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...

In this report examining the U.S. chemical industry, James Heintz shows that a shift to the production of chemicals that are safer for workers, the environment and human health can create jobs and new markets. The chemical industry has shed 300,000 jobs since 1992, and has under-invested in...

This paper examines three sets of major questions regarding the current US government's fiscal deficit and outstanding debt, tied to the 2009 economic stimulus programme, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). First, I consider the claim that high levels of government borrowing drive...

Full employment used to be an explicit goal of economic policy in most of the industrialized world. Some countries even achieved it. In Back to Full Employment, economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States--today faced with its highest level of unemployment since the Great...

Herndon, Ash and Pollin replicate Reinhart and Rogoff and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010 is the most ambitious measure aimed at regulating U.S. financial markets since the Glass-Steagall Act was implemented in the midst of the 1930s Depression.  However, it remains an open question as to whether Dodd-Frank...

As fast-food workers join picket lines around the country, media outlets are questioning how much a minimum wage increase would cost businesses, fast-food restaurants in particular. Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin examine the potential impact of a proposal to raise the federal minimum...

This joint report by CEPR and the Political Economy Research Institute (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) gives an estimate of $177-354 billion in revenue that could be raised by taxing financial transactions in the United States.

This paper provides some empirical evidence on issues raised by the global antisweatshop movement. We first consider the relationship between wage and employment growth, finding no consistent trade-off between them. We then measure the share of labour costs in the production of garments in the...

Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim consider the economic impact of two living wage proposals for Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. Pollin and Wicks-Lim look at the overall costs of each proposal, which offer a wage of $10.80 per hour and health insurance benefits to two alternative pools...