Partnering for impact: How academic collaboration fuels breakthrough research at the JPMorganChase Institute

For the past decade, the JPMorganChase Institute researchers have worked with leading academics to produce research that drives meaningful impact. By combining our real-time, transaction-level data with the methodological rigor of academic best practices, the Institute delivers insights that help decision makers across the country better understand the forces shaping the economy.

Our data offers a powerful view into the financial lives of households and businesses in the U.S., and our academic collaborations provide another avenue to broaden the reach of these data with fresh questions, innovative methodologies, and peer-reviewed credibility. Over time, we've built a model that ensures our work not only reflects academic standards, but also responds to today's most pressing economic challenges.

This blog explores how we partner with researchers, what those collaborations look like in practice, and why they're critical to informing smart policy and decision making.

How the Institute partners with academia

At the core of the Institute's academic engagement is the Strategic Research Fellows Program, our flagship initiative that embeds academic experts directly into the Institute's research process. These fellows, including university faculty, PhD candidates, and research assistants from top institutions like University of Chicago, Harvard University, New York University, and University of Pennsylvania, work alongside Institute researchers to design, develop, and publish economic research that informs both scholarly and real-world conversations.

Fellows play an active role in contributing to our research agenda while at the Institute. They work alongside our Institute team to help build data assets, advise on methodologies through joint workshops, and co-author working papers and peer-reviewed publications. Each project is carefully structured to maximize both learning and impact, with some fellows launching entirely new studies, while others enhancing ongoing research through rigorous benchmarking and peer review. This distinctive approach sets our fellows program apart by continually building research skills and ensuring that the research is empirically sound and timely to economic conversations.

Importantly, these collaborations don't end with publication. Fellows extend the reach of our work by serving as ambassadors who ensure our findings don't remain siloed, but instead continue to inform the broader economic dialogue shaping public and private sector decisions. Research co-authored by the Institute and our fellows has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, and presented at top academic and policy conferences. Some examples of published and working papers include:

Spending and job-finding impacts of expanded unemployment benefits: Evidence from administrative micro data

Revenue collapses and the consumption of small business owners in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

The impact of work-from-home on brick-and-mortar retail establishments: Evidence from card transactions

Through these partnerships, the Institute advances not only its own mission, but also fosters the development of future research leaders, expanding the voices and potential contributions to economic policy discourse. Fellows gain hands-on experience working with proprietary data on real-world questions, an opportunity that strengthens their academic work and exposes them to the practical applications of economic research in a policymaking context.

Collaboration in action

The Institute's study on unemployment insurance during the pandemic, developed in partnership with our Strategic Research Fellows from the University of Chicago, demonstrates the value of our academic collaborations. By using the Institute's data on household income and spending, the research was able to answer the key questions policymakers had about UI: how much was spending buoyed by expanded UI benefits, and were these benefits disincentivizing people from returning to work?

The analysis found that the benefits expansions during the pandemic had large effects on spending but did not deter many people from finding new employment. That is, in the context of the pandemic when economic activity was already depressed and job-finding rates were low, the expanded benefits were able to support households without sacrificing overall economic efficiency. This means that in future recessions where economic activity is similarly depressed, expanded UI benefits may be a more efficient way of stimulating the economy than broad-based stimulus checks that have been used in the past.

Academic fellows contributed critically to this study, helping refine the methodology and contextualize the findings for both academic and policy audiences. Their involvement enhanced the rigor of the study, and as a result it has meaningful implications for decision makers.

The role of our partnerships going forward

The Institute's academic partnerships don't just support our research, they help push the boundaries of what we can understand about the economy. As we look to the future, these will grow in scale and scope, helping us to surface—and answer—new questions, reach larger audiences, and contribute to the policies and decisions that will help make our economy stronger.

To explore our latest research, visit https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/all-topics.