative to linear regression analysis. But what makes it so advantageous? Tree-based models:

• Can be used for any type of data, whether they are numerical (i.e. number calories in cereal) or categorical (i.e. manufacturer of cereal)
• Can handle data that are not normally distributed (normal data are symmetric, bell-shaped, and centered at the mean; however, most data do not follow this type of distribution)
• Are easy to represent visually, making a complex predictive model much easier to interpret
• Require little data preparation because variable transformations are unnecessary

Topics: litigation analytics, data visualization

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we continue our podcast series on federal credit's role in infrastructure and exports.

Topics: federal credit, podcast, Complexity Simplified, Federal Credit and Infrastructure Series

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we kick off our podcast series on federal credit & infrastructure.

Topics: federal credit, podcast, Complexity Simplified, Federal Credit and Infrastructure Series

Since 2017, Summit has been closely monitoring the opioid litigation landscape, including multi-district litigation (MDL) through various outlets. For example, we are tracking more than 30 opioid cases in the state of West Virginia. Our team calculated the supply of opioids, opioid deaths, and the impact of the opioid epidemic on state budgets through the increase of total salaries in the heavily impacted professions.¹ These professions include medical services, social services, and law enforcement services.

Topics: litigation analytics, opioids, data visualization, unstructured data

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we continue our series on federal government programs.

Topics: Complexity Simplified, Government Program Series

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we discuss what goes into launching a federal government program. 

Topics: Complexity Simplified, Government Program Series

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we kick off our podcast series on government programs.

Topics: Complexity Simplified, Government Program Series

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we discuss credit risk transfer.

Topics: Complexity Simplified, credit risk transfer

In the final post of our Mission-Oriented Finance series, we discuss impact evaluation.

Topics: mission-oriented finance, Overview of Mission-Oriented Finance at Summit