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...

This paper looks at the problem of state budget shortfalls during the recession and calculates the number of jobs that would be lost (nationally and by state) if states utilize pro-cyclical spending cuts in an attempt to balance their budgets. This is an update to an earlier paper from December...

In the current recession, millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Unemployment has increased nationwide to levels not witnessed since the 1980s. This issue brief tallies more than 110,000 jobs that have been shed from state and local governments in the last two years and breaks them down by...

This paper examines recent economic data, including the most recent data released the third week of August 2010, in an attempt to evaluate the Venezuelan economy's prospects in the foreseeable future. It finds that the Venezuelan economy, which went into recession in the first quarter of 2009...

Since the Great Depression, the worst episode of unemployment came in the second half of 1982 and the first half of 1983. Over that time, the unemployment rate stayed above ten percent from September through June—reaching 10.8 percent of the labor force in November and December of 1982. A...

Contrary to popular perceptions, the United States has a much smaller small-business sector (as a share of total employment) than other countries at a comparable level of economic development, according to this new CEPR report. The authors observe that the undersized U.S. small business sector...

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...

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...

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...