Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

The Community Development Banks (CDBs) should not be seen as a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) or for other programs designed to revitalize lower income areas. Rather, they should be seen as a complement for existing programs and for other programs that will be proposed by...

At a time when small businesses are suffering from a credit crunch, quot;nichequot; financial institutions increasingly are filling the void left by more traditional sources of financing, such as commercial banks. In this working paper, authors Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Ronnie J. Phillips, and...

The US economy has been expanding moderately since the official end of the Great Recession in 2009. The budget deficit has been steadily decreasing, inflation has remained in check, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7 percent. The restrictive fiscal policy stance of the past three years...

If the Congressional Budget Office's recent projections of government revenues and outlays come to pass, the United States will not grow fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate between now and 2016. The public sector deficit will decline from present levels, endangering the...

As this report goes to press, the official unemployment rate remains tragically elevated, compared even to rates at similar points in previous recoveries. The US economy seems once again to be in a "jobless recovery," though the unemployment rate has been steadily declining for years. At the...

Greece's unemployment rate just hit 27.6 percent. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Why has the troika--the European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and European Central Bank--been so consistently wrong about the effects of its handpicked policies? The strategy being imposed...

With the anti-austerity Syriza party continuing to lead in polls ahead of Greece's election on January 25, what is the outlook for restoring growth and increasing employment following six years of deep recession? Despite some timid signs of recovery, notably in the tourism sector, recent...

The Greek economic crisis started as a public debt crisis five years ago. However, despite austerity and a bold "haircut," public debt is now around 175 percent of Greek GDP. In this policy note, we argue that Greece's public debt is clearly unsustainable, and that a significant restructuring of...

What are the prospects for economic recovery if Greece continues to follow the troika strategy of fiscal austerity and internal devaluation, with the aim of increasing competitiveness and thus net exports? Our latest strategic analysis indicates that the unprecedented decline in real and nominal...