A paper by a team from Melissa High School is one of 12 that Federal Reserve reviewers picked to publish from 207 entries in this year's High School Fed Challenge, and it was the only one chosen from Texas, Melissa ISD said Friday.
The team is made up of three current Melissa High students and a former student who now attends the University of Texas at Austin, according to the district.
The contest
The Fed Challenge is an academic paper competition run by the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Dallas and Richmond. It is in its 32nd year and is open to high school teams across the country, the district said. Teams research an economic theme and turn the work into podcast scripts.
This year's theme was the economics of music. The Melissa entry is titled *All I Want for Chri$tmas is Revenue: The Economics of Xmas Music*. It appears on pages 86 to 93 of the 2026 *Journal of Future Economists*, published by the New York Fed.
Written as a conversation among four podcast hosts, the script looks at how holiday songs playing in stores can change what shoppers buy and how much they spend, then works through a case study of how a 1994 Christmas hit kept earning royalties decades later.
