If raising the minimum wage affected only 2.5 percent of the labor market, as many argue it does, than it would not be such an explosive political issue. In truth, it affects wages well up the income ladder. The authors show why. They argue that a higher minimum wage is an essential part of any...

Proposals that would establish a two-year budget and appropriations cycle for the U.S. government have been offered by both Democrats and Republicans in recent years. This article analyzes the potential impact on such budgeting. The first section examines the budget period in theory and...

In the growing search for alternatives to the narrower versions of mainstream economic theory, the author celebrates the work of an earlier institutional economist, Vernon Briggs. Briggs's "human resource economics" draws from a variety of fields and emphasizes the importance of human capital to...

The subprime mortgage crisis caught Wall Street off guard this summer. That is the definition of a crisis, and a credit crunch soon ensued. But according to the financial thinking of the late economist Hyman Minsky, such problems are endemic to what he called "money manager capitalism."...

Post-Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI), a synthesis of post Keynesian and institutional economics, emerged in the USA as a strand of evolutionary economics in the early 1980s and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This article examines milestones in the development of PKI,...

This essay is based on remarks presented by the author at The Fourth Bi-Annual Cross-Border Post Keynesian Conference, Buffalo State College, on October 9, 2009. It addresses the economic challenges facing Buffalo, New York, and countless other American cities, especially in the Northeast and...

Among the models that CBO uses to analyze the economic effects of changes in federal fiscal policy is a life-cycle growth model. That model requires an estimate of the responsiveness of the supply of labor to a one-time temporary change in after-tax compensation, which is described by the...