Labor

What we’re reading: A weekly scan of published items relevant to the Institute’s work

The corrosive social and economic effects of what have now become ‘normal’ unemployment levels require new solutions, and tradewithout full employment exacerbates the problem

As empirical evidence continues to roll in, can the theoretical orthodoxy continue to hold their ground?

Does the technology revolution require a new social policy?

European Union countries are facing an epic challenge of integrating more than 1 million refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and beyond.

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.

Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is Professor Emirita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has written extensively about the economics of care and reciprocity.

The United States economy has come apart, with the rich getting richer and workers’ incomes not advancing at all.

Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.

This is almost certainly the highest level of relative, and certainly absolute, global inequality at any point in human history. Is there anything we can do to reverse or mitigate this trend?

A panel featuring Thomas Piketty, Kevin Murphy, and Steven Durlauf

The Institute recently sponsored several panels at the Kiel Global Economic Symposium. In particular, the panel on Income Distribution and Mobility struck us as likely to be of especially wide interest. We are grateful for the participation of all the scholars on them and are pleased to present summaries of their presentations here.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.

Whilst progress has been made, the “glass ceiling” dividing men and women has yet to be broken definitively. Monika Queisser discusses the challenges still facing women in the workplace and beyond.