Nearly all pundits agree that the recession, which began in December 2007, will see a steep decline in U.S. output in 2009. In this paper we present a forecasting equation which performs well according to the standard econometric criteria and has a standard error of forecast which is a little...

The paper finds a strong negative correlation between youth employment and minimum wages for the panel of U.S. states, 1976-2007. Such a correlation is not observed in earlier panels. The source of the new results is traced to the greater variance of minimum wages across states emerging after...