After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We...

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial...

In this Working Paper, also an entry for the International Encyclopedia of Public Policy, John King begins with a brief discussion of the meaning of ‘socialism’ and ‘social democracy,’ from their nineteenth-century origins down to the present day. He then discusses socialist economic...

This Working Paper reexamines the issue of international financial capital mobility, which has become today’s economic orthodoxy. The policy discussion is often framed in terms of the impossible trinity. That framing distorts discussion by representing capital mobility as having equal...

Generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment. The effects of benefit generosity are more ambiguous in a broader behavioral framework in which workers get substantial disutility from unemployment controlling for income, and know...

The working paper analyzes the possible distributional consequences of the global crisis based on the lessons of past crises. The decline in the labor share across the globe has been a major factor that led to the current global crisis. Onaran argues that this is a crisis of distribution, and...

In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory, Richard Goodwin (1967) presented a model which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast, Michal Kalecki (1971) argued that a higher wage share would have an expansionary...

This paper explores the interaction between the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the cost-of-living faced by single mothers. After the 1993 EITC expansion, we identify up to a 10 percentage point increase in labor force participation for single mothers in the lowest cost areas but no...

Since the early 1990s, credit expanded relative to income, especially after 2001. It is hypothesized that traditionally uneven credit access and gaps in the costs of credit by demographic characteristics shrank during this period. Relying on data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer...

In this PERI Working Paper, John Weeks inspects the standard policy rule that under a flexible exchange rate regime with perfectly elastic capital flows, monetary policy is effective, and fiscal policy is not. The logical validity of the statement requires that the effect of an exchange rate...