Most of the public concern about housing markets is based on claims that house prices have increased at historically anomalous rates and that house prices have outpaced incomes. The first claim is based on inaccurate historical data. The second is linked to relaxed credit constraints. House...

A challenge to the popular presumption that U.S. workers are experiencing declining levels of leisure time, finding that the total hours of work have not changed much over the past decade, but that the composition of labor has shifted from home work to market work, mostly as a result of changes...

It wasn’t A Beautiful Mind—the book or the movie—that made John Forbes Nash, Jr., famous. It was his work in game theory, a theory that models strategic interactions between people as games. Before Nash, the only games theorists could get a handle on were artificial ones with no real-world...

Economists have long observed that wages alone do not fully reflect a job’s value—job “amenities” also play a role. Recent empirical studies have confirmed this observation to be the case. Researchers are also finding that workers frequently choose to take lower-paying jobs, which...

Economic theory says the average income of different regions should grow closer over time. Within the United States and across some of the richer countries, evidence suggests this is true.

A review of the connection between labor resource utilization and the growth/unemployment correlation summarized by Okun's law, showing that the instability of that relationship, particularly over short time horizons, has important implications for monetary policy.

An analysis of how implementing a flat tax on income and ending the deductibility of mortgage interest payments would affect housing prices. The authors show that, to the extent prices decline, higher-income households would bear most of the impact, but increases in the value of their other...

Economies can’t grow without a sufficiently developed infrastructure, but how deep does the infrastructure have to be to make a difference? The authors take a look at some research from the Fraser Institute that examines the relationship between economic growth and economic infrastructure...

By all accounts, economic inequality is growing—the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. This Economic Commentary explores inequality in income and consumption and asks whether inequality is determined early in life, before individuals enter the labor market, or whether it...

Do countries that inhibit the quick integration of new technologies pay a price in slower economic growth? This commentary suggests they do. Focusing on the level of Internet use to indicate the absorption rate of emerging computer technologies, the authors argue that faster technology...