Nick Bunker is a Policy Research Associate with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
In the wonkier corners of the internet, the release of new data from the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey usually produces a graph that can be a bit bewildering to neophytes...
The U.S. unemployment rate has been at or under 5 percent for more than six months. But even though that number is close to many estimates of the long-run unemployment rate, neither infla...
In the most recent interview in our “Equitable Growth in Conversation” series, our own Ben Zipperer talks with David Card of the University of California, Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Pri...
In the 1975 book “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff,” economist Arthur Okun coined the phrase “leaky bucket” to describe how efforts to redistribute income might reduce economic e...
Fifty-five years ago, Nicholas Kaldor, a macroeconomist at the University of Cambridge, laid out six “stylized facts” about economies. Kaldor wasn’t just summarizing what economists had l...
The damage the U.S. labor market endured during and after the Great Recession was massive. The unemployment rate, after rising for 29 months, spiked at 10 percent in October 2009—a level ...
Usually when the government announces new data on the growth of the overall U.S. economy, the attention of the press and analysts jumps to the level of economic growth. But last week, the...
The U.S. labor market recovery from the Great Recession of 2007–09 has been uneven in a number of ways, including by location. While the nation’s overall unemployment rate may be below 5 ...
When you’re fighting a recession, you want to use the policies with the most “bang for your buck.” Given what we now know about the potential scarring effects of recessions, using ineffic...
One way that high levels of income and wealth inequality might affect economic growth is through the development of human capital. Inequality could warp workers’ ability to improve their ...
Prior to the Great Recession of 2007-2009, eligible unemployed workers in the United States could receive unemployment insurance checks for up to 26 weeks. In the wake of the recession an...
Where does productivity growth come from? The definitive answer to that question would quickly win someone a Nobel prize and the immediate gratitude of economists and policymakers. (Well,...
With the rise of new internet-based companies and the smartphone as an essential part of many people’s lives, it can be hard to believe that the U.S. economy is lacking for innovation and...
How’s U.S. wage growth doing these days? According to the January data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, average nominal wage growth for all U.S. workers grew at a 2.5 percent cli...
Recessions, despite the hopes of economists and policymakers during the Great Moderation, are still very much a part of our economic reality. But as this June will mark seven years since ...
