Recent estimates of the U.S. economic gains that would result from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are very small — only 0.13 percent of GDP by 2025. Taking into account the un-equalizing effect of trade on wages, this paper finds the median wage earner will probably lose as a...

This paper takes a careful look at a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) Working Paper that claims to find significant gains for liberalization of trade through the World Trade Organization. It is not clear that the reported gains are at all large. The IMF paper shows that multilateral...

This report reviews the characteristics of the immigrant workforce and analyzes the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of immigrant workers. According to the most recent available data, immigrant workers are now over 15 percent of the workforce and almost 13 percent of unionized...

This study estimates rates of all forms of health insurance coverage for workers aged 18 to 64, by wage quintiles, over the past three decades. This analysis looks at health insurance from any source, while other reports (with rare exceptions) look at only employer-provided health coverage. This...

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...

The strong rise in the U.S. stock market since the spring and the return to positive economic growth in the third quarter of this year have created a consensus among economists that the Great Recession is very likely over. Unfortunately, the end of the official recession will have little visible...

Asian Pacific American (APA) workers are, with Latinos, the fastest growing group in the U.S. workforce and in organized labor. Since the late 1980s, APA workers have seen their representation in the ranks of U.S. unions almost double, from about 2.5 percent of all union workers in 1989 to about...

There has been a serious push in policy circles to cut Social Security benefits for near- and/or current retirees. The argument for such cuts has been based on the deficits in the federal budget; the finances of the Social Security program have been at most a secondary consideration. However,...

Employment in physically demanding jobs or in jobs with difficult working conditions is a major cause of early labor-market exit among older workers. Raising the retirement age is particularly concerning for near-retirement age workers with such jobs. Despite the fact that the retirement age...