The financial crisis reveals a need for a public credit rating agency that is not in the pay of issuers, according to M. Ahmed Diomande, James Heintz, and Robert Pollin.

This study focuses on the employment effects of military spending versus channeling some significant part of the military budget into alternative purposes.  We begin by introducing the basic input-output modeling technique for considering issues such as these in a systematic way. We then...

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), David Neumark (2002) finds that living wage laws have brought substantial wage increases for a high proportion of workers in cities that have passed these laws. He also finds that living wage laws significantly reduce employment...

Levine & Zervos (1998) presented cross-country econometric evidence showing that, in a sample of 47 countries, stock market liquidity contributed a significant positive influence on GDP growth between 1976-93. We show that the Levine-Zervos results are not robust to alternative specifications...

This paper examines the viability of security transaction excise taxes (STETs) as one policy tool for promoting a more stable financial environment, specifically with respect to the U.S. economy. Contrary to a large recent critical literature, we show that a STET can be designed without creating...

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...

This report considers a proposal to reinstate the New York stock transfer tax (STT)that was phased out between 1979 and 1981. The proposal under consideration would reinstate the tax at half the rate that prevailed at the time of its repeal. The revenues from such a tax, at around $3.5 billion...