United States

The Romer/Romer letter to Professor Gerald Friedman marks a turning point. It concedes that there are indeed important issues at stake when evaluating the proposed economic policies of Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders. These issues go beyond the political debate and should be discussed seriously between and among professional economists.

Bullet-point financial reform proposals are either too simple or too vague.

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

This research project focuses mainly on whether the wealth of the United States middle class recovered and whether wealth inequality continued to rise or moderated over the years 2010 to 2013 following the financial crisis of 2008.

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Archival artifacts from the history of economics.

This research project investigates the rise of federal credit programs in the United States, leading to a better understanding of the development of federal credit programs.

This research project examines how the spatial pattern of inequality in US cities shapes the provision of public transit and more broadly the prospects for a more equitable and sustainable transportation policy.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

This research project explores the causes and consequences of the way countries innovate and the economic foundations for the government’s direct involvement in conducting innovation.

This research project follows freed slaves from when they first applied for their land under the Southern Homestead Act until 1900 to learn how access to free land influenced their economic progress.

This research project seeks to understand the linkages between the changes in the financial economy and the behavior of households in the real economy.

This research project constructs new measures of slavery as a state-sanctioned property rights institution and documents how slavery impacted economic development in US history.