There is a growing chorus of policy analysts and pundits telling the country that we could have millions more jobs in manufacturing, if only we had qualified workers. This claim has the interesting feature that it places responsibility for the lack of jobs on workers, not on the people who get...

The unemployment rate is expected to average 10.2 percent for 2010, 9.1 percent for 2011, and 7.3 percent for 2012. With this in mind, this Issue Brief describes a job sharing tax credit, designed to provide a quick and substantial boost to the economy. It would use tax dollars to pay firms to...

Economists are increasingly coming to the recognition that the current downturn is likely to be longer and more severe than they had expected at the time the last stimulus package was approved in February. As a result, there is likely to be interest in additional stimulus in order to boost the...

This report analyzes the wage and employment effects of the first three city-specific minimum wages in the United States –San Francisco (2004), Santa Fe (2004), and Washington, DC (1993). We use data from a virtual census of employment in each of the three cities, surrounding suburbs, and...

Some economic observers argue “structural unemployment” has increased in the wake of the Great Recession, but in this paper we find little support for either of two arguments that suggest that structural unemployment has been on the rise. The first argument focuses on the large increase in...

This paper reviews the recent labor-market performance of 21 rich countries, with a focus on Denmark and Germany. Denmark, which was widely seen as one of the world's most successful labor markets before the downturn, has struggled in recent years. Germany, however, has outperformed the rest of...

From the early 1990s through the peak of the last business cycle, relatively low U.S. unemployment rates seemed to make the United States a model for the rest of the world’s economies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and...

Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market...

This paper considers the case for and against 'the treasury view' - the idea that in a downturn, government spending has no effect on economic activity or unemployment. The report covers three areas: the evidence for expansionary fiscal contraction – the idea that somehow cutting budget...

At the peak of both the stock and housing bubbles, there were extraordinary shifts in the statistical discrepancy between the national output and income accounts. The statistical discrepancy fell from its normal range of 0.5 – 1.0 percent of GDP to levels below -1.0 percent of GDP. The...