Is the current labor market as tight as official statistics would seem to indicate? If incumbent workers increase their hours of work, it is irrelevant to the unemployment rate, but hardly irrelevant to the level of labor supply. Bluestone and Rose find that job insecurity and stagnating wages...

In this paper we demonstrate that because of stagnating wages and rising job insecurity, there has been a change in the labor supply regime in the U.S. macroeconomy since the 1970s. There is now greater labor supply at any given officially measured unemployment rate. This induced growth in the...

This paper is organized in three parts. First, we present the logic and original evidence for Phillip's Curve and NAIRU. We show that the sources of increased labor supply during the past two expansions have shifted significantly compared with the experience of the 1970's business cycle. The...

Barry Bluestone, of the University of Massachusetts, and Teresa Ghilarducci, of the University of Notre Dame, show that although the poverty rate for elderly Americans has declined over the past three decades, the total number of persons in poverty has grown and the number of poor nonelderly...

Longitudinal data are used to compute income and earnings mobility in the 1970s and 1980s. The various strengths and weakness of different perspectives on mobility are assessed, with the change in real income or earnings being chosen as the one that most closely resembles the common-sense...

Challenge has published many pieces arguing that the standard of living in the United States has suffered in recent decades. But not everyone agrees there is a serious middle-class squeeze. Here is a counterargument.

It is widely believed that one of the achievements in recent decades has been the closing of the wage gap between men and women. In any single year, this is true. But measured over fifteen years, these economists finds that women's earnings are still far behind men's. They still cannot work as...

In this paper, state expenditures are analyzed with respect to their impact on the creation and realization of surplus value. In order to do this, the categories of productive and unproductive labor are developed and tied to the causes of economic crises. State expenditures are divided into...