The economic crisis of the last two years has led to serious concerns about the sharp growth in the federal government’s fiscal deficit as well as the government’s overall debt burden as a share of total U.S. GDP. Many analysts also believe that an excessive share of the economy’s...

The 2008-09 Great Recession has created an ongoing severe fiscal crisis for state and local governments throughout the United States. Republican leaders are now advancing an agenda to radically downsize state and local governments by cutting taxes, slashing wages and benefits for public workers,...

Did the presence of immigrant workers in the United States labor market—including both documented and undocumented workers—significantly affect conditions for low-wage native workers during the Great Recession of 2008-09?   Building from the methodology developed by Card (2005), our basic...

Wall Street hyper-speculation brought the global economy to its knees in 2008-09.  To prevent a 1930s-level Depression at that time, economic policymakers throughout the world enacted extraordinary measures.  These included large-scale fiscal stimulus programs, financed by major expansions in...

After the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, commercial banks in the United States began accumulating huge cash reserves in their accounts at the Federal Reserve. By the middle of 2011, reserves had reached $1.6 trillion, more than 10 percent of U.S. GDP, an order of magnitude for commercial...

This paper examines three sets of major issues regarding the current U.S. government’s fiscal deficit and outstanding debt, tied to the 2009 economic stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvest-ment Act (ARRA). First, I consider the claim that high levels of government borrowing...

Amid the wreckage of the 2008-09 Wall Street collapse and Great Recession, orthodox economists and political elites in both the United States and Western Europe have been strongly pushing the idea that austerity is the only viable policy option. The basis for the austerity hawks' claim is that...

This paper considers policies for promoting productive investments in the United States, especially as regards the project of building a clean energy economy. The four main policies examined are: 1) Expanding public investments throughout the economy and gaining the crowding-in benefits that...

This study focuses on the employment effects of military spending versus alternative domestic spending priorities, in particular investments in clean energy, health care and education. We first present some simple alternative spending scenarios, namely devoting $1 billion to the military versus...