In the past 6 years the Greek economy has gone through a massive adjustment at a steep price. The economy finally grew in 2014, by 0.6 percent, but the recovery is weak, slow and fragile. This paper argues that prolonged mass unemployment and reduced living standards, brought about by years of...

With Spain’s official unemployment rate at 26 percent, and the economy projected to contract by 1.3 percent this year, it is difficult to make the case for continued austerity that could push a barely growing economy back into recession. Yet the government is committed to further fiscal...

This report analyzes the wage and employment effects of the first three city-specific minimum wages in the United States –San Francisco (2004), Santa Fe (2004), and Washington, DC (1993). We use data from a virtual census of employment in each of the three cities, surrounding suburbs, and...

This paper explores the potential impact of the Federal Reserve Board’s decision on interest rates on the budget deficit. The first part recounts the history of the 1990s surplus, correcting the widely held misunderstanding that this surplus was achieved by the Clinton administration’s tax...

There is a growing chorus of policy analysts and pundits telling the country that we could have millions more jobs in manufacturing, if only we had qualified workers. This claim has the interesting feature that it places responsibility for the lack of jobs on workers, not on the people who get...

This paper outlines a proposal for a system of work sharing that would give employers an incentive to maintain workers on their payroll at reduced hours as an alternative to laying them off. The system would be attached to the existing system of unemployment compensation, with shorttime...

This paper presents a broad overview of economic and social trends in Honduras since 2006, including the years following the military coup of June 2009. It finds that economic inequality in Honduras has increased dramatically since 2010, while poverty has worsened, unemployment has increased and...

Currently twenty-four states have “right–to-work” laws, which primarily restrict the rights of workers and employers in the private sector from entering into certain kinds of labor contracts. Federal labor law mandates that unions represent all workers at a workplace, whether they are...

This report argues that a key driver in rising inequality and a decline in the employment to population ratio is conscious economic policy, with a particularly important and under-appreciated role for macroeconomic policy. The paper first demonstrates the remarkable “flexibility” of U.S....

On January 24, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its estimates for union membership in the United States in 2013. This issue brief focuses on the union membership numbers by gender, education, race, and private vs public sector.